The CX Revolution: A New Framework for Customer Experience in the Age of Intelligence
Customer experience is the ultimate output of a company’s brand promise, determining whether a business stands the test of time or fades into obscurity. But CX, and by extension brand loyalty, is on the verge of being totally unrecognisable from what we have known until now. CX’s position as business-critical, however, is resolutely unchanged. The latest research from FSC offers a practical way to navigate the coming change.
Introduction
In the race to offer the holy grail of services powered by AI that really work, not just for the companies searching for cost savings but for the real people using them, customer experience (CX) is on the verge of a revolution. This is not something just happening to us, but actively being shaped by us, in a symbiotic dance of people, technology and commerce.
CX has always been governed by technology. From mail order to ecommerce to smartphones, each wave quietly reset what customers expect and how brands compete. But the next shift is not incremental: it’s a big, whopping transformation, brought about by the interplay of three technologies that are converging to reshape customer experience over the next decade.
“The choices that leaders make today will influence not only how their brand will fare, but how the future unfolds for everyone.”
The latest FSC white paper – CX in the Age of AI: Agents, AR and the Coming Revolution – shows that the choices that leaders make today will influence not only how their brand will fare, but how the future unfolds for everyone. Our research unearths the potential of (and the responsibilities surrounding) the new world of agentic commerce, where human beings are no longer the main characters in the customer journey; and provides a framework for deploying AI without losing what makes your brand worth choosing in the first place.
Many brands will get this wrong: they will chase efficiency, sacrifice trust, and wonder why customers defected to competitors who understood something they missed. Understanding the forces at play is the first step in being one of those who hold firm when so much is changing beyond recognition.
Goodbye digital age, hello era of intelligence
For the last decade and a half, we have been in the Fourth Industrial Revolution – characterised by a technological supercluster from AI, IoT and AR to robotics, quantum computing and biotechnology. It’s an explosion of converging technologies, blurring the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological worlds.
What sets the current moment (“the most intense eruption of new technologies in earth’s history,” according to Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI) apart is the scale, speed and scope of these systems. This wave of change is about technologies combining in ways that multiply their individual power, with change unfolding over months instead of decades. Add to this the applicability across infinite domains – from commerce to healthcare, entertainment to national security – and the advent of autonomous (agentic) systems, and we arrive at a point, at the brink of this transitional phase, where we actually should believe the hype – or at least appreciate why this turning point is different.
Under pressure
The commercial pressure to adopt AI is intense. With CX quality hitting an all time low in 2024, the imperative to adapt is crucial to survival: nearly 21% of global brands saw their CX rankings decline in 2025, and whilst the vast majority (84%) of managers believe they’re meeting their customers’ needs, only 45% of consumers agree.
According to Simon Robinson, CX pioneer, bestselling author and one of the experts we interviewed for the white paper, the reason is that CX has moved away from its roots: “Customer experience has been reduced to dashboards and data points, and we’ve completely lost the understanding of what it is to be human and what human experience is.”
Until now, many brands have approached AI in CX with scepticism, having inherited platforms that fragment rather than unite, and with the gap between vendor promises and operational reality being sharply felt.
But, in just a few years, AI has moved from an interesting side project to board-level priority – and the payoff is undeniable. Early adopters that have embedded AI deeply into their customer experience have seen:
Revenue increases of 15.8% and productivity gains of 22.6% (Gartner);
Higher ROI from their AI tools to the tune of 128% (Zendesk);
More than double the revenue growth of laggards (McKinsey).
Investment is flowing at unprecedented scale. In the US alone, private AI investment grew to $109.1 billion. Globally, corporate spending on AI has hit $252.3 billion.
But speed has outpaced confidence. Consumers are simultaneously curious and cautious. Many welcome faster service and smarter personalisation, yet remain deeply uneasy about privacy, bias and loss of control.
Secret agents
“The worry is not that AI will fail. The worry is that it will succeed.”
The worry is not that AI will fail. The worry is that it will succeed. No longer do the AI tools we‘re using every day need us to tell them what to do. Agentic systems – those that use multiple AI tools, remember information, and make decisions without human input – are proliferating, and along with them, commerce itself is changing.
For decades, commerce has followed a predictable journey: a consumer has a need, then searches, compares, deliberates, decides and buys. Each stage is a chance for brands to intercept, persuade and capture. The entire infrastructure of CX assumes that the human is the primary navigator. AI agents break those mechanisms.
Consumers do welcome the change – favourability towards AI in CX has surged to 67%, up 10 points year on year, and 81% of consumers regard AI as integral to modern service delivery – but they are also apprehensive (when researchers asked people to describe AI in a single word, the most common response was ‘scary’).
And for brands, suddenly there is no view of how purchase decisions are being made: instead of selling to people, they are selling to the systems that represent them. The browsing patterns, hesitation points, comparison behaviours – all of it vanishes into a process that can’t be seen.
It is now time to rethink the full stack of engagement, as summed up neatly in a recent McKinsey report: “In the era of agentic commerce, the consumer no longer travels alone. Their digital proxies now navigate the commerce ecosystem.” Brands have to redesign, “not for the people they’ve worked to understand but for the agents now acting on their behalf.”
“It is now time to rethink: in the era of agentic commerce, the consumer no longer travels alone.”
Full sense
If AI agents are the brain of agentic commerce, ambient intelligence is the sensory system: the continuous signal layer that tells the brain what’s happening.
With ambient technologies – sensors embedded into everyday environments, commonly seen in smart home devices that automatically adjust heating, for example – experiences are curated by anticipating needs. They are invisible and context-aware, using signals we aren’t consciously sharing.
