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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#660: Enabling and accelerating customer experience improvements using AI with Isabelle Zdatny, Qualtrics
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- [00:02]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug, there's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [00:12]
Liberty Mutual Companion
Hey, everyone, check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [00:15]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual Together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [00:22]
Liberty Mutual Companion
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [00:24]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [00:27]
Liberty Mutual Companion
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.
- [00:30]
Capella University Narrator
You've never been one to settle, stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner, energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on, and your own high standards to meet. Stop now. Not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing because you've always had the drive. Now go earn the degree. Capella University. What? Can't you visit Capella. Edu to learn more. The Agile Brand.
- [01:13]
Greg Kilstrom
Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and Martech platforms as as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show.
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Podcast Host
We are recording live at Qualtrics X4 in Salt Lake City and seeing and hearing all about how to create amazing customer and employee experiences as AI and AI agents increasingly play a role. With a potential 1.3 trillion in revenue gains and cost savings on the table, organizations across industries stand to gain a lot through strategic investments in AI. Today we're going to talk about enabling and accelerating customer experience success by augmenting your teams and processes with artificial intelligence based tools. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome back to the show Isabelle Zidatny, Head of Thought Leadership for XM Institute at Qualtrics. Isabel, welcome back to the show.
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Isabel Zadatny
It's fantastic to be here. Thank you for having me again.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Good to. Good to see you in person here.
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Isabel Zadatny
It's wonderful.
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Podcast Host
I do so many of these remotely. It's always nice to be, you know, in person.
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Isabel Zadatny
It's my favorite part of X4.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, absolutely. So for those that didn't catch you when you were on the show last fall, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Qualtrics?
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Isabel Zadatny
Yes. So I lead thought leadership for Qualtrics XM Institute, which is almost like a little think tank inside Qualtrics. And we're really dedicated to building the category of experience management. So less focused on the product and more how to we equip CX&EX and XM professionals with the tools and the insights and the data and the best practices and the frameworks that they need to feel confident and successful in their role. So I produce our content, I advise companies on the design execution of their program, speak on topics, design training. And I got started back in 2013 at Temkin Group and then joined Qualtrics when we were acquired in 2019.
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Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Great.
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Podcast Host
Great. Wow. So, yeah, you're doing a lot here. So let's. And yeah, want to talk primarily about some research that was recently published that I know Qualtrics and McKinsey worked on. So I want to start there. And, you know, we certainly talk about AI a lot on this show. I think literally every conversation somehow goes into AI. It's not starting that way. But your research, as I mentioned at the top of top of the show, shows that businesses are standing to gain anywhere between 160 billion to 1.3 trillion by making strategic AI investments. So let's start at the beginning again. That's predicated on the making the right investments. So where are businesses maybe going wrong as they plan and strategize?
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah. So I would say I'm seeing two big mistakes that organizations are making in their approach to AI. First, I would say is that they are implementing AI for the sake of AI. There's the allure of the shiny new feature, or executives are putting pressure. And so they're just like, we need to stand up these technologies rather than starting with what is the outcome that we are trying to achieve. And then how could we possibly bring AI into the mix to help us get there more quickly and economically. And then the second big one I'm seeing is more at an organizational level as opposed to cx. Specifically that they're struggling to get out of pilot purgatory and invest in the types of systemic changes that are really necessary for unlocking the full value of AI. So they start small, they do very expensive experiments and then they don't really scale them more broadly across the organization, which is not creating the value that AI can create.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. And I mean, that said, I mean pilots is a good way to start, but what do you think is kind of what's the leap they need to make from pilot?
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah, I think you need, you need to move from doing AI in silos to system wide organization and management. I actually just saw an Axios article yesterday that I think 71% of executives are concerned about how much AI development is happening within silos at organizations. And so I think a lot of teams are looking at, here are the solutions, we're doing that work for us and there's not a lot of up leveling yet. And that requires some fundamental changes to your data and technical infrastructure too. And change management. Right. Scaling can be quite difficult.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah. Are there particular, I don't know if it's industries or use cases where benefits of AI are particularly clear or maybe potential? I mean obviously that's a big number of potential, but where are you seeing some of the biggest potential?
