Editorial
Research Report
Your Reputation Is On the (Phone) Line
The Gist
- CX roles are shifting from resolution to system design. The work is moving beyond fixing individual customer issues to correcting AI logic so the same problem doesn’t recur at scale.
- Humans become architects, not backups. AI agents still require human oversight to manage hallucinations, prevent brand drift, and ensure customer trust across automated journeys.
- AI elevates work instead of eliminating it. Organizations that evolve service roles into experience and AI architecture positions can improve employee engagement, reduce burnout-driven turnover, and increase the strategic value of CX teams.
Generative AI may be old news, but for those who have lost their jobs because of it, the technology is creating fresh wounds. In the customer experience industry, job loss due to AI could be widespread, as 85% of CX leaders polled by Zendesk predict that AI will lead to a "significant" decrease in the number of customer service agents.
Table of Contents
- The Talent Paradox in Customer Experience
- The Time for a Pivot in Customer Service
- What Are Experience Architects?
- What CSAs Will Need to Become an AI Experience Architect
The Talent Paradox in Customer Experience
AI is already taking over the CX via chatbots, which is creating a sort of talent paradox. While the technology is capable of handling vast volumes of customer queries, it's understandable that customer service teams are concerned that their skills will become obsolete. For now, their jobs may be safe because the websites with the best CX may put off implementing chatbots until they're capable of more human-like interactions.
For example, although AI is already threatening large numbers of customer service jobs, one thing users particularly like about digital commerce integrators is their use of the names of specific support staff, which suggests a more personalized support experience instead of canned responses from a bot.
The future of AI in the CX will be bots that are capable of these types of personalized interactions.
The Time for a Pivot in Customer Service
So what will happen to all the support staff who currently answer live chat queries? Now is the time to start pivoting staff from simply answering live chats to optimizing the ecosystem — before all those customer support positions disappear.
At some companies, this is already happening, as Gartner found in a recent survey that just 20% of leaders have cut customer service agent staff as a result of AI, while 42% have pivoted and are hiring for new, specialized roles to support their AI. Some of these new roles include AI strategists, automation analysts and conversational AI designers.
This reality makes it clear that traditional CX skills have become commodities, creating the need to establish new guidelines for core skills to manage the AI-driven stack. But there's a solution. It's about transforming the CX department into a center of excellence that includes the positions already listed and is led by experience architects.
Related Article: Your Missed Opportunity in Customer Experience Culture
What Are Experience Architects?
Experience architects oversee the complete customer journey customers take with a particular product or service. They should aim to create seamless interactions that are not only intuitive but also have value. They combine strategy with information architecture and interaction design, constructing the skeleton for digital products while ensuring that every point of connection across the experience resonates emotionally with customers and remains coherent. The ultimate goal is to make customers feel both understood and valued.
In light of AI, experience architects specifically create a human-centered journey for customers who interact with a company's AI, making it both seamless and intuitive. Their focus is on the way customers not only interact with the AI but also perceive it.
AI experience architects target valuable, understandable and ethical experiences through the integration of AI outputs into customer flows. They design the patterns for interactions and bridge the technical capabilities of the AI with user needs and business goals. These workers team up with engineers and conversation designers to create complex interactions with AIs that don't just feel natural. They also come across as trustworthy and coherent.
What CSAs Will Need to Become an AI Experience Architect
Customer service agents make great AI experience architects because they already have some of the necessary skills. They often feel empathy for customers and have a drive to solve problems. To upskill for an AI experience architect position, customer service agents need these additional skills:
- Subject matter expertise in specific areas of support needed to guide AI in handling routine tasks and refocusing human work on interactions with greater value
- Prompt engineering, or being able to create the prompts needed to elicit both accurate and useful responses from the AI
- An understanding of AI's limitations and capabilities and the ability to use it to design AI behavior and then integrate it with pre-existing platforms
- Be able to implement ethics into the AI, audit it for biases and ensure AI-driven user interactions are transparent
- The ability to interpret data generated by an AI and use it to continually improve the satisfaction of customers
- An understanding of how AI tools connect with other systems while supporting data privacy, compliance and security
- Be able to design both the logic and thinking processes for AI agents
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According to Gartner, it costs between one-half and two times an employee's annual salary to replace them, making retention critical. Over half of exiting employees said that in the three months before they left, no one spoke to them about their future with the organization — clarifying the sometimes-mass exodus due to worries about AI replacing them.
Employers may find themselves wondering about the next step for their customer service agent employees, but those that transition these workers to AI-related roles will not only save money but also grief — both for them and their employees.
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