Gladly chief marketing officer Ali Fazal explains why the AI tools built to avoid customer conversations are enabling the interactions brands could never afford before.
There is a story about AI and customer service that most of retail now takes for granted. For years, the support team was a cost to be squeezed, and the promised land is that AI finally flips it into something that makes money. Every customer experience vendor with an AI demo is selling a version of it, and the fun part is that they’re right.
The gotcha is that most of what gets pitched as a breakthrough is really a company finally putting a number on the revenue its support conversations were already producing. The person who talks a customer out of canceling or answers the question that tips a sale has been driving revenue all along, and the company just never counted it. That is worth doing, and it is also old news. Any halfway decent care team has known it forever. The bigger and less obvious shift is that AI now makes it possible to have conversations a brand could never have justified paying for in the old world.
For a long time, the only corner of retail where that kind of attention paid for itself was luxury. Spend big money at a retailer where a handbag runs five figures, and you get a sales associate who knows your name, texts you when something you would love comes in, and follows up after a big purchase. The math is straightforward: When the average order runs into the thousands, a brand can keep a knowledgeable person beside the customer and still come out ahead. Selling $40 sneakers or a mid-priced sofa, that same attention never paid for itself, so those customers got an order confirmation and a tracking link.
Picture the morning that attention would matter most. It’s a customer’s wedding day. She wakes up, and the dress is not there.
In most of retail, she opens the brand’s chat, and it asks who she is. She gives her name and email. It wants an order number, so she digs through her inbox, finds the confirmation, copies it, and pastes it back, only to get a bare UPS link she could have found herself.
In most of retail, she opens the brand’s chat, and it asks who she is.
A smaller group of brands is better than that. Their chat already knows who she is, and which order she means, so it simply hands her the tracking. No digging. A brand doing this today is already ahead of 90% of the field. It is still a low bar, though, because she had to wake up, panic, and go start the conversation herself.
The version that should exist never makes her start it. She reaches for her phone, and the panic never lands, because the answer is already in her texts, updating as things move: The dress is out for delivery, arriving between 9 a.m. and 10 a.m., and someone needs to be home to sign. She opened nothing and asked no one. The brand watched the package and came to her, on the channel she checks before she is fully awake. That is the kind of conversation that never penciled out before. It used to take a person who knew her and followed her order the way a friend would, and no brand could staff that for every customer.
For 15 years, the economic logic of customer experience ran the other way, toward fewer conversations and cheaper ones. Call centers went offshore. The website swallowed questions a person used to answer. Chatbots arrived with one assignment: to end the conversation before it reached anyone the company had to pay. The industry got very good at not talking to its own customers and called that progress. Given what a conversation cost back then, the rationing was… rational.
What is collapsing now is the cost of that attention. A scripted reply was always cheap. The expensive part was the informed, human follow-through that took a trained person and real time, and that is the price coming down fast. As it drops, the reason to save that care for a lucky few drops with it. The heads-up before customers think to ask, the nudge partway through a decision they are stuck on, or the answer that reaches them on whatever app they already have open—all of it can now go to the person spending $40, the same way it once went to the one spending $40,000.
This lands harder now because being a customer has gotten exhausting. Prices keep climbing, patience is thin, and trust in nearly every institution sits near the floor. When a brand actually shows up for tired, skeptical people at the exact moment they are trying to decide something, it feels almost startling, and it is worth far more than it was a few years ago.
The danger is that most companies will aim this new power at the old target. After years of training themselves to deflect and contain, they will use smarter tools to deflect and contain more cheaply, then write the savings into a slide. A capability that could finally give millions of people a real, human conversation would get spent making sure even fewer of them ever have one.
For years, talking to as few customers as possible was just good business. That stopped being true, and it leaves one question: Which conversations did you give up because they cost too much, and were those the ones your customers wanted most?
Note: This content was created by Gladly.