VIDEO TRANSCRIPT:

Hello and thank you for joining Alvaro and me for the first in the series focused on customer journey transformation with Agentic AI. When we talk about Agentic AI, the most important question isn't what can the technology do, it's what customer and business problems are we actually trying to solve. In financial services, customer journeys have already been digitized and yet customers... Still experience friction every day. There's rising complaints in the UK where I am now. They've risen 50% year-on-year in retail banks. More customers in retail banks are also now switching. In fact, nearly three quarters of customers have a relationship with a competing bank because they seek an alternative experience. An escalating cost and regulatory risk that comes with that too. This episode is about how customer journeys fundamentally change when intelligence can reason, adapt and collaborate across the experience. The reality we see with senior leaders across banking and insurance is this. Most journeys don't break because teams don't care about the customer experience. They break because the journey itself can't think. Let me give you... Three familiar examples. First, fragmented conversations. Customers explain their situation multiple times to a branch, to a call centre, a chatbot, a case handler. The organisation knows the customer, but the journey doesn't. Context is lost between steps, channels and systems. Two, rules over judgment. Journeys follow predefined paths which we set even when the context clearly suggests a better one. Edge cases escalate to humans not because they are particularly complex but because the system can't reason. Three, slow response in moments that matter. Fraud claims, lending decisions, vulnerable customers. Speed and confidence matter most here. Yet orchestration engines wait for handoffs instead of acting with intent. These aren't UX problems, they are intelligence problems. Agentic AI has the potential to address this problem with autonomy to understand customer intent. It's AI with agency. Today, customer journeys are predefined, distinct from each other and at best orchestrated. The journey does not adapt to the customer's idiosyncrasies or individual needs or context. Now if we contrast that with an agentic journey, in an agentic model journeys behave less like flowcharts and more like responsive living systems. They can reason over context, not just wait for triggers. They can adopt in real time, not only at predefined forks. They can collaborate across channels, functions and even other agents. And critically, they can act with intent, not just compliance. From the customer's point of view, the organization feels like they genuinely know me, which is what, of course, we all expect. So what does that mean? So now we need to think and design for a new paradigm. Not customer and colleague experience is CCX, but customer, colleague and agentic experience is CCAX. Experiences are not linear and predictable, but adaptable and individual for each customer. Over time, AI agents will augment more and more of a customer's journey. So to design for new agentic powered experiences, we now need to design for two different audiences. One is of course humans, the customers and colleagues who are emotional and want things like reassurance and the second one is agents who support humans but use data, precision and logic to complete tasks and achieve goals and there's a mistake here which is people design and think about agents in the same way as they think about humans and in fact they behave and react to information completely differently so we need to address that.

So we start with humans as always and customers increasingly expect more fluid intelligent interactions everywhere and in a traditional model channels tend to be silos websites are living in a browser they're places you go to to click around and find your way around content contact centers are places you call with a question or a complaint and then you wait and wait and wait and chatbots are things that usually deflect Now, in an authentic model, channels become entangled, meaning they form flexible conversational opportunities contextually and continuously. Channels have memory and are pervasive, so you can come back to them and pick things up where you left them off, on another device or another modality. So in that sense, websites and apps stop behaving like static touchpoints and pages, and they start behaving like static touchpoints and pages. behaving like a unified purposeful dialogue. How do companies start? We advise clients to start with making all search semantic so it better understands customer intent. It's a no regret move. For example, we applied this for a US company recently and they saw a 35% improvement in outcomes. Over time, natural language and semantic search can evolve into authentic, autonomous and action-orientated solutions. As trust builds with customers, the search evolves into an agent that can autonomously do jobs. For a Middle Eastern bank, we're now building agents into their customer app so they can flag fraud, proactively provide spending advice and much, much more. If we look at contact centers, they stop being constrained by opening hours or rigid scripts and we see channels plenty. We're integrating interaction everywhere into the websites, an app, anywhere the customer wants it. So we have agents triaging queries via websites, apps and much more. It's human by design but agentic by default. Humans step in where judgment, empathy and accountability matter most, not because the system has failed, but because it knows when to collaborate, when to raise things. Now, finally, a quick word on designing for agents. We all know general purpose agents like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and others. And customers know them as well. Their behavior shows that people are increasingly opting for these over traditional search and queries. According to Adobe's report and our own review of financial services data, agents, meaning non-human visitors, are increasing exponentially. This means optimizing everything for consumption by agents, and this goes for websites, but also for the content you produce. For example, we discovered that renewal quotes for an insurer were being uploaded into ChatGPT by customers for comparison and interrogation. So we started writing the material to be optimized not just for humans, but also for agents. And so companies have to think about the impact of a gentic. Everything is everywhere. This really means a renewed opportunity to reimagine operations, experience design and customer service across the board.

And this brings us to the key takeaway for episode one. This matters now, not in three years, because the gap is widening. Institutions that treat AI as a digital feature will incrementally improve channels. Institutions that treat AI as an agentic layer for business will redefine the customer experience and unlock the full potential that is on offer here. The winners won't just have better websites or contact centres, they'll have journeys that can think and channels that can converse. At Publicis Sapient, this is the shift we're focusing on, moving from channel optimisation to cognitive experiences. In the next episode, Ashima is going to show you how the enterprise can use a gentic to redesign business operations and processes too that sit behind much of what we've discussed here.

Relevant Links

• Customer Journey Transformation with Agentic AI: From Channel Optimization to Cognitive Experiences
• This is where an AI-led, agentic-by-default service model becomes valuable.
• Agentic customer experience in financial services
• From Semantic Search to Agentic Banking Assistants: A Practical Roadmap for Financial Services Leaders
• From CX and EX to CCAX: Why Agentic Transformation in Financial Services Must Redesign Work for Both Customers and Colleagues
• De l’IA générative à l’IA agentique : repenser l’expérience client dans les services financiers européens (Europe)
• IA agéntica en banca en México: cómo pasar de canales digitales fragmentados a recorridos que realmente resuelven (LATAM)
• FAQ (FAQ)
• 12 Things Buyers Should Know About Publicis Sapient’s Approach to Agentic AI in Financial Services Customer Experience (LIST)