AI adoption is failing in customer experience because organizations have lost sight of the customer. According to Shalima Bhalla, an enterprise CX practitioner and the host of the “Customer Signal” podcast, the issue lies in the way AI programs get funded and framed.
“The conversation revolves around shaving seconds, not solving problems,” she says.
Bhalla believes that the missing layer in most AI strategies is an operational commitment to making customers’ lives easier. What’s more, she says today’s intelligent agents can do this every time customers ask for help.
“Sometimes, these agents can help even before they ask,” says Bhalla.
How agentic AI is already reshaping customer engagement and enterprise AI adoption
Up to 34% of companies report actively using AI across all their customer interaction processes, and 91% of executives are pushing to deploy it in automated workflows in 2026. However, customer feelings are not always so positive. One survey finds that 93% of customers prefer talking to a human over an AI agent for customer service, and 50% would cancel a service that relied solely on AI.
Automation has been part of the customer experience for a long time. Customers don’t automatically hate it. What they hate is what the early automation wave turned into.
Companies chased deflection and cost reduction so aggressively that the experience hit a ceiling. Customers were pushed into bot loops. Their issues weren’t understood and they couldn’t reach a human when they needed one, so they naturally rated those interactions poorly.
Bhalla argues that the shift now is from automation to augmentation. “Instead of deploying AI as a gatekeeper, agentic AI can do what it does best: summarize massive amounts of customer history to predict intent and suggest next best actions in real time.”
Think about the standard pain points customers have learned to expect. They repeat their story across multiple departments, and each time they wait while someone tracks down a supervisor. They work their way through menu options that don’t match their problem, only to be asked to re-authenticate themselves repeatedly.
“When you automate the data routing and the back-end steps between systems, you remove all the friction that prevents resolution,” Bhalla explains. “Customers don’t want a futuristic conversation; they just want their problem solved with minimal effort.”
Bhalla even pushes for a further mindset shift by arguing that companies no longer need to wait for customers to call with issues. With AI’s ability to analyze signals and detect patterns, companies can anticipate and reach customers proactively with a resolution while the underlying issue is being fixed.
“It’s high time companies reimagine how they measure customer success. If your organization ranks getting the customer off the phone quickly over delivering value, you’re not taking advantage of a modern AI-driven CX strategy,” Bhalla notes. “The best use of technology is anchored in measurable outcomes like whether you fixed the issue the first time and how hard the customer had to work to get an answer.”
How Shalima Bhalla builds trust with enterprise executives through 20 years in customer experience and AI strategy
Customer experience transformation is often sold like a feature upgrade, but enterprise leaders know better. They’ve lived through large platform migrations and digital transformations that promised simplicity only to deliver more complexity.
That’s why practitioners who can connect strategy to frontline reality make all the difference. Shalima Bhalla offers over two decades of experience driving customer strategy. She currently leads Global Customer Experience Solutions and Go-to-Market Strategy for the telecommunications sector at a Fortune 500 cloud and enterprise technology company. Prior to her current role, she held senior leadership positions at Cisco, Afiniti, and Avaya.
“Over the years, I’ve seen that AI in customer experience is a coordination problem,” Bhalla says. “The promise of agentic AI only becomes real when your organization is willing to confront its operational reality and redesign it around the customer journey.”
Why Shalima Bhalla launched the “Customer Signal” podcast to talk about enterprise AI adoption
In Bhalla’s opinion, the most important AI and customer experience ideas are not typically found in white papers. She finds them in practitioner conversations, and that’s precisely why she launched the “Customer Signal” podcast. Listeners won’t find polished case studies with perfect outcomes. Instead, each episode surfaces real-world lessons from leaders who are implementing and learning in public, with honest conversations about what’s changing and what’s working.
A practitioner-driven space helps reconnect the dots. In many companies, AI strategy is drafted far from the customer. It lives in innovation hubs and executive steering committees. Meanwhile, the people closest to customer pain often don’t get the chance to discuss what should be fixed first.
The “Customer Signal” podcast brings AI back into contact with the human reality of customer experience. It puts it in the context of trust that can be lost in a single interaction and loyalty that’s earned through consistency.
Customer experience is the missing layer in a modern AI strategy, and Bhalla is ready to talk about it.
“When your company says it’s doing AI, but your customers still feel unheard or shuffled, the issue isn’t your model’s capability. It’s your intent,” she says. “If you deploy AI primarily to reduce contact, you’ll reduce trust. But if you deploy it to increase resolution and anticipate needs, you’ll gain a force multiplier for loyalty.”