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah. So just to give a little bit of background about this research report, so we partnered with McKinsey against the goal here was really to put some hard numbers around the opportunity that AI can present to organizations who use AI to improve customers experiences. Our source of insights, I would say for this research were one. Qualtrics conducted an executive study of 1500 global executives in Q4 of last year, asking them about their expectations and efforts around both customer experience and AI, which yielded some really interesting insights. And then McKinsey performed a detailed value analysis, sizing the opportunity, the potential impact AI could have across 19 different industries. So that's where that $860 billion number comes from. And then we also interviewed a number of innovative clients to understand how they were using AI to better understand and serve their customers. So for McKinsey's value analysis of that. So AI enabled customer experience is expected to drive an estimated $860 billion in all the way up to $1.3 trillion in annual value. And it's expected to do this in three ways. So the biggest opportunity that they found was in productivity gains. So $420 billion is expected to come from productivity gains using AI to augment and automate work. $260 billion expected from revenue growth. So using AI to transform how you acquire and grow customer relationships like intelligent targeting and personalized messaging. And then another 1 billion from process improvements. So using it to optimize your operations, lower cost to serve customers. So they also broke that number down across those 19 industries. And the biggest opportunities were B2B. I think it was 420 billion opportunity. The biggest was business and professional services which was $150 billion opportunity on average. And that was through things like, like personalized marketing and I believe optimized operations. Also on the B2B side, commercial insurance was 70 billion opportunity and SMB banking was 60 billion opportunity. And both of those are from things like automated processes and risk assessments and things. On the B2C side, both retail and retail banking were $100 billion. And then there's a whole host of other B2C ones that were pretty close, like hospitality, airlines, QSR. So yeah, there's, it's definitely the nature and scale of the opportunity varies a lot, but it crosses everything.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, yeah, there's something for everything.
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah, exactly.
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Podcast Host
So I mean you mentioned, I mean obviously there's, there's several different categories here, but to kind of go to the process thing and back to your point about silos are what often get in the way. You know, this is where I think software and platforms have a huge role to play, but so does the change management part. And so how do you, for those executives that are getting pressured to do AI, whatever that means, but they're still getting pressure to do it, how do they put the right focus on the software or the platform part as well as process?
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Isabel Zadatny
It's such a good question and I'll say one of the things I heard the people I interviewed over and over is the technology is not actually the hard part part. It's getting people to use the technology effectively and feel comfortable and confident using it. That that change management piece is actually I think long term going to be much trickier. So yeah, so I would say again, start with what is your organization kind of AI vision and strategy and value. So what are the outcomes you're trying to drive? And that will be different by different businesses across different industries. You might want to increase customer spend or average contract value. So starting with a central organization, wide vision, having governance structures in place, like a centralized governance council, some way to monitor all the different AI use cases and make sure that they're getting implemented effectively. You need common risk and ethics guidelines and that should help with the culture change. Right. Starting with this is the vision that we're all trying to move towards and this is why we are asking you to change your behaviors and adopt these new technologies and then making sure that your workforce is ready for AI, that they have the skills they need. You do a capabilities gap. Where can you upskill people? Where do you need to bring other people in? One of my favorite stories from this report was when I talked to ServiceNow to get change management, get people comfortable using AI. They have a central, they call it an AI control tower. So a central dashboard that has all of their different AI use cases across the company was like 350 when I talked to them. Everyone can see it, here's who owns it, here's what value it's driving. And then they selected certain roles across the company. They looked at those roles and they identified ideal workflows. They talked to people, what are your tasks like? And then matched here's the parts of your, of your job that you don't love, that you don't find engaging, that could be automated based on the AI solutions we have are augmented through synthesis or prediction. And so taking that type of role based approach of like this is specifically how this is going to help you do your job better was really influential for getting that change management and buy in across the company. It's not here to replace you, it's here to help you.
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Podcast Host
Right? Right. Yeah. And I mean I think that's such an important point is the visibility on it. It's not so much having these siloed tools that do individual tasks and that's a lot what I heard this morning at the keynotes here, having that almost that operating system that allows you and not only the executives but the frontline employees and everybo between. Right.
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah. I mean you really need all the data. Right. To be living. You need to be moving towards some type of like enterprise data warehouse or something where you can. Yeah. Be applying these models on top of using them. AI compounds the garbage in, garbage out issue. So making sure it's all clean and good for powering your LLMs, it's a big undertaking.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. So what about the customers and the, you know we've talked a lot about the, you know, the, the enterprise level and leadership and even employees. But what do customers want out of this? You know, how are they responding to greater AI integration? And you know, what have you seen as some of the best customer responses to AI?