This, of course, has deep implications for privacy. When a consumer is in charge of what information they disclose – the options they select on a pop-up window, for example – they have a sense of control. But ambient systems (which are more embedded than most people realise, with over 1.1 billion wearable devices in active use globally) know things about you that you didn’t tell it and might not want it to know.
For brands, privacy becomes a product attribute. Forward-thinking companies are finding traction where the value exchange is clear – L’Oréal has implemented real-time personalisation across more than 200 direct-to-consumer websites, generating 15-20% of sales for their B2C brands – but the balance of privacy and personalisation must be carefully managed.
The final element of the agentic commerce triad is augmented reality (AR), where devices like smart glasses overlay digital content onto the physical world. Qi Pan, Head of Computer Vision at Snap Inc. and another of the experts we spoke to for the white paper, sits at the frontier of this technology. He explained why this represents a fundamental shift in how humans will interact with AI. “It is placed at the same point your eyes are, so it has the potential to actually sense what is happening for you all the time.”
“As AI agents increasingly dominate digital purchasing – handling research, comparison and transaction – brands lose their grip on the online journey. AR offers a counterweight.”
As AI agents increasingly dominate digital purchasing – handling research, comparison and transaction – brands lose their grip on the online journey. AR offers a counterweight: customers return to real spaces, but now those spaces respond and adapt. IKEA Place, for example, uses spatial computing to drop true-to-scale furniture into your actual room with 98% size accuracy.
AR technology has existed for years but lacked the ability to make itself genuinely useful. The opportunity should not be ignored: the global AR market stands at approximately $50.9 billion in 2026.
But how does all of this play out for brands rethinking their CX strategy?
Making the right choice
CX as we know it is ending – and what replaces it will be shaped by the choices being made right now. The same capabilities can support or exploit, simplify or manipulate – depending on what is valued, incentivised and regulated.
The future will be shaped not by what the technology can do, but by how organisations choose to deploy it. Our research identified four key inflection points for leaders to focus on:
Business model: when AI agents sit between brands and customers, commercial structures have to change. Revenue models built on direct customer access – browsing data, purchase signals, loyalty programmes – will have to adapt to new avenues of connection.
Long-term value: whilst consumers show a preference for human-like AI – which agrees with them no matter what in a sort of fabricated empathy (think of ChatGPT telling you your idea is brilliant) – ultimately this artificial intimacy wears thin, and people lose trust. The question becomes whether brands build for lifetime value or harvest attention until the trust runs out.
Privacy and personalisation: many consumers will happily trade data for convenience if it feels useful and the risk is low. But the downside of getting it wrong looms larger than the upside of getting it right. Regulatory and ethical risks scale quickly when the line between relevance and surveillance is crossed.
Trust and reputation: brands will inherit the strengths and weaknesses of every platform and data source they deploy – trust will become networked. But when AI fails, customers will still hold the brand accountable; they must ensure that decisions can be explained, and errors can be reversed.
None of these risks can be mitigated by technology alone. Each requires intentional choices about values, boundaries and trade-offs.
Intentional design as a competitive advantage
One temptation is to see human-centred design as a brake on innovation. Our research suggests the opposite. In a world where efficiency is table stakes, differentiation comes from the quality of human experience that a brand enables.
Organisations that lead in CX consistently succeed in the market, with higher growth, stronger loyalty and better long-term returns: the Design Management Institute found design-led companies outperformed the S&P 500 by 219% over ten years. And research indicates every dollar invested in UX can return between $2 and $100 – with well-executed design systems driving conversion rate improvements of up to 400%. Crucially, they also recover faster when things go wrong – because trust has already been earned.
The danger is mistaking speed for progress. As political philosopher Michael Sandel quips, “AI is like philosophy on a deadline.” Rushing to deploy AI without understanding customer psychology leads to expensive failures and reputational damage that are difficult to unwind. The alternative is designing for human experience from the start.
A look to the future – and a framework to help us navigate it
“Brands that will thrive are not those that predicted correctly, but those that built the capability to learn and adapt”
Diving into this topic for our research made it all the more clear that predicting the future is impossible. Multiple trajectories are equally viable, and the path that emerges will be shaped by choices made now by regulators, platforms, brands and consumers.
Resilience, however, can be built – and our white paper sets out a practical framework to navigate the uncertainty.
Map your starting position: real customer appetite, organisational readiness and risk exposure.
Architect for flexibility: modular systems, clear human override points and reversibility.
Govern with intent: explicit principles, transparency standards and ethical red lines.
Measure what matters: trust trajectories, behavioural signals and agent-mediated visibility.
Experiment continuously: small, bounded tests that generate learning rather than lock-in.
The brands that wait, or bet everything on a single outcome, will find themselves at a disadvantage. The organisations that will thrive are not those that predicted correctly, but those that built the capability to learn and adapt.
Staying steady on shaky ground
Whatever the future, certain capabilities remain unshakeably valuable: deep customer understanding, flexible architecture, clear governance, quality AI implementation, and preserved human capability.
As we strive to stay on top of how technology is radically altering the way that people shop, connect with brands and experience the world, we have both obligation and opportunity.
FSC’s new white paper, CX in the Age of AI: Agents, AR and the Coming Revolution, is out soon. Head to our white paper directory for more, and come along to our launch event in March when we’ll be sharing our full research, expert interviews and strategic frameworks – and creating space for leaders to debate what responsible, commercially successful CX should look like in the intelligence era. Contact us at hello@futurestrategy.club.
