Episode 268: Companies have spent years designing websites, apps, stores, call centers, and all the other ways for customers to interact with them directly. What happens when the customer starts somewhere else entirely?
Mark Hammond, Senior Vice President for Core AI at Qualtrics, argues that AI agents could become a new front door to your business.
Consider car shopping. Today, you might ask ChatGPT, Perplexity, or another AI to compare models and narrow your choices. But there is no reason for the interaction to stop there. The AI could use the manufacturer's own configurator to help you choose options, calculate a price, and eventually take other actions, all without forcing you to leave the conversation and start over on the manufacturer's website.
A conversational interface is only part of the story. Mark makes an important distinction about what "agentic AI" actually means. The real change comes when an AI can use tools: search data, run an analysis, configure a product, execute a transaction, or call another specialized capability on your behalf.
That creates a second problem. The AI may be extraordinarily capable and still know surprisingly little about how your company really works.
"The generic foundation models know everything about everything except the specifics about your business," Mark says.
Your employees know your customers, products, terminology, policies, exceptions, and all the accumulated detail that comes from operating the business. Much of that knowledge is not sitting on the public Internet. And an AI cannot make full use of your tools and data if it does not understand that context.
That leads to a counterintuitive possibility. AI may not make every company more alike. As powerful general-purpose models become widely available, the knowledge unique to your organization could become more valuable, not less.
In this episode, Mark and Rob talk about what agentic AI actually means, how it may change the way customers interact with companies, how AI can uncover signals traditional customer-feedback methods miss, and why teaching AI how your business really works could become an important source of competitive advantage.
Guest: Mark Hammond, Senior Vice President for Core AI, Qualtrics
Host: Rob Markey, Partner, Bain & Company
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Timestamped Topics
05:14 – Shifting from what an AI tool can do to the value a customer really needs
08:22 – Why AI-guided conversations could change traditional surveys
11:31 – What agentic AI is actually defined as
15:16 – How AI agents could become a new front door for customers
20:48 – What customer experience leaders should prepare for over the next few years
22:26 – Why general AI models still don't understand the specifics of your business
27:11 – Teaching AI how your business works
Notable Quotes
03:00: "What do you see a lot of in the data? Sometimes the things that you really want to focus on aren't popping because they're common. They're popping because, wait, that's not what we would expect to see."
16:00: "If I'm coming in and … I'm shopping for a car, how am I going to do my research for shopping for a car? It used to be that you would go to a review site, go to the individual manufacturer's websites, and you'd start to dig in and do your research. And nowadays you'll go to an agent, and you'll ask it questions, and it will do some of that browsing for you."
21:00: "How do I avail myself of your product or your service? How do I do it in a research fashion? How do I do it in an ordering fashion? Increasingly, I'm going to want to do that not just through your app, or your website, or on the phone, or in person at a kiosk. I might actually just want to do that because I'm talking to one of these natural language agents."
24:00: "The generic foundation models know everything about everything except the specifics about your business."
28:00: "Once you've taught the models how your business works, using your agents and your tools that you have made available, is way more useful than just querying something generically. And so then you get this rich tapestry where everybody's agents can talk to everybody else's agents and life gets better. But that also is very different from the apocalypse that everyone is envisioning, that all of the things that we do will be subsumed by AI. No. Actually, AI is dependent on the things that you do to deliver the value we all want."
