The Customer Experience Now Starts Before the Customer Sees the Product.
AI is moving upstream from the checkout.
Your daily signal on AI and CX — minus the hype.
📌 DCX Stat of the day: 25% of consumers used Gen AI shopping tools in 2025, and another 31% plan to use them. But 76% want clear rules for when an AI assistant acts, and 71% are concerned about how those tools use their data. Capgemini
In this issue:
→ Target speeds up trend decisions
→ AI changes what reaches the shelf
→ Control remains the trust test
→ Memory becomes CX plumbing
→ Agentic commerce stays uneven
🔎 Deep dive
The customer journey now starts in the buying office
Target’s new Trend Brain story is a useful reminder that consumer AI is not limited to chat, search, or support. It is moving into the decisions that shape what customers are offered in the first place.
Business Insider reports that Target is using the AI tool across owned brands like Wild Fable and Universal Thread to read signals from social media, fashion shows, and purchasing trends. The goal is faster design choices and shorter product lead times. In swimwear, Target said the tool helped spot early signals like polka dots and adjust buying decisions before the season fully played out.
That matters because customers do not experience merchandising strategy as strategy. They experience it as “they had what I wanted,” “this feels current,” or “this brand is late again.”
The hidden risk is overreacting to weak signals and confusing speed with judgment. Target’s own team seems to know that. The article notes the tool is not across every design team yet, and designers still go into the real world to understand trends. Good. The store cannot become a spreadsheet with better lighting.
📬 Copy-Paste Take
AI is not only changing service and checkout. It is starting to shape what customers find before they ever ask for help. That means CX teams need to pay attention to assortment, availability, and merchandising signals too.
OPERATOR PLAYBOOK
Audit the upstream CX decisions
Audit every product, offer, or assortment decision for four things:
What signal is the model using?
What human judgment still has to be verified?
Where a bad prediction shows up for the customer.
How quickly the business can correct the mistake.
Then test whether your team can explain the customer consequence in plain English.
Ask your team: Where are we treating upstream business decisions as separate from customer experience?
Signal: AI-powered CX is moving into the decisions that shape what customers see, want, trust, and buy.
📈 Market Reality Check
Consumers want AI help with visible limits
Capgemini’s 2026 consumer research makes the tradeoff pretty clear. One-quarter of consumers have already used Gen AI shopping tools, and another 31% plan to. That is not rejection. That is adoption with conditions.
The conditions matter. Capgemini found that 76% want clear rules for when an AI assistant acts, and 71% are concerned about how Gen AI tools use their data. It also found that human support still matters for complex purchases, with 74% valuing in-person help during store service and 66% during purchase decisions.
So the operating question is not “Will consumers use AI?” Many already are. The better question is whether the journey makes AI feel useful, bounded, and recoverable.
Adoption plus ambiguity equals trust debt.
🧰 Tool Worth Knowing
Twilio Conversation Memory
What it does: Twilio Conversation Memory is now generally available. It extracts useful observations from customer conversations, resolves identity across channels, stores context against a profile, and recalls relevant information before an AI or human agent responds.
CX use case: A customer starts in SMS, moves to voice, then gets escalated to a human without repeating the issue, preference, account history, or last failed step.
Worth watching because: Consumer AI breaks when every channel starts cold. Memory is the plumbing behind handoffs that customers will actually judge.
Bottom line: Useful if your journey has a cross-channel mess. Risky if governance and data quality are weak. Memory makes the wrong context travel faster, too.
NEW: The DCX AI Today - AI Tool Directory - If you lead a CX team and want a curated shortlist of tools worth evaluating, this is your starting point.
⚡ 90-Second CX Radar
BCG says brands need to show up inside AI answers
BCG argues that brands now have to manage five CX rules tied to presence, guidance, the live layer, continuity, and trust. The practical point: if third-party agents become the customer’s default window into shopping, brands lose more control over discovery, comparison, and expectation-setting.
OTB and Google Cloud bring virtual try-on into clienteling
OTB is launching Google Cloud’s Virtual Try-On API with Diesel and Jil Sander first, across the U.S. and Europe, with Marni and Maison Margiela planned later. The CX angle is not the shiny visual. It is the handoff between digital browsing and the in-store appointment. Can the advisor remove doubt before the customer walks in?
Wayfair treats agentic commerce as early, not magic
Wayfair says traffic from agentic AI platforms is still very small, even as it works with Perplexity, OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Pinterest. That is a useful correction. Agentic commerce may matter first in replenishment, commodity purchases, catalog data, and technical comparison before it changes emotional, high-consideration purchases.
🧭 Your Move
Don’t only look for AI in chat, search, and support. Look upstream.
Product selection. Availability. Recommendations. Store presentation. Pricing moves. Return friction. Those are all experience decisions, even when CX does not own them.
If AI changes the decision before the customer arrives, CX leaders need a seat earlier in the process.
The customer journey starts wherever the first decision about the customer gets made.
Unti Monday,
NEW: The DCX AI Today - AI Tool Directory - If you lead a CX team and want a curated shortlist of tools worth evaluating, this is your starting point.
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