Customer experience leaders: Better AI won't fix bad service

Better AI alone won’t fix customer service failures, speakers argued during a Newsweek webinar focused on “Humanizing AI” on July 30. Nick Mehta, entrepreneur in residence at Bessemer Venture Partners and former CEO of Gainsight, described calling an airline for a complex flight change: an automated agent spent about 10 minutes collecting account details, then handed him off to a representative who asked for the same information again. The human ultimately directed him to use the airline’s app. The issue, Mehta said, was the handoff—context didn’t follow the customer between channels. Panelists from NiCE, Braze and Zendesk said companies must design journeys end to end, measure outcomes across channels, and avoid optimizing AI only for the most common requests.