Eglobalis Customer Experience , Innovation & Design Agency

01/06/2026

Is AI Replacing CX Research? Or It's Exposing Every Organisation That Was Never Doing It Properly. 🔍
Everyone's cutting CX research budgets. AI will answer it all, right?
Wrong. And the data is brutal.
📉 73% of brands showed zero CX improvement year-over-year — while 21% actually declined and only 6% improved. CX hit an all-time low in North America. (Forrester 2025 Global CX Index — 275,000 consumers, 469 brands, 12 industries, 13 countries)
😬 66% of CX practitioners believe experience improved last year. Only 17% of consumers agree. That 49-point gap isn't a data problem — it's a research methodology crisis. (Medallia 2026 State of Customer Experience Report — 1,500+ consumers, 550+ CX practitioners, 600 anonymised programmes)
🤖 63% of consumers say AI advances make trust even more important — not less. (Salesforce State of the AI Connected Customer — 15,015 consumers, 18 countries — cited in the full article)
💸 AI spending on personalised CX will exceed $30 billion by 2027 in Asia-Pacific alone — and the winners are investing more in customer intelligence, not less. (IDC projection — cited in the full article)
Ask yourself — honestly:
🔥 If AI is genuinely improving CX, why are nearly three quarters of brands standing completely still — and one in five going backwards?
🔥 You have more customer data than ever before. So why is the gap between what brands believe and what customers actually feel still growing?
🔥 When AI handles 80% of your service interactions, who in your organisation is responsible for understanding what customers truly feel — and are they resourced to find out?
🔥 Is your NPS score a real strategic compass — or just a number that makes leadership comfortable at the quarterly review?
🔥 When did your last CX research commission directly change a business decision? If you have to think hard about that — that is your answer.

AI raises the bar. It doesn't lower it. The organisations pulling ahead aren't spending less on customer intelligence — they're making it indispensable to every P&L conversation.
The rest are about to find out what that gap costs. 📖

If this hit home — like it, drop your answer in the comments, and share it with every CX and AI leader in your network who needs this wake-up call. One share puts the right thinking in front of the right people. 🔁
🔔 Follow Ricardo Saltz Gulko Newsletter for weekly insights on CX, AI, and customer intelligence that moves the needle:
The original article was published at eGlobalis: https://www.eglobalis.com/why-ai-doesnt-reduce-the-need-for-cx-research-it-raises-the-bar/
LinkedIn :

CX Research is becoming more important in the AI era. Discover why AI raises the bar for customer intelligence, trust, journey management, and business decisions.

30/05/2026

What Saves Money 💸 💳 on Every Interaction but Costs You the Customer? My new article at CMSWire.

You guessed it. AI. A chatbot that fails to solve customer problems may create more financial risk than operational savings.

The Gist 👨‍💻

➡️ Does cheaper customer service always save money? No. AI self-service can lower interaction costs while increasing customer churn if experiences fail to resolve issues effectively.

➡️ Why do so many AI service initiatives disappoint customers? Organizations often automate broken processes before fixing underlying workflow, knowledge and escalation problems.

➡️ What separates successful AI deployments from failed ones?

Leading organizations prioritize readiness, governance, knowledge quality and human escalation paths before scaling automation.

The bot saves you money. The customer never comes back. Here is what the data is actually telling us in 2026. Every boardroom conversation about AI and customer service eventually lands on the same slide. Cost per interaction.

Chatbot: $1.84. Human agent: $13.50. The math looks obvious, the decision feels easy, and the project gets approved.

But that slide is missing its second page.

https://www.cmswire.com/customer-experience/what-saves-money-on-every-interaction-but-costs-you-the-customer/

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You guessed it. AI. A chatbot that fails to solve customer problems may create more financial risk than operational savings.

