AI is About to Expose Your Experience
Plus: Why The “Boring Stuff” is The Real Competitive Edge
📅 January 20, 2026 | ⏱️ 4-min read
Good Morning!
The Executive Hook:
You know what’s funny? We keep talking about AI like it’s a “feature.” Like you sprinkle it on top of a broken experience and suddenly customers are delighted.
In reality, AI is more like a microphone. It doesn’t fix the messy parts, it amplifies them. If your knowledge base is stale, your policies are confusing, or your escalation path is basically “good luck,” then congrats: you’ve just scaled the confusion.
That’s why today’s mix matters. IBM is trying to industrialize the boring stuff so AI can actually run. PwC is basically telling us most companies aren’t getting paid yet. And Evernote is a reminder of what good looks like when AI improves the customer experience in quiet, practical ways: less hunting, less friction, fewer “why is this so hard?” moments.
🧠 THE DEEP DIVE: IBM is basically saying “stop duct-taping AI”
The Big Picture: IBM just launched IBM Enterprise Advantage, a consulting-led service aimed at helping companies build, govern, and run internal AI platforms so agentic AI can scale beyond one-off experiments.
What’s happening:
IBM is packaging a “secured platform + shared standards + reusable AI assets” approach (their words, not mine), so teams can move faster without reinventing the wheel every time.
The pitch: redesign workflows, connect AI to existing systems, and scale agentic apps without switching cloud providers or ripping out infrastructure (AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, watsonx, open/closed models).
IBM points to its internal “Consulting Advantage” platform and says it’s already been used across 150+ client engagements, with productivity gains of up to 50% for consultants.
Why it matters:
Here’s the part a lot of AI coverage skips: most CX blowups aren’t caused by “bad AI.” They’re caused by bad operations wearing an AI costume.
If your policy is confusing, your knowledge base is stale, and your escalations are basically “good luck,” then giving an agent (human or AI) more “intelligence” just means they can fail faster… at scale… in front of more customers.
The takeaway:
If you want agentic AI in customer journeys, build the boring stuff first: standards, guardrails, escalation rules, and measurement that actually tracks customer outcomes (not just containment rates). The brands that win won’t feel futuristic. They’ll feel… oddly calm.
Source: IBM Newsroom
📊 CX BY THE NUMBERS: CEOs are spending on AI… and shrugging at the results
Data Source: PwC 2026 Global CEO Survey
56% of CEOs say AI has delivered no significant financial benefit so far. Translation: “We tried things. Nothing changed.”
Only 12% say AI delivered both cost and revenue benefits. That’s… not a lot of victory laps.
42% cite keeping up with technological change (including AI) as a top concern. That’s the polite version of “we’re overwhelmed.”
The Insight:
This is what I see in real orgs: the “AI gap” isn’t talent. It’s plumbing. The companies getting ROI aren’t just buying tools. They’re wiring AI into the way work happens: data, governance, workflow redesign, and employee readiness.
For CX teams, the warning is simple: pilots don’t compound. Systems do.
🧰 THE AI TOOLBOX: Evernote v11 (AI Assistant + Semantic Search + Meeting Notes)
The Tool: Evernote just dropped v11, its first major update in five years, with AI features that change the customer experience of using Evernote: less hunting, less rework, more “oh good, it just knows what I meant.”
And I’ll admit it: I was an Evernote fanatic for years… right up until it felt like the product stopped moving. This is the first release in a long time that makes me think, “Okay, I might go back.”
What it does (in plain human terms):
AI Assistant: you can ask Evernote questions about your own notes and it summarizes, pulls context, and helps you act.
Semantic Search: you don’t need the exact keyword anymore. You can search by meaning (which is how humans actually remember things).
AI Meeting Notes: record, transcribe, and summarize meetings with action items so you’re not relying on the world’s messiest system: “I’ll remember later.”
How this changes the customer experience:
Less friction, less rage-searching: The product stops punishing you for not remembering the “right” phrase you used months ago. That’s a big deal in day-to-day trust.
Fewer broken promises to yourself: Meeting summaries + action items reduce the gap between “I captured it” and “I can actually use it.”
More confidence, less cognitive load: When the tool can reliably surface the right note at the right time, it feels like a calm workspace instead of a cluttered drawer.
The human point:
This is what “AI that helps” looks like: not flashy, not magical, just quietly removing annoying little moments that make users abandon a product.
⚡ SPEED ROUND: Quick Hits
🔐 VCs are pouring money into AI security because “rogue agents” and shadow AI are becoming a real enterprise headache (and a CX risk when customer data gets involved). Source: TechCrunch
🧾 OpenAI says 2026 is about “practical adoption,” with emphasis on real deployments (enterprise, health, science), not just bigger demos. CX translation: fewer magic tricks, more operational reality. Source: OpenAI
🧭 Davos attendees are getting an AI concierge built on institutional data (WEF + Salesforce), a glimpse of where “guided experiences” are headed. Today it’s event navigation. Tomorrow it’s customer journeys.
📡 THE SIGNAL: The future of CX is… fewer tiny annoyances
The best AI experiences won’t feel like AI. They’ll feel like relief.
You won’t “notice the model.” You’ll notice that you didn’t have to rage-search for the right thing. You didn’t have to repeat yourself. You didn’t get trapped in a dead-end flow that treats you like a ticket number with feelings.
That’s the bar now: not clever, not flashy. Calm.
And calm doesn’t come from a bigger model. It comes from cleaner operations, kinder failure modes, and an escalation path that actually respects the human on the other side.
See you tomorrow,
👥 Share This Issue
If this issue sharpened your thinking about AI in CX, share it with a colleague in customer service, digital operations, or transformation. Alignment builds advantage.
📬 Feedback & Ideas
What’s the biggest AI friction point inside your CX organization right now? Reply in one sentence — I’ll pull real-world examples into future issues.