Customer Patience is Down. AI-in-The-Workflow is Up.
Plus: Adobe’s new data shows AI-referred shoppers aren’t window-shopping — they’re converting
📅 January 14, 2026 | ⏱️ 4-min read
Good Morning!
The Executive Hook:
We’ve all seen “AI features” that feel like the salad garnish on a steak dinner. Nice, but… not the meal. The real CX shift is when AI stops being a feature and starts being the way work actually gets done — inside the tools your teams already live in, with enough context to be useful, and enough guardrails to not go off the rails.
Today’s theme: embedded AI is becoming the default hallway for getting things done.
🧠 THE DEEP DIVE: Slackbot becomes an AI agent (not just a chat helper)
The Big Picture: Salesforce is rolling out a new, more capable Slackbot designed to do work across apps from inside Slack — not just answer questions.
What’s happening:
Slackbot can handle practical stuff like finding info, drafting messages, and scheduling, right where teams already collaborate.
It can connect into other common enterprise tools (with permissions) to pull context and complete tasks without “tab ping-pong.”
Salesforce is framing it like an agentic workflow layer — the “last mile” of making AI actually usable for employees.
Why it matters:
If you run CX, this is bigger than “cool internal productivity.” When employees get faster answers and faster next-steps, customers feel it immediately: fewer holds, fewer handoffs, fewer “I’m waiting on another team.” The customer doesn’t care that Slackbot got smarter. They care that the time-to-resolution shrank and the tone stayed human.
The takeaway:
Don’t ask, “Do we have AI?” Ask, “Where are customers still paying a waiting tax?” Then embed AI there — in the moment, in the workflow, with escalation built in.
Source: TechCrunch
📊 CX BY THE NUMBERS: AI traffic is showing up with purchase intent (not curiosity)
Data Source: Adobe (Adobe for Business Blog)
Retail traffic from generative AI sources jumped 693% year over year during the 2025 holiday season.
AI-referred visitors converted 31% more than other traffic sources (with big spikes on major shopping days).
AI-referred shoppers were less likely to bounce and spent more time on-site, which is a polite way of saying: “they came in focused.”
The Insight:
This isn’t just a marketing story. It’s a service story. When customers arrive already “pre-briefed” by an AI assistant, their expectations change: they want faster answers, cleaner policies, and fewer surprises at checkout and post-purchase. If your experience has friction, AI will not hide it — it will spotlight it.
🧰 THE AI TOOLBOX: Customer Experience Agent Studio (Google Cloud)
The Tool: Google Cloud’s Customer Experience Agent Studio is a build-and-deploy platform for creating customer-facing agents powered by Gemini.
What it does:
Lets teams build, test, and deploy personalized conversational agents faster (think days vs. weeks), using a more visual, “less code-heavy” approach — plus multilingual voice options and journey-aware context.
CX Use Case:
Smarter self-service that doesn’t trap people: Use an agent for the repeatable stuff (order status, returns, appointment changes), then route cleanly to a human when emotion, nuance, or exceptions show up.
Consistency across channels: One logic layer can support web + mobile + voice so customers don’t get different answers depending on where they ask.
Trust:
This is the part CX leaders should guard like a hawk: permissions, policy grounding, and escalation behavior. A fast agent that’s confidently wrong is just a faster way to lose trust.
Source: Google Cloud
⚡ SPEED ROUND: Quick Hits
Five9 + Google Cloud expanded their partnership with a joint “Enterprise CX AI” offering aimed at large contact centers — worth watching if you’re trying to unify bots + humans + analytics without duct tape.
Wayfair partnered with Google to push AI-powered shopping discovery “wherever customers are,” which is corporate-speak for: the front door to your brand is moving outside your site.
FIS launched an agentic-commerce offering for banks — a signal that “AI that can complete the transaction” is coming to regulated experiences too (with all the compliance fun that implies).
📡 THE SIGNAL: The new CX battleground is “where the work happens”
A few years ago, the big question was, “Can AI answer the question?” Now the question is, “Can AI move the situation forward?” That’s a different standard — and it’s where loyalty gets won or lost. Because the moments customers remember aren’t the clever answers. They’re the moments where they felt taken care of quickly, clearly, and fairly. Your job in 2026 is to make sure all these shiny new agents don’t just accelerate tasks — they accelerate trust.
See you tomorrow, Mark.
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