AI and design: the future of customer experience

Operational workflows will be automated

Behind the scenes, AI will gradually eradicate manual tasks: reconciliations, reporting, admin and hand-offs. Whole chunks of operations will vanish. This is an advantage, as freeing humans from repetitive strain will enable them to focus on higher-value work.

Agentic AI will take this further by stringing tasks together end-to-end. Instead of humans moving work between systems, AI agents will be able to coordinate whole workflows.

Journey management will be paramount

As services become faster, more automated and more invisible, journey management will become even more critical. It will form the backbone that links people, AI and systems across the organisation.

Unless clear priorities and guardrails are set, dozens of agents could optimise locally while breaking the journey overall. Take the example of logistics: one AI agent might optimise routes for speed, another for fuel efficiency, another for warehouse capacity, and another for customs clearance. The tensions between these system optimisations already exist, but with AI acting at speed and scale they can spiral faster. Without end-to-end oversight, the result isn’t just inefficiency, it’s systemic breakdown: warehouses overflowing overnight, goods piling up at borders, and customers facing sudden disruption while each agent insists it has ‘optimised’ correctly.

The safeguard against this is cultural as well as technical. Teams need to work together across the end-to-end, with shared priorities, transparency, and fast decision-making, so AI strengthens the chain rather than splintering it.

Organisations will need muscles for testing, scaling and stopping

One of the biggest impacts of AI in design is its ability to collapse the cycle from idea to live service. New features can be prototyped, tested and launched at pace. Most governance models are not designed to handle this.

Leaders will need new muscles to kill ideas quickly, scale the right ones and keep the experience coherent while the volume of change increases. Without those muscles, organisations risk pursuing dozens of AI experiments in parallel and creating incoherent customer experiences.

What’s needed isn’t heavier governance, but enabling governance: working in the open, setting priorities clearly, and making fast decisions at the right level.

Uniquely human strengths will win out

AI will raise the floor of customer experience, but it will also generate a wave of terrible ideas. For example, in retail AI can optimise sourcing and logistics across the supply chain, but it still takes human taste and judgement to curate products that feel right for customers.

Equally, human critical thinking and human empathy will remain indispensable, particularly given that the training data which feeds AI will always have gaps.

Originality, judgement and emotional intelligence will remain uniquely human strengths. The brands that thrive will combine AI-driven efficiency with human-led creativity.

Organisations will need to invest in data

AI is only as good as its inputs. That means organisations must invest heavily in the structure and architecture of data to both enable AI to make use of it, and to join up operations end-to-end.

Some of this work may be accelerated by AI itself, but it is the role of leadership to oversee, prioritise and set direction across the organisation. This is also about responsible data practices: how data is sourced, how long it’s stored, and its energy footprint.

There is a reset moment here. Before AI can deliver value, many organisations will need to do the hard work of cleaning, connecting and governing data properly. The same is true for content. Without structure and quality, AI will amplify the mess.

There will always be whole system effects

AI is not a neutral tool. Its application has whole-system effects that can have profound impacts on the value your organisation delivers, to its staff and its customers.

Automating a customer interaction might make a service faster, but it can also create unexpected work behind the scenes. For example, an airline might use AI to cut call centre load by automating rebookings, but if flight systems and crew scheduling aren’t joined up end-to-end, the operation may collapse under new bottlenecks.

That is why AI must be treated as a whole-system change, not a set of isolated point solutions. The decisions that leaders make now about where and how to apply AI will shape not only customer experience, but also culture, ways of working and long-term trust.

Setting a new benchmark

AI won’t level the playing field of good service design. It will widen the gap.

Some brands will disappear as their AI-driven services push customers away. But the organisations that thrive will be the ones who set a new benchmark for customer experiences: fixing data, collapsing workflows, and governing journeys - while building the trust and creativity that customers value.

AI will always be artificial, but the experiences it enables don’t have to make our lives artificial. The organisations that design for the real flow of everyday life will create the best customer experiences, and raise the bar of expectations for every service.

If you want to explore how to build that capability in your organisation, start here.