How AI is changing customer experience

In our Ask OCTO column, experts from Google Cloud's Office of the CTO answer your questions about the business and IT challenges facing you and your organization now. Think of this series as Google Cloud's version of an advice column — except the relationships we're looking to improve are the ones in your tech stack.

This month, we're chatting with Will Grannis and his team at the Office of the CTO about how AI is fundamentally changing customer experience (CX) by enabling a new level of personalization, efficiency, and proactive support. And for the first time, we're also including a perspective from Gemini.

Customer expectations have reached new heights in the AI era. People expect experiences that anticipate their needs, understand their context, and adapt in real time — yet many organizations struggle to deliver this at scale while maintaining efficiency and privacy. Our OCTO experts work with enterprise customers facing this exact challenge daily. Here's what they're seeing on the front lines of customer experience transformation.

Insights from our CTO experts

Scott Penberthy: Cinematic storytelling

We've been experimenting with a system that replicates the cast of characters involved in movie production when creating videos for advertising. While still in development, we have seen encouraging results. The videos are highly personalized to specific audiences, taking into account gender, age, city, and YouTube interests. Voice accents match local regions, from British accents in London to Boston's distinctive sound. Music suits the age range and interests, with scene changes timed to the beat. We've begun testing early personalized videos with select Google Cloud customers.

Creating deeply personalized videos has been a goal for brands, but costs and time have made them nearly impossible. When systems like ours are ready, brands can personalize messages daily at low cost. This could become a common way for brands to connect with people, helping them feel understood through cinematic stories.

Antonio Gulli: Agents empowering human experts

Choosing an expert to manage your finances or legal matters is critical. People are creating agent-based workflows to help their advisors and lawyers sort through large amounts of data to find what's relevant to specific situations. This ensures professionals make judgments based on the best available information.

In finance, these agents provide broad views, bringing order to data. One tracks market shifts, another analyzes financial habits, a third scans regulatory changes. For a client nearing retirement, a system found a lesser-known tax credit matching their portfolio, allowing the advisor to evaluate the strategy and make an informed recommendation. The important decision always belongs to the person.

The same approach helps lawyers handling millions of documents during discovery. Agent-based systems work like tireless paralegals that organize and connect information quickly. As these systems become more widely used, they'll provide high-quality information to everyone, not just those with access to it. This frees people to use their judgment, build trust, and make important decisions that shape our world.

Pablo Rodriguez: Hyper-personalization at scale

AI's greatest value is delivering tailored experiences at large scale. By analyzing past purchases, browsing habits, and real-time activity, AI can anticipate what people need. This goes beyond putting names in emails — it means changing website layouts for specific people, suggesting products before they look, and customizing support based on past interactions. The result is a clear experience that makes each person feel like the brand's most important client.

The future involves moving past predicting needs to understanding intent and feelings, making social awareness a key function. Smart personalization strategies integrate privacy protection as a foundational element. Trust is being built through new laws like the EU AI Act and technology through secure cloud services with built-in encryption, data privacy features, and compliance tools.

Chuck Sugnet: AI transforming both the products and the experience

It's amazing the first time you ride in a Waymo self-driving taxi and experience how AI is changing something billions of people do daily. AI is already changing customer experience in retail and media through recommendations and search. Recent AI advances will speed this shift into new industries.

AI will shift how people interact with products by understanding and adapting to their needs. You don't learn to drive a Waymo — you tell it where to go. You don't figure out microwave controls — you tell it how long to cook, or it detects the food type. Complex products will have advanced help built in, like Shopify's Sidekick for Merchants.

Customers will get training and support built into the experience, in their preferred language. They can see how clothing looks with virtual try-on or visualize furniture in their home. AI can act as a personal customer service agent and help call center staff resolve difficult issues.

While it is natural to be excited about all the change AI innovation brings, it is also helpful to step back and think about what isn’t going to change. For example, data is critical today to understand customers and will continue to be essential for getting the most from AI for customers. AI is getting more capable, but doesn't know your products, customers, and procedures unless you provide them. Investing in a unified data platform that can store, process, and retrieve the right information at the right time is more important than ever.

