Enterprises are expanding their use of artificial intelligence (AI) in customer experience to encompass the entirety of the process, not just relegating it to back-office tasks. In addition to speeding up the work of customer experience (CX) teams, it also makes customers feel heard and better understood.
“We’re finally moving beyond superficial ‘personalization’,” said Lisa O’Malley, senior director of industry products and solutions at Google Cloud, in a Feb. 24 blog post. “AI-powered CX creates the feeling of being understood, of having needs anticipated and met with minimal effort.”
For example, O’Malley said that customers are saying “please” and “thank you” to AI agents.
But the “most significant shift, however, is the evolution of the support system from a cost center to a revenue generator. The conversations I’m having with customers point to omnichannel engagement — across voice, web, mobile, email and apps — as directly driving ROI,” O’Malley said.
A positive customer experience translates to higher ROI (return on investment) because it increases engagement and enhances loyalty to the brand, affecting sales directly by reducing drop-offs and cart abandonment, O’Malley pointed out.
“Customer expectations shift with every swipe, click and voice command across a rough landscape of touchpoints. It’s turned what was once a cold call into a game of darts,” she said. “This is where AI moves beyond a buzzword and becomes essential.”
The future of AI in customer experience is “invisible” because it feels natural and seamless, O’Malley added.
Five AI Trends for 2025
The maturing of AI in customer experience is one of five trends Google Cloud is forecasting for 2025. These were based on data insights from a survey of 2,500 business decision-makers, top AI topics in Google Trends, plus third-party research and insights, including those from Google AI thought leaders.
The AI Business Trends 2025 report found that enterprises are stepping up their capital investments in AI, driven by fast advances in AI models and increasing adoption. AI agents in particular are driving “enormous” gains as they quickly become “more sophisticated and precise,” the report said.
Here are the five trends Google Cloud identified for this year:
AI-powered customer experience will become seamless and invisible: AI will help enterprises deliver a customer experience that is seamless, personalized and efficient. For example, positive customer experience leads to higher customer loyalty and therefore sales. AI agents can analyze the customer’s sentiment across emails, social media posts and chat messages in real time. Companies can use these insights to tailor their responses to the customer.
Use of multimodal AI will accelerate: Companies will increasingly use multimodal AI models — those capable of understanding and generating text, images, video and audio — for their business needs. By tapping into structured and unstructured data — such as PDFs, emails, social media posts and videos — AI can enable complex data analysis, lead to more streamlined workflows and enhanced insights.
Chatbots to become multi-agent systems: The era of simplistic chatbots is coming to an end. They will be replaced by AI agents that can reason, plan and remember past actions to help it make decisions, learn and adapt — usually with a human overseer. The next stage is for multi-agent systems where an AI agent team works with each other.
AI ushers in assistive search: Whether shopping for new clothes or looking for company data, searching with AI will no longer be a text-based endeavor that can lead to frustration. Instead, search will become smarter. Users can upload images, audio, video and even conversational prompts to do assistive search to find what they want faster. This is due to generative AI and multimodal search capabilities.
AI to be widely adopted into security and privacy best practices: As AI adoption grows, so do concerns about cybersecurity. Google Cloud expects to see companies increasingly using AI to combat fraudsters and other cybercriminals. AI can help a company’s IT department boost security defenses, identify and combat attacks, accelerate responses and alleviate repetitive manual work.