The new collaborators
AI-agents have quietly become co-workers in our service systems — answering queries, routing tickets, recommending actions. Yet the real challenge isn’t technological implementation; it’s designing participation between AI and people.
Shared control, shared value
Research into experience enabled with AI-agent adoption shows that the most effective organisations contextualise where AI is a substitute, where AI augments, where AI is an autonomous agent, and where there is no need of AI — effectively a participant with clearly defined roles. For example, when AI handle repeatable or predictive tasks and humans focus on empathy, judgement, and exception handling, the result is not replacement but augmented experience.
Designing for balanced participation
At CXMi, we apply the ACM framework to balance this partnership:
- Attitudes — mindsets that embrace AI as an ally to both customers and frontline staff, not a threat.
- Capabilities — the data and organisational skills that enable collaboration.
- Methods — automating insights to actions, capturing adjacencies that need both human judgement and AI scale across touchpoints.
The future of experience excellence belongs to firms that design experience capabilities where AI and humans participate together — not compete.