Your next customer isn’t human: why retail need to rethink CX for the AI agent era
AI isn’t just powering experiences… it’s becoming the customer. And that shift changes everything.
A few weeks ago at Sunrise (A start-up festival by Blackbird), I sat in on a session that has stayed with me. So much so that here I am, writing this on Substack.
Karl Durrance, Stripe’s Managing Director ANZ, was talking about the evolution of payment experiences. But more than that, he was talking about the next phase of customer experience. And it hit me like a lightning bolt:
“When we talk about the digital economy, one of the things that it enables is it makes the world smaller. It makes it accessible.”
What makes it more accessible? When a purchase you make is being done buy something else while you go on about living your life.
What does this mean? We’re no longer just designing for people. We’re designing for agents - autonomous tools that are completing tasks for us. They’re not just browsing. They’re transacting. They’re deciding.
It’s no longer a hypothetical. It’s happening.
And most businesses aren’t ready.
AI agents are now becoming your customer
In my last article, “AI Agents and Content Governance - can we talk about it?”, I shared why we need to be more critical of AI agents that run experiences. The ones building journeys without governance, where content and execution become harder to trace, harder to QA, and even harder to control.
But this is the other side of the same coin.
We’re not just looking at AI agents from an execution lens anymore. We’re now seeing them emerge as participants in the customer journey.
And that changes the entire equation.
Human customers are driven by emotion. AI agents are driven by function.
Humans linger on storytelling, design, and emotional connection.
Agents don’t.
They have one job: complete a task. Find the best product. Execute the task. Move on.
They don’t come back. They don’t get nostalgic. They don’t forgive a broken flow.
So if your customer experience is built around wooing, not doing, you’re going to miss the next wave of revenue.
And you won’t even know it happened.
Because these agents won’t complain. They’ll just fail silently.
What does this mean for CX and digital strategy?
The future of CX has to adapt to a dual reality:
An emotionally-driven, human experience that connects, inspires, and builds trust.
A frictionless, structured, machine-readable experience that enables agents to complete tasks on behalf of customers.
This means we need to ask new questions:
Can an AI agent access and navigate your experience - or will it hit walls like login gates, third-party redirects, or blocked checkout paths?
Do your flows make sense to a tool scanning your site - not just to your copywriter?
Are you tracking what content or steps get blocked by automated systems or bots (and could they be legitimate agent activity)?
If an agent places an order, who owns the return, the refund, or the broken flow?
From human-led loyalty to agent-led logic
At Nevam, we talk a lot about content governance. The idea that every touchpoint - whether human or AI-driven - needs to align to your brand, legal, and CX standards.
But what happens when the customer isn't loyal, doesn't feel emotions, and doesn't care about your brand voice?
Then governance isn’t just about tone. It’s about functionality.
Are you tracking your funnels in a way that shows what can be completed — not just what looks good in a deck?
Can you see the breakpoints that humans might overcome… but agents won’t?
Are you designing experiences that can flex for both?
We’re building for this future now
We’re exploring how we can map agent pathways the same way we do human journeys. Could we crawl your experience using an AI simulation and flag where agents get stuck?
Could we create a CX “agentability” score?
Could we help you balance storytelling with simplicity — so you don’t lose the next generation of digital buyers?
This isn’t about abandoning humanity in CX. It’s about designing for both.
Because the customer of the future won’t always be human. But the experience needs to work - no matter who (or what) is behind the screen.
Want to be part of the journey? Join our product community.
UPDATE: After posting this we saw World Ecomonic Forum shared this article: https://www.weforum.org/stories/2025/05/meet-the-ai-agents-defining-the-new-customer-experience/