Your next customer might be AI
Most businesses still treat customer experience as a “front-end” issue — polish the website, add a chatbot, rewrite the scripts.
That era is fast closing.
KPMG calls the next wave agentic customer experience — AI that doesn’t just respond but acts across the journey. The winners won’t be the firms with the loudest tech story. They’ll be the ones with the best operating model underneath it.
Here’s the uncomfortable truth: AI won’t fix a broken experience. It will expose it.
KPMG’s work points to the same drivers customers actually reward: empathy, resolution, and meeting expectations. So, if you’re using AI to deflect customers rather than resolve them, you’re not lowering cost, you’re compounding churn.
The opportunity is real, but it’s not “buy more tools”. It’s doing the unglamorous work:
aligning the organisation around one customer outcome,
integrating the systems that force people to repeat themselves,
designing governance so AI decisions are explainable and auditable.
Do nothing, and you don’t just “miss innovation”. You inherit hidden cost: rework, escalations, trust erosion and customers trained by the best experiences elsewhere.
NextGen Experts view: the new CX moat is invisible plumbing — the joinery between data, process, people and accountability.
Three boardroom questions:
Where do customers still repeat themselves — and what does that friction cost us?
Do we have one customer truth, or competing versions?
If an AI agent acted for us tomorrow, would we stand behind its decisions?
Because the shift is already underway — and “average” is about to feel expensive.
(Source: KPMG Customer Experience Excellence FY25–26 report)