26/05/2026

The Hidden Cost of AI That Cannot Escalate — And What It Means for Your Bottom Line

Most AI business cases were built on one assumption: automate more, spend less. 💰

That assumption is now being publicly challenged — by Gartner, McKinsey, and the actual cost data coming out of enterprise deployments in 2026. ⚠️

The problem is not AI itself. The problem is AI that cannot escalate well. And the cost of that failure is hiding in plain sight inside your CX metrics. 🔍

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The data below tells the full story 👇

📊 Forecasts GenAI cost per resolution in customer service will exceed $3 per interaction by 2030 — surpassing offshore human agent costs. AI is not getting cheaper at scale.

📊 AI-related regulatory change will lift assisted-service volumes by 30% by 2028 — as customers increasingly opt for humans when stakes are high (Gartner)

📊 25% of customers defect after just one bad service experience. One failed escalation is not a support ticket. It is a revenue event.

⚡ In B2B, 50% of open service issues were unresolved — and directly contributed to customer defections . In B2B, escalation failure, ends contracts. 🚨

The real cost is not in the automation. It is in the debt it creates. 💡

When AI is deployed as a barrier instead of a bridge, companies accumulate what I call deflection debt — more supervisor calls, more complaints, more regulatory exposure, and more churn risk. None of it shows up in your deflection rate dashboard. All of it shows up in your P&L. 📉

What most companies are getting wrong right now 👇

🔹 Measuring deflection rate as a success metric. Deflection tells you how many contacts you avoided. It tells you nothing about how many customers you lost because of it. Those are two very different numbers. 📊

🔹 Building AI that cannot hand over context. When a customer escalates after three automated loops and has to re-explain everything to a human agent — that is not a technology failure. That is a design and governance failure. And the customer pays the price. 🔄

🔹 Assuming the economics improve at scale. The $3 forecast is a direct challenge to every CFO who approved an AI CX business case on a “cheaper at scale” assumption. Has your finance team seen that number? 🎯

Your experience matters here more than any study 👇

💬 Have you ever lost a client or seen significant churn that started with a failed AI escalation — and how did leadership respond ?

💬 Is your company still measuring deflection rate as a primary CX success metric — or have you moved to something that actually reflects customer outcomes?

💬 In your experience, what is the one moment in the AI-to-human handover where trust breaks most often — and has anyone in your organisation designed specifically to fix it? 👇

Read the full article here: https://lnkd.in/dNPi78ai

Or on LinkedIn https://lnkd.in/d2csJPdr

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hidden-cost-ai-cannot-escalate-what-means-your-bottom-saltz-gulko-xasnf/?trackingId=gPFM08ioSXSsIvOtQEi6hg%3D%3D

Most AI business cases were built on one assumption: automate more, spend less. 💰 That assumption is now being publicly challenged — by Gartner, McKinsey, and the actual cost data coming out of enterprise deployments in 2026.

12/05/2026

You Already Pay for Customer AI in Your CCaaS Platform. Is It Switched On? 🤖

Let me say something that sounds absurd at first — yet the documented facts make it difficult to ignore.

A global enterprise. Sophisticated IT team. Significant monthly spend on a fully licensed CCaaS platform. AI features sitting completely dormant in the admin panel. Not because anyone decided against it. Because the implementation focused on go-live, and "phase two" never arrived. 💤

I witnessed this firsthand at one of Samsung's operating companies.

And here is the uncomfortable part: it is not a Samsung problem. Industry data shows fewer than 25% of contact centres have fully operationalised their CCaaS AI — features they already own, already pay for, every single month.

Genesys. NiCE. Cisco. Avaya. Amazon Web Services (AWS) Connect. Five9. Talkdesk. The AI is already in your subscription. Agent assist. Virtual agents. Predictive routing. Speech analytics. No new contract needed. Sometimes just a toggle. 🔛

But — and these matters — switching it on without governance, trained people, and a human escalation path is how you become the next Klarna cautionary tale. They saved $40M with AI. Then rehired human agents after repeat contacts jumped 25%. The technology worked. The design did not. ⚠️



Three questions worth asking your team today:

👉 Do you actually know which AI features your current CCaaS tier includes?

👉 Your platform is already scoring calls and analysing sentiment — who in your organisation owns that output, governs its accuracy, and is accountable when it is wrong?

