At the recent Customer Engagement Summit in London, consumer experience expert Veatriki Tzannatos, former European Division Consumer Affairs Senior Manager at Colgate-Palmolive, warned that the arrival of consumer-facing AI agents could change the balance of power between businesses and their customers.
“The power shift is going to change and I'm not sure enough people—some people are— but enough people are considering the impacts on what that means for the future for CX.”
That comment prompts a question worth considering: If consumers increasingly rely on AI to help them interact with businesses, will organizations need to rethink how they manage customer relationships and the data underpinning them?
The answer will depend on how these technologies develop and how consumers choose to use them. But there are already signs that AI is changing the information businesses receive from customers, adding another dimension to the challenge.
When AI Becomes an Intermediary
Businesses have long focused on building customer relationships through a combination of marketing, personalization, loyalty programs and service interactions. Customer relationship management (CRM) platforms help bring customer information together, forming a record of previous interactions and a basis for tailoring future communications.
Consumer AI agents could complicate that model.
If buyers increasingly use agents to research products, compare offers, identify suitable providers or manage routine interactions, businesses may have fewer direct opportunities to influence those decisions. Their relationship with the customer could increasingly involve an AI intermediary interpreting requests and helping determine which businesses deserve consideration.
“I think there's going to be a lot of rethinking on how we're going to approach consumers with their new powers,” Tzannatos said.
How should CRM leaders think about the role of customer data in a world where the customer journey may involve more interactions between software agents and business systems?
Will existing customer profiles provide the context needed to support these interactions? How will businesses recognise customers across different channels and agent-mediated conversations? And what information will they need to make available to consumer agents without compromising privacy or security?
Much will depend on how agents access business services, what information consumers allow them to use, and whether organizations can support these interactions reliably.
Customer Communications are Already Changing
The potential influence of autonomous consumer agents remains an emerging area. But AI is already changing how customers communicate with organizations.
Al Davies, Business Development Manager at ArvatoConnect, described a growing challenge in regulated sectors, including financial services and healthcare:
“Consumers are more savvy now. They can use generative AI themselves, so they're using that to write complaints, which means not only you getting an increase in them, the complaints are longer, it takes longer to sift through and find the actual nub of the issue.”
AI can help people articulate their experiences, structure their arguments, and produce more detailed submissions. But the resulting communications may take longer to process if businesses cannot quickly identify the underlying issue.
Does Every Problem Need an AI Strategy?
Davies also raised a broader question about how businesses approach AI investment and whether they are solving the right problem in the first place:
“It’s challenging people's perception on whether they actually need an AI strategy or do they need automation? Is it more of a process issue? What kind of solution do they need for that?”
Faced with changing customer behaviour and increasing volumes of communications, organizations could be tempted to add AI features to existing CRM systems without examining the processes behind them.
But an AI tool will struggle to deliver the intended results if customer records are incomplete, information is spread across disconnected systems, or complaints are routed through inefficient workflows.
Turning AI Experimentation Into Better Customer Experiences
Tzannatos expects organizations to draw more conclusions from their AI experiments as they refine their strategies.
“People are going back to the drawing board—they're doing a lot of testing, they're getting a lot of data out. And I think that those results will start to emerge in the new year and that will help shape people's strategy for the coming future.”
Such iteration could help CRM teams determine which applications deliver practical benefits and where existing systems or processes need attention.
CRM's Next Questions
Consumer AI agents could change how customers discover brands and engage with businesses. Generative AI is also changing how people communicate with customer service teams today.
Neither development provides a definitive blueprint for the future of CRM. Tzannatos's comments raise questions about how businesses will maintain customer relationships as consumers gain new capabilities, while Davies's observations indicate how AI-generated communications could affect the work of customer operations teams.
But both developments warrant the attention of CRM leaders.
Will customer data remain useful when AI agents increasingly mediate interactions? Can existing systems provide the context needed to support customers across channels? And are organisations addressing underlying data and process problems before adding more AI?
The answers will vary between businesses and industries. But as customer behaviour evolves, CRM strategies will need to account for how information is created, interpreted, shared and used to deliver service.
The starting point is to understand what is changing for customers, identify where existing systems struggle to respond and determine which combination of data improvements, process changes and AI capabilities can address those problems to make CRM useful in a customer journey that may increasingly involve AI on both sides of the interaction.