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah, so we saw as part of our 2025 consumer trends that consumer comfort with AI dropped 11 points year over year which I think shows we're Kind of in this trough of disillusionment part of the hype cycle right now. So I think one of the things from that was, again, rather than organizations were telling customers, we're doing AI, your experiences are now AI Customers don't care about that. What they care about is being able to achieve what they want to achieve quickly, effectively, enjoyably. I would say some of the best use cases I've seen are using AI like virtual assistants to help customers complete complicated tasks. A big one. One of the companies I talked to for this report used it for their claims process, which historically is like a very long, complicated process. You don't know what on my receipt is eligible, what's ineligible. And then it would take on the back end, someone multiple days. Right. Sometimes to review is the information inserted properly. Say the virtual assistant help walk people through. They could take a picture of their receipt, even like a CVS receipt that's really long and filled with things and it would automatically fill out that. And it moved from being, I think, two days to like under two minutes for 60% of the interaction. So that's good for customers. Right. They have something they have to do that's not fun. How can we use AI to help them achieve their goals better?
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Podcast Host
Yeah, definitely. And I mean, that's where I mean, I think kind of what you were referring to earlier is that lots of companies were throwing AI at the wall to see, like the chatbot thing that isn't really smart. And it gets you into the voice calls sometimes. Still do. But I think agentic AI, kind of what you're referring to here really does kind of bridge that gap. And so, I mean, are you seeing that consumers are. I mean, obviously there's a little bit of a trust gap, it sounds like right now, I think in the last year, according to Forrester and some others, there was a dip in CX in general.
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah, yeah.
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Podcast Host
So, like, maybe that's related to what you're saying too. But do you think we're gonna kind of cross that or.
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Isabel Zadatny
I hope so. I think usually if we look at like, right. New technology adoption, you have something comes out, people get very overexcited, they start applying it to things they shouldn't. So chatbots are a great example where again, garbage in, garbage out. They started training chatbots on bad internal data, old, old knowledge base articles. The technology wasn't there, so people were having really bad experiences. So then they're like, well, this isn't living up to the hype. What then often happens is that companies get much more Buttoned down and understand these are the best use cases for these specific tools and start improving that. And consumer perception's a lagging indicator behind that. But eventually kind of comes back and they're like, oh, but I think it's all about like what's in it for them? How is it helping them? Not they probably the less they know that they're engaging with AI and that's like even in their thought process, probably the more enjoyable the experience is.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. And I mean, I think eventually, I mean, I've heard other people have said the same. Like I think in five years we may not even use the term AI, It'll just be doing stuff. But.
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Isabel Zadatny
Well, because it's also so kind of ethereal now where people. Yeah. Don't distinguish between analytical and generative.
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Podcast Host
Right. But the promise of this, and I think what's really powerful is you've got the. And someone characterized it this way, you've been listening, you have a lot of data already. Generative AI helps kind of make sense of all of that data now. Agentic actually can tie the pieces together and not every organization is there just yet. But that promise of one to one. I've been talking about like one to one personalization for years, but never felt like it was possible until a year or two ago. So how close are we to that for, you know, for brands?
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah, I mean, I think Ethan Mollick, who's a Wharton professor and AI researcher, describes like the jagged frontier of AI, gets really good at some things and is like very far out in front and then it's like really strangely bad at other things. So I think. Right. We're still some things are moving forward at a much faster rate. I think that we're closer than people think we are. It's like, it's a cliche now, but that old Hemingway quote about going bankrupt, it happens slowly than all at once. I think a lot of the foundations have been built that organizations are ready to start deploying these for primetime. Like, I think the foundation's stronger than it was before, so I do think it's coming soon.
- [18:41]
Podcast Host
So what would your recommendation be then for those organizations that are, you know, they, they know this, they agree with the sentiment here, but maybe not sure where to start in getting things moving. You know, what, what, what should they be thinking about?
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah. So I would say again, first of all, starting with the outcomes that you're trying to achieve. So like if you're a CX professional, you know, what are the metrics you're trying to move what are the experiences you want to deliver? What's an initiative on your roadmap that you are trying to implement? And then how can you bring AI in to help you execute on that? So again, rather than getting distracted, using it as a tool to help you do your job better and then the other thing I would say is start using it yourself. I think there's a big difference between people who don't use these tools at all and use them a lot. They're not going to be good at everything. You don't know what they're good at, what they're bad at until you start playing around with them. And I think a lot of people are going to be surprised when agentic AI becomes mainstream and mature. And I don't think as professionals we want to be one of those surprise people. I think we want to be on the leading edge and be able to come to our organization. We're the closest to customer needs and opportunities and our work should be spanning a lot of the functions across the organization. So I think we should have some AI expertise that we can bring to the table to help our organization implement the.
