We’re entering a new era where AI agents in customer experience are transforming the way businesses operate and connect with customers. By combining AI-powered virtual agents with next-generation hardware, you can offer deeply personalized, seamless experiences while significantly lowering your cost-to-serve.
You’ve likely known that better operations could lead to better customer experience. But now, with the rise of generative AI and AI-powered agents, this connection is becoming a direct and measurable advantage. Businesses that adopt these technologies are not only improving their service quality, they’re doing so at dramatically lower costs. In fact, AI agents in customer experience are becoming a key driver of financial performance and brand loyalty.
To unlock this potential, you need to move beyond managing simple app-based customer journeys. Instead, think about empowering autonomous AI agents to manage entire customer missions, like handling a return, booking a trip, or resolving a service issue, on your customer’s behalf with minimal friction or human input.
AI Agents Are Transforming the Future of Customer Experience
Right now, we’re seeing only the early stages. The real breakthroughs will happen as these AI agents become embedded into intuitive hardware and platforms that blend into your customers’ everyday lives, whether through voice assistants, wearables, or other smart interfaces.
Inside your company, these AI agents are already reshaping workflows. You can use GenAI to increase employee productivity, automate tasks, and improve internal collaboration. In some cases, organizations have seen 15% to 30% boosts in productivity, and some aim for gains of 80% or more.
Externally, AI agents are changing how customers engage with your brand. They make interactions faster, clearer, and more human-like. For example, a virtual co-pilot that helps your customer find the right product, processes their return instantly, and offers a personalized discount, all without needing to speak to a human agent. And when a situation does require human input, your team is freed up to focus on those high-value, nuanced moments.
By adopting AI agents in customer experience now, you’re not just keeping up, you’re laying the foundation for long-term success.
Key takeaways:
To stay ahead in this evolving landscape, you should:
- Begin with focused, high-impact initiatives. Test use cases that improve both customer interactions and internal efficiency. Use these to understand the ripple effects on your tech stack, your workforce, and how you define success.
- Design for customer missions, not just journeys. As AI agents begin to handle more touchpoints, start thinking beyond linear journeys. Reframe your role around supporting complex, end-to-end customer missions.
- Embrace full convergence. True transformation isn’t just technological. You’ll need to integrate departments, workflows, and talent to build a unified, AI-first organization that drives exceptional customer experience.
Business Process Improvement with AI Agents
If you’re looking to future-proof your business, the success stories of Visa and Verizon offer compelling proof that AI agents in customer experience aren’t just hype, they’re transforming how companies operate internally and serve customers externally.
#1
In early 2025, Visa partnered with OpenAI, Microsoft, and Anthropic to launch Visa Intelligent Commerce, a platform designed to reshape the online shopping experience. Instead of manually searching, comparing, and purchasing, users can now delegate these tasks to AI agents that act on their behalf, searching for products, booking trips, and managing grocery orders. These agents are designed to work within preset spending controls while allowing the user to make the final purchase decision. The goal is to reduce cart abandonment and streamline decision-making, especially in mobile or high-volume retail environments. For businesses, this not only translates into more transactions but also richer insights into customer intent. Visa’s AI commerce agents highlight a growing trend, AI that supports both operational efficiency and frictionless customer engagement.
#2
Now look at Verizon. In July 2024, Verizon began piloting an AI-powered customer service assistant built on Google’s Gemini LLM, and by January 2025, it had been fully deployed across its support operations. Trained on over 15,000 internal documents, this AI system works alongside 28,000 human agents, helping them resolve customer inquiries faster and more accurately. The results? Call times dropped significantly, and customer service agents were freed to focus on higher-value interactions, particularly sales. According to Verizon’s Consumer Group CEO, this shift contributed to a nearly 40% increase in sales, driven by more efficient service and better upsell opportunities. For a company of Verizon’s scale, it’s a powerful case for how internal AI adoption doesn’t just support the customer, it transforms your frontline workforce into growth enablers.
But here’s the catch, you won’t unlock these kinds of gains unless you raise the bar. Process automation alone isn’t enough. To transform CX at scale, you must embrace the full convergence of AI agents and next-gen hardware.
How to Let Autonomous Agents Handle the Heavy Lifting
Until today, many employees’ time is wasted on low-value, repetitive tasks. But it’s not just your team that’s affected, your customers are too. Whether they’re planning a trip, buying a car, or just figuring out weekend plans, customers often face a confusing maze of apps, websites, and call centers. One Google study found that users planning a trip might engage with over 700 digital touch-points in a few months.
Imagine replacing all that noise with intelligent, autonomous AI agents that know your customer well and take care of their missions behind the scenes. Instead of acting as a glorified FAQ bot, your brand’s AI agent could draw complex insights from user-approved personal data and coordinate a network of vertical agents, some proprietary, some third-party, to handle every step of a customer’s task, whether that’s booking a trip or remodeling a kitchen.
When your customer starts planning a vacation, the agent doesn’t just ask generic questions, it curates destinations based on each family member’s preferences, books flights, recommends hotels, and even reserves restaurants and activities. If traffic or weather changes the plan mid-trip, the system adapts in real time, offering alternate suggestions through a unified, simple interface. This isn’t just better customer experience, it’s intelligent, anticipatory service.
Thinking about home renovation? Your AI agents can research methods, suggest materials, place orders, and even provide video tutorials. From daily shopping to fitness planning and pet care, these autonomous agents are designed to simplify life’s complexity, freeing both you and your customers from endless decision fatigue.