👉 If a customer lands in your bot flow right now, how many taps does it take to reach a human?



I wrote the full article with a vendor-by-vendor breakdown, activation checklist and primary sources on Eglobalis 👇 🔗 https://www.eglobalis.com/you-already-pay-for-customer-ai-in-your-ccaas-platform-is-it-switched-on/

Or on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/you-already-pay-customer-ai-your-ccaas-platform-ricardo-saltz-gulko-fovkf/



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Article originally posted on Eglobalis: https://www.eglobalis.

10/05/2026

📚 My yearly Best Books of 2025–26: Part I will be released soon.

Every year, I like to look back at the books that truly stayed with me. Not only because they were well written, but because they brought a clear message, practical thinking, and real value for business life.

In Part I, I’ll share the best books I’ve read so far — the ones that stood out for their clarity, relevance, and ability to make us think differently about leadership, innovation, AI, customer experience, strategy, and the future of business.

These are not just books to read.

They are books that make you pause, reflect, act, and sometimes even challenge the way you see business and leadership.

We’ll also include a few titles to watch out for in the second-semester list.

Coming soon only in my newsletter and on the Eglobalis website. You can subscribe here: 🚀

https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/cx-insights-by-ricardo-s-gulko-6990079803374628864/

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/my-yearly-best-books-202526-part-i-released-soon-ricardo-saltz-gulko-aapac/

Every year, until Covid, I used to look back at the books that truly stayed with me. Now, my list is back.

05/05/2026

Before You Scale AI in Customer Experience, Fix These 5 Things
ata, governance, workflows, talent, measurement — miss one, and your AI becomes a liability.
The Gist

AI failure is a readiness problem. Most CX AI initiatives underperform not because of weak technology, but because organizations lack the data, governance, workflows, and talent needed to support it.
The gap between urgency and capability is widening. Nearly all companies feel pressure to deploy AI, but only a small minority have the structural foundations to generate real value.
Winners build before they scale. The companies seeing results redesign workflows, enforce governance, and train teams first—turning AI into a compounding advantage rather than a risk.

There is a pattern repeating itself across enterprise boardrooms right now. AI budgets are approved. Pilots are launched. Vendors are selected. And yet, for the great majority of companies deploying AI in customer experience, the results are not arriving — or worse, they are actively damaging the customer relationships they were meant to improve.

Data, governance, workflows, talent, measurement — miss one, and your AI becomes a liability.

20/04/2026

The New Editorial Risk: Confusing AI Assistance with AI Authorship
We’re living through a strange moment.

Almost everyone now uses AI in some form. Some use it for grammar. Some for structure. Some for research. Some for speed. Some for everything.
Yet in certain places, the real panic did not come from AI itself… it came from those suddenly realizing everyone else had access too. 🤖
The issue is no longer technology. It is editorial maturity.
My latest article explores a growing challenge:
When editors confuse assistance with authorship, they risk punishing honest professionals while shallow content quietly passes through.
Because let’s be honest:
Using AI responsibly to improve language is not the same as outsourcing thought.
And pretending otherwise solves nothing.
Some questions worth asking:
1️⃣ Is your editor AI-mature… or did panic create Inconsistent rules nobody can explain? Or continuously reinterprets them to align with personal preferences?
2️⃣ Are standards based on quality… or selective convenience?
3️⃣ Is thoughtful content being questioned while generic content flows freely?
4️⃣ Are contributors judged equally… or only when they become too visible?
5️⃣ Is governance being used to build trust… or to manage internal preferences?
6️⃣ If almost everyone uses AI in some form, why are only some people suddenly a problem?
7️⃣ Are we protecting standards… or protecting old privileges?
The future belongs to editorial systems that understand nuance, transparency, and fairness.

Not those fighting yesterday’s battle with today’s tools.

This is Part 1 of a 6-part series on editorial integrity, AI maturity, and what the industry must confront — because silence protects only those acting in bad faith.