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Podcast Host
And you know, the research, we didn't talk a lot about the employee experience specifically, but you know, the research touched on there's huge opportunity in cx, but also with ex. What's the relationship between those two or you know, how should leaders be thinking about that?
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah, it's a good question. And we actually, I should say for the executive study, we also asked about plans and ambitions around employee experience as well, and it was very similar to what we found on the cx. I think on the short term, as I said earlier, the biggest value looks like it is going to come from those productivity gains from helping augment employees work. So I think that's where a lot of organizations are starting, is helping employees. It's also a little bit lower risk right. Internally. But I think the more you can free employees up and take away some of the routine repetitive administrative tasks so that they have the bandwidth to make those genuine human connections with customers and do their jobs better, that then you're going to see the customer experience improve as a result of improving the employee experience.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, I mean the employee's happier doing more valuable work and the customer can only stand to benefit, right?
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Isabel Zadatny
Yeah. It's an interesting dynamic though. Like customers, employees and executives of employees do sit right at that intersection point where they have to use all the tools internally, but they're also noticing how it's helping them. Like they as part of our EX Trends 2025. They were actually more, I think, confident in AI than customers were because they've seen the applications within their roles.
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Podcast Host
Well, as we wrap up here, just a couple things for you here. I know X4 is not done yet, but you wanted to get a sense of what's been a highlight so far of your experience.
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Isabel Zadatny
Oh, it's such a good question, I have to say. I just love seeing everyone, I work remotely so talk to people a lot, all the time. And the opportunity to actually get to spend FaceTime with people, just connect with clients too, one on one and hear those kind of side stories and things that you wouldn't get in like more official conversations about what they're doing and thinking about is always really exciting to me.
- [22:25]
Podcast Host
Great, great. Love it. And last question for you. I know you were on the show, so I asked this to you before, but I'm going to ask you again. We'll see. We can compare answers here, but that's a research project of its own. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
- [22:40]
Isabel Zadatny
Oh, I do think I'm going to answer this the same way. I think for me it's continuous learning and staying curious. Especially if you think about something like AI. Right. That's changing all the time. The ability to continuously be taking in information, synthesizing it, thinking about it and just making sure that I, you know, head of Thought leadership. I need to be aware of where we're going to help kind of prepare people. Yeah, exactly. That doesn't sound kind of fascistic at all. But yes, I would say just continuous learning and staying very curious.
- [23:16]
Podcast Host
Wonderful. Well, again, I'd like to thank Isabel Zadatny, Head of Thought Leadership for XM Institute at Qualtrics, for joining the show here at Qualtrics X4 in Salt Lake City. You can learn more about Isabel and Qualtrics by following the links in the show notes.
- [23:31]
Greg Kilstrom
Thanks again for listening to the Agile brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagilebrand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me if you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event. Go to www.gregkilstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile.
- [24:25]
Capella University Narrator
The agile brand.
- [24:34]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
And Doug. There's nowhere I wouldn't go to help someone customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual. Even if it means sitting front row at a comedy show.
- [24:43]
Liberty Mutual Companion
Hey everyone. Check out this guy and his bird. What is this, your first date?
- [24:47]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Oh, no. We help people customize and save on car insurance with Liberty Mutual together. We're married. Me to a human, him to a bird.
- [24:53]
Liberty Mutual Companion
Yeah, the bird looks out of your league.
- [24:55]
Liberty Mutual Spokesperson
Anyways, Get a quote@libertymutual.com or with your local agent.
- [24:58]
Liberty Mutual Companion
Liberty. Liberty. Liberty. Liberty.
- [25:01]
Capella University Narrator
You've never been one to settle. Stand down or stand still. You're a lifelong learner, energized by excellence. There's a fire inside you you can't ignore. You've got competition to outrun, momentum to build on and your own high standards to stop now. Not a chance. At Capella University, we help you catch what you're chasing because you've always had the drive. Now go earn the degree. Capella University. What can't you do? Visit Capella. Edu to learn more.