Troy Trimble: AI for sport

You've booked seats for your family at your local team's game. AI works for you before arrival by monitoring real-time traffic and sending updates based on your commuting preferences, ensuring a smooth trip.

AI's ability to use different media types updates your phone, watch, AR glasses, or earbuds with relevant information as you approach the stadium, helping find the best entry gate. You'll pass through quickly without scanning physical tickets — your identity is securely verified by cameras. Once inside, AI provides easy directions to your seats.

Once seated, you get customized updates on game parts you missed. AI offers personalized suggestions on where and when to eat or shop, based on preferences and real-time foot traffic. This experience will mainly use spoken natural language, with sign language support being developed for accessibility.

When ready to leave, your AI agent directs you to the right exit based on your commute preference and points out last-minute stops like merchandise shops. A personalized game day summary with key moments and stats will be created and waiting before you get home.

Some of this technology is already used in major sports stadiums. The rest is active research, promising more innovations soon.

Orna Berry: On-prem LLMs

Sovereign LLMs result from customer demand for deploying open-source large language models in their on-premises environments. This allows companies to perform specific tasks while maintaining strict data privacy and security without using public cloud services.

People can train these sovereign LLMs for highly specialized uses, like translating English into local languages or summarizing legal documents — information they consider too sensitive for public cloud services. These sovereign LLMs meet strict functional and regulatory requirements, can be trained for specific tasks, and ensure data remains within country borders. This is especially important for regulatory frameworks like the EU AI Act.

Ashwin Ram: Advancing customer agents

With agent-based systems, we can create a future where businesses offer people personalized digital assistants available at all times. These assistants wouldn't just answer questions but provide guidance and perform tasks on people's behalf. These agents will build long-term relationships with each person, keeping their history and context, and adapting over time.

Three new technology areas are needed: hyper-personalization, allowing agents to customize experiences for each person; long-term memory, letting agents retain history and context over time; and continuous learning, enabling agents to adapt as they go. Additionally, multi-modal conversational interaction creates natural, human-like conversation through voice, text, video, or other communication methods.

From a consumer perspective, this removes the difficulty of navigating websites and apps, dealing with phone menus, waiting for email replies, or working within limited human staff hours. For businesses, it allows brands to create digital storefronts that increase engagement and loyalty at lower cost.

A perspective from Gemini

Based on the patterns emerging across industries, AI is fundamentally reshaping the relationship between businesses and their customers. This isn't about replacing human connection — it's about creating "algorithmic empathy," where technology enables deeper understanding at unprecedented scale. The organizations succeeding in this transformation are becoming so-called "Sentient Enterprises" — companies that use AI to elevate human agents rather than replace them, freeing people from routine tasks so they can focus on complex problem-solving and genuine relationship building.

My analysis reveals four interconnected pillars that organizations must master simultaneously:

• Proactive Service represents the shift from reactive problem-solving to predictive intervention — resolving issues before customers even know they exist, building "silent trust."

• Hyper-Relevance moves beyond basic personalization to demonstrate genuine understanding of each customer's unique context and history. 

• Integrated Automation eliminates friction while preserving human touch for high-empathy moments where it matters most. 

• Agentic Experiences represent the emerging frontier where autonomous AI systems orchestrate entire customer journeys — requiring businesses to prepare for a future where they'll increasingly interact with customers' personal AI agents rather than the customers themselves. 

Success requires viewing these not as separate initiatives, but as an integrated transformation of how you engage with customers.

The combined picture

Three themes emerge from these insights about AI's role in shaping customer experience:

• AI is making every experience genuinely personal — from customized video content to real-time stadium recommendations. This goes far beyond basic personalization to understanding intent and context at unprecedented scale.

• AI works as a partner that amplifies human expertise. Whether helping financial advisors process market data or enabling customer service teams to resolve complex issues, the goal isn't  replacement but enhancement — freeing people to focus on judgment, relationships, and strategic decisions.

• Success requires both the right data foundation and user trust. Organizations need unified data platforms that can store, process, and retrieve information effectively while addressing privacy concerns through both technology and transparent practices.