By: Mohamed Abdelsalam: Group Head of Customer Engagement & Experience, Magrabi Retail Group

2025 has been a year marked by the rapid acceleration of AI, with organizations across different industries focusing on AI applications that are highly relevant to their specific sectors and when it comes to customer experience, the platform for AI innovation has really flourished and accelerated in a visible way.

As end consumers we can see this everywhere and in many forms: things like smart chatbots, near human experience call center AI conversations, AI generated engagement content, products recommendations and next best action/personalized offers recommendations as well.

As end consumers we can see this everywhere and in many forms: things like smart chatbots, near human experience call center AI conversations, AI generated engagement content, products recommendations and next best action/personalized offers recommendations as well.

I think all of the above innovations in customer experience had shown a growing curve of remarkable impact on customer satisfaction and retention which is translated into incremental revenues.

However the challenge over the coming few years is how to keep the human element in the mix giving that most of customer experience platforms are providing similar AI applications for end consumers which basically started to feel repetitive and pragmatic and soon to be reflected in stagnancy in the growth unlocked by AI adoption 

AI can be a great tool to help many different sectors in the business world but in some sensitive areas like customer experience, I think a successful timeless AI applications should be built around customer and not around saving the operational cost or improving the P&L. 

This means using AI to help customers by facilitating the journey itself to eliminate frictions and unnecessary steps that requires customer to waste time, effort or energy, to get his problem solved. When AI genuinely makes the customer life easier, customer will be satisfied and satisfied customer naturally returns

In a nutshell focusing on customer happiness is directly proportional with revenue growth and success of a business.