Connected Customers: How Agentic AI Is Rewriting Customer Experience

The CX pressure cooker

As consumers become more price sensitive, customer experience (CX) has emerged as a critical differentiator. Many brands find themselves constrained by legacy systems, fractured data, and organizational silos that reduce agility and create inconsistent experiences across channels.

AI reshaping customer service

The current wave of artificial intelligence, led by agentic AI and large language models, gives organizations a new way to deliver fast, personalized service at scale. These models can handle a broader range of queries, generate tailored communication en masse, and provide decision support for staff and leadership. Early adopters report measurable gains: higher customer satisfaction, increased staff productivity, and deeper operational insights.

Technical and organizational roadblocks

Despite the promise of AI, many organizations struggle to capture its full value. Outdated infrastructure and fragmented data stores prevent autonomous AI tools from moving freely across workflows and repositories to complete goal-based tasks. Customer service and IT teams may adopt point solutions, but without a unified platform and orchestration layer, AI cannot consistently act across the full service lifecycle.

Creating a cohesive platform that connects people, data, and decisions is therefore essential. That transition often becomes an opportunity to streamline processes, rationalize systems, and rethink how teams work together.

Preserving the human element

Widespread adoption of AI must be balanced with careful attention to privacy, authenticity, and workforce impacts. Excessive personalization can make customers uncomfortable, and engineered empathy from bots can feel insincere. High-performing organizations treat AI as a collaborator: they define clear boundaries between machine and human roles, invest in employee training, and communicate transparently about changes to jobs and responsibilities.

From potential to impact

To move from AI potential to real CX impact, organizations need more than isolated tools. They need orchestration architectures and unified platforms that let agentic AI reason and act across people, systems, and data. When implemented thoughtfully, AI-enabled service models can deliver personalized experiences at scale while enhancing workforce satisfaction and business performance.

Download the full report.

This content was produced by Insights, the custom content arm of MIT Technology Review. It was not written by MIT Technology Review’s editorial staff. This content was researched, designed, and written entirely by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This includes the writing of surveys and collection of data for surveys. AI tools that may have been used were limited to secondary production processes that passed thorough human review.