From Customer Experience to “I Tried This”

My AI-Forward Shift

The last 18–24 months, many of us (function and level agnostic) have heard the phrase “AI-first” or “AI-forward.” For some, that language made us freeze. For others, it created a quiet kind of fear. And for a few, it sparked real excitement. For me, it landed as optimistically cautious. I honestly wasn’t sure where that put me on the AI-forward spectrum, but it definitely piqued my interest. I wanted to see if AI was going to break what I cared about in Customer Experience, or help me hold the flame to it and make it stronger.

A bit of context. I’m a trained Chemical Engineer who, after graduation, somehow swooped into the world of tech and Customer Experience. Over the years, I crafted my way through SaaS, ecommerce, and regulated organizations, leading Support teams and building end-to-end customer journeys. My comfort zone has always been operational tools, workflows, and designing experiences that make customers feel taken care of. Site reliability and tech stacks were not in my language of choice.

At the same time, I’m also the kind of person who likes to be able to say, “I tried this.” Even if it’s messy. Even if it’s uncomfortable. Even if it’s not the path I was trained for.

So when AI started showing up everywhere, I ventured down two pathways.

From a functional perspective, we had already invested in building a strong omnichannel presence. We brought chatbots into the mix and started moving toward an LLM-driven model that improved self-serve in a meaningful way. It wasn’t about deflecting tickets just to reduce volume. It was about giving customers a faster path to answers, and giving my team more space to focus on the hard questions where humans still do the best work. Over time, the impact started to show up in the places every CX leader watches. Customers who used to show up with complaints began coming back with appreciation. CSAT and NPS stopped hovering at the low bars and started climbing toward the targets we knew we could hit.

From a personal standpoint, I approached AI with a weird mix of hopefulness and a desire to break it. I wanted to find the edges, and I wanted to see if it could make my day feel lighter without making my work feel shallow. Pretty quickly, I realized it wasn’t about replacing my thinking. It was about reducing the drag. Drafting. Summarizing. Cleaning up my notes. Turning a rough idea into something I could share. The small things that quietly steal time during a busy week.

That created a ripple effect. I started sharing it with people in my circle of influence, not as “look at this shiny tool,” but as “look how much lighter the routine stuff can be.” 

• Catching up on missed Slack threads with an intelligent summary. 

• Turning messy thoughts into a clear message. 

• Getting unstuck faster. 

I even played around with building a few Zaps and small automations, just to see what was possible without needing to be a technical builder.

And that’s where “AI-forward” started to mean something real to me. Not a mandate. Not a buzzword. Not a threat. More like a new kind of leverage, if you use it with intention.

But I also immediately I hit the question a lot of people hit when they move from “learning” to “building.”

Where do you even begin?