The Prompt: How AI is reshaping the customer experience – wins and watchouts

Business leaders are buzzing about generative AI. To help you keep up with this fast-moving, transformative topic, our regular column “The Prompt” brings you observations from the field, where Google Cloud leaders are working closely with customers and partners to define the future of AI. In this edition, Lisa O’Malley, AI product leader, shares how AI is already transforming the customer experience.

Last year, we published our AI trends for 2025. It sparked a lot of conversations, but one area resonated deeply among enterprises: AI's potential to fundamentally reshape the customer experience. We know that today, customer expectations shift with every swipe, click, and voice command across a rough landscape of touchpoints. It's turned what was once a cold call into a game of darts. This is where AI moves beyond a buzzword and becomes essential.

Today, I’m revisiting this trend not as a theoretical exercise, but as a practical imperative. Here’s my observation on 2025 so far: When it comes to the customer experience (CX), we often talk about AI automating back-office tasks. That's true, but also a massive understatement. It's not just about making things faster. It's about fundamentally changing how work gets done. With AI, customer support is finally having its moment. We're moving far beyond simple personalization. We’re getting from point A to Z, faster.

In my conversations, I'm seeing this transformation unfold in real-time, along with some potential missteps. Let’s talk about it.

How AI is reshaping the customer experience

The customer experience, at its core, encompasses every perception and feeling a customer has throughout their entire journey with a company. A positive experience boosts engagement, retention, and loyalty, directly impacting sales by reducing drop-offs and cart abandonment. So how has AI fit in?

First, consider the impact on internal processes. AI isn't simply making grunt work more manageable, it's fundamentally reshaping how work gets done. It's about freeing up human agents from the mundane, allowing them to focus on complex problem-solving and building genuine rapport with customers.

On the customer-facing side, we're finally moving beyond superficial "personalization." AI-powered CX creates the feeling of being understood, of having needs anticipated and met with minimal effort. The evidence is already there: customers are saying "please" and "thank you" to virtual agents, a testament to the increasingly natural and engaging nature of these interactions. This points towards a future of "invisible" CX – experiences so efficient that the technology fades into the background.

Perhaps the most significant shift, however, is the evolution of the support system from a cost center to a revenue generator. The conversations I'm having with customers point to omnichannel engagement – across voice, web, mobile, email, and apps – as directly driving ROI. Success is no longer solely defined by reducing call handle time or deflection; it's about increasing revenue through enhanced engagement strategies.

Where agents and AI-powered search come in

It’s no surprise that virtual agents are a major factor in this shift. AI agents make the customer experience feel invisible because of their human-like self-service across multiple languages and platforms, all while directing inquiries to human agents when needed.

Another major differentiator we’ve seen is AI-powered search. AI-powered search enables virtual assistants to quickly find answers to unexpected questions and improve access to knowledge. Instead of relying on pre-programmed responses, these systems dynamically pull information from a variety of sources, including knowledge bases, documents, and databases. They’re multimodal, multilingual, and multichannel by design – so even if your customer doesn’t speak your language, finding your service won’t be an issue.

Wins: We’re helping customers get ahead

Our Gemini models are multimodal - they can generalize, understand, operate across, and combine many different types of information simultaneously. This powers omnichannel agents that engage users across web, mobile, voice, email, and apps. Our open ecosystem also allows easy connection across customer systems of record and customer experience applications so the agents can understand, reason and act on the most comprehensive set of data and systems. Plus, our end-to-end Customer Engagement Suite (CES) is built on Google Cloud’s foundational security, privacy, and AI innovation, meaning you can deliver trusted and consistent customer interactions across all channels.

For example, at Wendy's, the AI voice-ordering agent intends to give crew members more time to prepare food, with initial testing showing that AI-enabled drive-thru service times were 22 seconds faster than the average in the region. Bell Canada saved over $20M across customer operations with CES, and Best Buy is resolving issues 90 seconds faster.

Watchouts: Make every agent your best agent

The shift in CX is undeniable, but so is the potential for missteps. Here are a few observations I’d made, and ways we can be mindful.

First, chatbots aren't the silver bullet. Let's be clear: chat is important, but it's not the answer to customer experience. The real opportunity lies in augmenting human capabilities: you should make every agent your best agent. You can use AI to help agents be their best selves, and with tools like Agent Assist, we're using AI to provide real-time coaching, helpful summaries, and bi-directional chat translation. It's about empowering agents, not eliminating them.

Second, generative AI isn’t the only factor. For instance, a customer speaking with a bank representative may have to verify their identity through a specific set of verification questions. At the same time, they may ask the bank: “Tell me what’s the best mortgage offering for me? Can you compare it across the products you offer?” The first requires a deterministic flow. The second requires a generative flow. The key is a hybrid agent who can do both.

Considering AI for CX? Get your data ready

Have you considered the type of knowledge, interactions, question answering, and task completion that the conversational AI application will need to handle? Organizations can really accelerate time-to-value when deploying AI applications if they focus on data preparation and readiness. Because AI is only as good as the data it has access to.

It’s clear the next few years will be defined by rapid advancements in AI, fueled by both technological breakthroughs and evolving consumer expectations. We'll see personalization techniques move beyond analyzing customer history, incorporating emotional cues from voice, facial expressions, and text to interpret intent and deliver more empathetic service. To learn more, download our AI business trends report.