This article was originally published on Eglobalis:
https://www.eglobalis.com/the-new-editorial-risk-confusing-ai-assistance-with-ai-authorship/
LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-editorial-risk-confusing-ai-assistance-authorship-saltz-gulko-6f4nf/
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This article was originally published on Eglobalis: https://www.eglobalis.

15/04/2026

CX Gap Discovery: When AI Is Necessary—and When It Isn’t

AI or Not—That’s the Question for Your Company 🤖

Most B2B companies are not struggling with an AI gap in CX. They’re struggling with clarity—on ownership, process, and what truly matters to customers.

In this article, I focus on a simple but critical challenge: how to distinguish when AI is actually needed—and when the real issue sits in governance, product design, or operating model. ⚖️

Before you invest in AI, ask yourself:

– Is this a scale problem… or a broken process?

– Are we missing intelligence… or missing accountability?

– If AI disappeared tomorrow, would this gap still exist?

One insight: the highest-value AI use cases are rarely where companies start—they’re where discipline already exists.

If you’d like to explore the full subject, you can read it on Eglobalis: https://lnkd.in/dCDDS62K

or here on LinkedIn: https://lnkd.in/de6sknmn

I’d be interested to hear how you approach this in your organization. 💬

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10/04/2026

Agentic Customers Don’t Care About Your Experience — Only Your Ex*****on

The next “customer” many companies will face is not a person clicking through your journey. It’s an AI agent acting on that person’s behalf — or a procurement bot acting for a business — with permission to search, compare, negotiate, purchase, and manage post‑purchase tasks. Cognizant describes this as the “agentic internet”: an ecosystem of AI-enabled tools and agents “working on behalf of consumers” to autonomously locate, evaluate, purchase, and maintain products and services. In the same research, AI-friendly consumers are projected to account for up to 55% of consumer purchasing activity by 2030.

This changes the centre of gravity in CX. Agents will still influence experience, but they will increasingly enforce ex*****on: data quality, API reliability, permissioning, identity, pricing integrity, fulfilment truth, returns logic, and operational resilience. In other words: the “experience” becomes a contract between systems.

That’s not theoretical. Visa reports that 47% of U.S. shoppers already use AI tools for at least one shopping task and that hundreds of secure, agent‑initiated transactions have been completed with partners; Visa also says it is working with 100+ partners, with 30+ building in its sandbox and 20+ agents/agent enablers integrating directly. At the same time, platform operators are drawing hard boundaries: Reuters has documented the Amazon–Perplexity AI. dispute over an agentic shopping tool, including a federal injunction and a subsequent temporary appellate stay.

Agentic customers are reshaping CX. Ex*****on, APIs, and governance now matter more than experience design in the AI-driven economy.

07/04/2026

Agentic Customers Don’t Care About Your Experience — Only Your Ex*****on
🤖 The next customer may not be a person.
It may be an AI agent acting on someone’s behalf to search, compare, negotiate, buy, and manage post-purchase actions.
That changes CX at the core.
✨ Agents do not care about brand language, polished journeys, or nice interfaces if ex*****on fails.
They care about:
• accurate data
• reliable APIs
• pricing integrity
• identity and permissions
• delivery truth
• returns logic
In other words, experience is becoming an ex*****on contract between systems.
📌 That raises harder questions than most companies are asking today:
Can your business be trusted by an AI agent to execute end to end?
Who owns ex*****on truth in your organization: CX, IT, Operations, or nobody?
If an agent fails in your environment, would you know where and why?
⚠️ The real risk is not bad design.
It is broken ex*****on hidden behind good design.
And agents will not complain.
They will simply move on.
Curious how others see this shift.
The original article was published under at eGlobalis https://www.eglobalis.com/agentic-customers-dont-care-about-your-experience-only-your-ex*****on/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agentic-customers-dont-care-your-experience-only-ricardo-saltz-gulko-r5n7f/
Agentic Customers Don’t Care About Your Experience — Only Your Ex*****on
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This article was originally published at: https://www.eglobalis.