AI’s role in human data
Editor’s note: Ron Welty is the CEO and founder of IntelliShop, a customer experience advisory firm based in Perrysburg, Ohio. Find Welty on LinkedIn.
Recently, I read an article in The Wall Street Journal about companies using AI to create digital twins of consumers, simulated people designed to answer questions about behavior, preferences and decision-making. At first, I’ll admit, I was a little shocked by the idea. But the more I thought about it, the more excited I became.
Not because AI will replace customer insight, quite the opposite: the potential widespread availability of these commoditized facsimiles of human experience will reinforce and elevate the market for real, textured, human-generated CX data. After more than 25 years advising some of the world’s most recognizable brands on customer experience, I’ve learned something simple but powerful: the most important signals in CX are rarely the easiest ones to measure. They live in the subtle human moments that shape how customers feel about a brand, and that’s where the human heart will always matter.
The nuances of human experience cannot be simulated
I couldn’t be more bullish on AI’s power to transform CX and CX measurement. AI is already analyzing enormous datasets, conducting macrosector analyses and assisting with program design, scope and many other tasks faster than ever before.
Those capabilities are incredibly valuable. In fact, they’re changing our business.
But a real customer’s experience can’t be distilled down to probabilities. Close your eyes and picture the following:
- A parent buying ice cream for their kids. When one child drops their cone, the employee behind the counter quietly replaces it for free, no questions asked.
- A customer walking into a bank during uncertain economic times and finds someone who genuinely understands their concerns and can relate to them as a person.
- A sports fan connecting with their local bartender while their lifelong team makes a deep playoff run.
These moments are not transactional; they are emotional, a complex interplay between that specific CX touchpoint and everything else going on in a person’s life, which for any of us can change dramatically by the day. Beyond pure process, these moments require empathy, context and instinct, all parts of emotional intelligence. This is the heart of customer experience.
AI can help analyze interactions. It can surface trends and highlight patterns that deserve attention, but the meaning behind those moments, the tone, intent and human connection is something that still requires people to observe, relay, interpret and understand.
In other words, the more we automate analysis, the more valuable human insight becomes.
The edge will belong to those who invest in real human insight
There’s a big part of this conversation I don’t hear enough people talking about: AI is already becoming ubiquitous. The barriers to entry are falling quickly. What was once complex and expensive is becoming accessible, scalable and, in many cases, commoditized. As more companies adopt similar models, similar datasets and similar approaches, AI will increasingly become table stakes. It’s going to be a requirement to compete, not a differentiator that defines leadership. When that happens, a new question emerges: If everyone has access to the same intelligence, what actually creates an edge?
There’s a tendency to think about AI as a replacement for traditional research. A faster, cheaper, more scalable alternative to human input. In reality, AI may do something very different. It may expose the limits of purely simulated understanding. AI can generate answers that are clean, structured and statistically confident. But confidence is not the same as truth. And in customer experience, some of the most important insights are not clean or predictable.
They are inconsistent. Emotional. Contextual. Occasionally irrational.
In other words, they are human.
This is where the idea of digital twins or simulated behavior models becomes both fascinating and incomplete. They are built on patterns of past behavior and extrapolate what people are likely to do based on what they have done. But the most meaningful moments in customer experience often happen outside of those patterns … they happen in the exceptions listed earlier in this piece.
These are not edge cases, they are defining moments, and they are incredibly difficult to simulate.
Where does this leave CX leaders?
AI is raising the floor, for everyone.
As these tools become more accessible, more affordable and more widely adopted, they will normalize a baseline level of insight across the market. They will simply be expected.
But raising the floor doesn’t raise the ceiling, and that’s where the real opportunity begins. Because when everyone is working from similar models, similar outputs and similar interpretations, the companies that stand out will be the ones that go beyond what AI can simulate. They’ll be the ones willing to invest in understanding how customers actually behave in the real world, not just how a model simulates them to behave.
In a world where intelligence becomes commoditized, understanding people will not be. And the companies that recognize that, the ones who continue to invest in real human insight alongside technological advancement, will be the ones that create meaningful and lasting differentiation.