The Balancing Act
What Would You Give Up to Implement AI?
I recently spent two days with regional CIOs from a range of industries, talking through how they’re implementing AI across their organizations. I love working with AI. It’s a genuinely useful technology, one that can strip mundane tasks off people’s plates and cut operating costs in the process. What struck me across those two days wasn’t the technology. It was how little airtime went to working with business partners to shape the experiences employees and customers would actually live with.
One of the keynote speakers told a joke that’s stuck with me since:
“A man walks into a bar and orders a beer. The AI bartender asks the man why he wanted a beer.
Man: I had a hard day and need to relax.
AI bartender: I can help.
The bartender lowers the overhead lighting, puts on calming music, wraps a warm towel around the man’s neck, and lights aromatherapy candles.
Man: Why are you doing all this?
AI bartender: I thought you needed to relax.
Man: I just wanted a beer.”
The room laughed, but the joke was making a real point. A system can execute a request perfectly and still miss what the person actually needed. That’s not a technology failure. It’s what happens when the people who understand the customer aren’t in the room while the system gets built.
Build it, break it, fix it works fine for testing new ideas. It is not a strategy for how B2B companies put AI in front of customers. When a technology team builds without input from the parts of the organization that own the customer relationship, the gap between what gets shipped and what customers will tolerate shows up fast, and expensively. Only 27% of customers will give a chatbot a second try after one bad experience, and 87% say they need a clear path to a human once AI is involved (Gartner, 2026). Even knowing that, roughly 30% of firms are launching underdeveloped chatbots anyway (Forrester, 2026). Buyers, meanwhile, are moving the other direction: 67% now prefer a rep-free experience and 45% already use AI mid-purchase (Gartner, 2026). More appetite for AI and less patience for getting it wrong, at the same time. That’s the Balancing Act.
That’s an unnecessary risk to carry, and it’s avoidable. I’ve written before about what a clear leadership structure and real cross-functional collaboration do for customer experience. That case gets stronger, not weaker, as AI investment accelerates, because AI raises the cost of getting the experience wrong at the exact moment more companies are moving fast to ship it.
Imagine a CX leader sitting at the table with the CIO from day one of an AI rollout, not to slow it down, but to help define what success looks like and measure whether the organization is hitting it. That’s not theoretical. McKinsey found that organizations that embed customer experience into how the business actually operates, rather than layering it on after a technology decision is made, see a 20% improvement in customer satisfaction, a 15% increase in sales conversion, and a 30% reduction in cost to serve (McKinsey, 2026). Those are the numbers a CX seat at the table is supposed to produce: trust and satisfaction go up, cost goes down, and the case for the next AI investment gets easier to make instead of harder.
So what does putting a CX leader at the table actually require? A CX voice in the AI roadmap before launching new products and services, with shared success metrics and a human escalation path for when AI is missing the mark. Building a habit of asking what customers and employees need and how success is measured is the path to success.
None of that is a reason to slow AI down. The goal is to use AI to compound customers trust and make good AI spending decisions.
If your organization is moving fast on AI and still figuring out who owns the experience on the other side of it, that’s worth a conversation before the rollout, not after. I help B2B complex-product organizations get a CX seat at that table early enough for it to matter, in the roadmap decisions, not the retro.
The first call is free: sixty minutes to look at where your AI investment and your customer experience are, and aren’t, working from the same plan.
Sources
● Gartner: Sales Survey Finds 67% of B2B Buyers Prefer a Rep-Free Experience
● Gartner: Only 27% of Customers Would Try a Chatbot Again After a Negative Experience
● Forrester: Predictions 2026, CX Teams Look to Escape the Orbit of Dysfunction
● McKinsey: How the Operating Model Can Unlock the Full Power of Customer Experience