If you want to compete in this new landscape, it’s time to think beyond “good enough.” With AI agents in customer experience, you’re no longer just improving support, you’re redefining what exceptional service looks like.
How Technologies Supercharge AI Agents in Customer Experience
Imagine you’re no longer tied to a screen when engaging with customers or managing your daily tasks. That’s the promise of AI agents in customer experience, especially as they become multimodal and embedded into the next wave of intelligent hardware. This convergence isn’t just about efficiency; it’s about redefining how people interact with technology in real life.
Think about it this way: you’re moving from app-driven interactions to ambient, natural experiences. Instead of tapping or typing, you’ll soon engage with your AI agents using voice, gestures, or even augmented reality. As these smart devices become more predictive and human-like, they will start to feel less like tools and more like seamless extensions of everyday life, at home and at work.
In your workplace, this evolution empowers your teams to do more. Employees can interact with internal AI agents through wearable or voice-activated hardware, boosting productivity and unlocking new ways to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
As this convergence progresses, the mutual reinforcement of smarter agents and more intuitive hardware will benefit both user experience and customer experience. On the agent side, you’ll benefit from lower training and operating costs, reduced risks like hallucinations, and better data privacy and trust mechanisms, encouraging customers to hand off more of their life management to your AI systems.
Meanwhile, the hardware itself will evolve. You can expect devices that offer better comfort, sleeker design, tighter integration into daily routines, and more awareness of physical cues like motion, light, or sound. These shifts aren’t just technological upgrades, they’re laying the groundwork for your next-generation CX strategy.
How To Prepare for the AI-Driven CX Revolution
Integrating AI agents into customer experience isn’t just about trying out ChatGPT or building a chatbot. It’s about reimagining how your business operates, and how it serves people.
These new approaches won’t be limited to isolated customer journeys like “search for a hybrid SUV.” Instead, they’ll support complete, data-driven missions like “find and buy the perfect car for me.” And to do that well, your agents must combine deep customer understanding with real-time access to tools, content, and physical interfaces.
But before you dive into a full transformation, start smart. Here, the “best” next move is to launch a few deep initiatives. Focus on real-world use cases that showcase how AI and GenAI can enhance both operational efficiency and the customer journey. Use these tests to examine how your tech stack holds up, what roles your team might evolve into, and which KPIs truly reflect customer, operational, and financial success.
At this early stage, give more weight to operational improvements. If your AI agents can’t scale internally, they won’t scale with your customers either. Building this operational foundation is your first step toward transforming your customer experience.
So, if you’re ready to harness the power of AI agents in customer experience, start small, start deep, and start now. The future is ambient, multimodal, and intelligent, and your customers are ready for it.
Building AI Agents for the Long-Term Impact
As you begin integrating AI agents into customer experience, your first step will likely involve vertical integration, where agents start managing parts of the customer journey such as support, recommendations, or transactions. But you shouldn’t stop there.
You need to ask yourself: What larger missions are your customers trying to accomplish? Buying a car isn’t just a purchase, it’s a mission that includes researching, financing, insuring, and scheduling maintenance. Your job is to understand these missions deeply and build AI-driven systems that don’t just respond, they orchestrate. That’s where the real long-term CX value lies.
Adopt New Metrics That Actually Matter
If you’re still measuring CX success only by NPS or CSAT, it’s time to rethink. Today, you should start incorporating metrics like cost-to-serve alongside customer satisfaction. These KPIs allow you to clearly connect lower service costs with improved experience and stronger financial performance, giving you a transparent, data-driven story to share with stakeholders.
When your AI agents are doing more, better, and faster work at scale, you need the right numbers to reflect that impact.
Re-Evaluate Your Investment Priorities
Too often, companies like yours underinvest in initiatives that translate operational gains into real customer value, because the returns can feel soft or hard to measure. But with AI agents in place, you’ll be able to track ROI more directly, especially as agents close the loop between internal efficiency and external experience.
Once you make those connections, between productivity, satisfaction, and profitability, you’ll have a compelling case to justify greater, sustained investment in AI-powered customer experience innovation.
Learn to Converge, Across Tech, Teams, and Functions
To stay ahead, you must learn to embrace convergence, not just in technology (like agents and hardware), but across your organization. You’ll need to bring together teams, skill sets, and functions that traditionally operated in silos. It’s about building a new kind of business architecture that’s agile, collaborative, and AI-first.
Start with proof-of-concept initiatives in functions like support, marketing, or fulfillment, where quick wins are most likely. Use these to identify what works, what breaks, and where you’ll need to adapt. Then use those insights to scale with confidence.
Your Roadmap Toward AI-Powered Customer Experience
If you’re serious about transforming your customer experience strategy with AI, now’s the time to start preparing a roadmap. That roadmap should blend short-term wins, like using generative AI to reduce support loads, with long-term, full-scale transformations that reimagine how your business serves and engages.
The ongoing convergence of ever-smarter hardware and broader networks of trusted AI agents will allow you to unlock the long-sought trifecta:
- Radically better productivity
- Superior, personalized customer experience
- Tangible financial performance gains
This isn’t just about efficiency anymore. As these technologies integrate more naturally into daily life, you’re stepping into a new era, where AI agents in customer experience aren’t just a tool, but a foundation for innovation and sustainable value creation.