Zendesk CTO sees all Customer Experience (CX) embracing AI, eventually

Customer Experience (CX) is a business that is all about helping customers to get what they need or want from a vendor or service. It’s a business that Zendesk increasingly sees as being dramatically impacted by AI. Zendesk has been steadily integrating increasing amounts of AI into its intelligent CX platform in recent years.

Adrian McDermott, Chief Technology Officer at Zendesk was part of a panel at the VB Transform 2024 event on Thursday about transforming CX with gen AI. Ahead of the session he met with VentureBeat to detail his company’s’ new Future of AI-powered CX report. 

The report surveyed over 1,300 senior CX leaders and found overwhelming interest in AI. 81% of CX leaders believe AI will change CX for the better and 86% believe CX will be utterly transformed over the next three years. The report also found that 77% of respondents think traditional CX will give way to radically different industry dynamics due to the influence of AI.

Not every organization has AI as a top of mind goal today, but the overall direction and impact for Zendesk is clear to McDermott. 

“We fundamentally believe that within a few years 100% of all interactions will in some way for every customer of ours involve AI, whether that’s a copilot experience, RAG experience, knowledge discovery or a full conversational experience,” McDermott told VentureBeat. 

Even with pervasive AI in CX, humans will remain important

One of the top concerns for companies implementing AI in customer service is maintaining a human touch. 

McDermott emphasized the importance of proper journey design and escalation protocols in AI-driven customer service.

“Human conversations are going to remain extremely important,” he said. “People will always hit zero to talk to the operator whatever the format and escalations are going to get more complicated, the human jobs are going to get more complicated, which is why humans supporting tools are going to be increasingly important as well.”

To address this concern, Zendesk acquired Klaus, an Estonia-based Quality Assurance company in February of this year, with integration into the portfolio in April. McDermott explained that Klaus has a set of tools that customer service managers can use to assess the quality of both human and bot interactions.

“This acquisition allows Zendesk to monitor every conversation, ensuring that the human experience isn’t lost in AI-driven interactions.

AI for CX is a journey that is still progress

One thing the report also makes clear is that it will take time for all customer service organizations to fully embrace AI.

McDermott outlined three stages of AI implementation in customer service:

1. Human-in-the-middle: Using AI to assist human agents, improving efficiency and consistency.
2. Concierge implementation: AI handles initial interactions and simple queries, with human escalation as needed.
3. Expanded automation: Increased AI handling of customer interactions, with continuous quality monitoring.

He notes that most companies start with the first stage, as it’s lower risk, and gradually move towards more automation as confidence in the technology grows.

Looking to the future, McDermott expects to see significant changes in the industry’s comfort level with AI over the next year. 

“I think that more people will have lived experiences in production in the CX environment,” he predicts. “This increased familiarity is likely to drive greater adoption and trust in AI-driven customer service solutions.”

However, McDermott also cautions against expecting overnight revolutions. 

“It’s going to be an evolution that runs for a while and takes some time,” he said.