AI in Customer Service: What Senior Leaders Are Really Saying About Scaling AI

We got a room full of senior leaders from Financial Services and beyond together to talk honestly about AI in customer service. Not the hype. What's actually working, and what isn't. 

The clearest thing we heard? Investment is going up, but most organisations are stuck. Not because the technology isn't there. It is. They're stuck because they haven't yet built the operating model, governance and adoption approach to make it work at scale. The problem isn't access anymore. It's readiness.

Leaders have moved past experimenting for the sake of it. The focus now is firmly on outcomes, better customer experience, more productivity, more efficient operations. And there was broad agreement that the AI that actually works isn't just clever technology. It's the people, process, governance and change management around it that make the difference. 

The thread running through the whole conversation was trust. Responsible AI and clear accountability came up again and again, not as a box to tick, but as the thing that makes scale possible in the first place. Alongside that, leaders were hungry for proof, real examples of organisations that have got past pilots and into measurable impact. And they valued hearing it from across industries, because a lot of the real learning comes from what's worked, and what hasn't, in other sectors. 

That gap between ambition and delivery is exactly what our eBook, The AI Disconnect in Financial Services and Insurance, gets into, why so many AI initiatives stall, and what you can do about it. 

And if trust and readiness are the sticking points, our whitepaper Accelerate Agentic AI Transformation lays out a practical framework for scaling agentic customer experiences responsibly. It's worth a read given that 83% of organisations plan to use AI agents, but only 29% feel ready to do it securely.

Knowing where to start is the hard part. That's what our From Fragmented to Connected in 90 Days: AI Efficiency Workshop is built for. It's a focused 2-hour session for business and technology leaders where, together, we'll find your highest-value AI opportunities, work out how ready you really are and what's getting in the way, talk through governance and Responsible AI, prioritise the use cases worth doing first, and build a 90-day plan to scale AI across your organisation. 

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Technology on its own won't get you there. The organisations getting real value from AI are the ones putting just as much into governance, responsible AI, adoption and change. Get those foundations right and AI moves from pilot to real business impact. Get them wrong and it stays stuck.