Is growth still good? - by Benn Stancil - benn.substack
If you are the vice president of customer experience at a large airline, you are probably worried about your job. You were hired to affordably provide great customer service to millions of people, and for years, you built a sprawling array of infrastructure to do it. You hired thousands of passenger assistance representatives and reservations agents; you created an assortment of ticketing applications in Microsoft Azure; you recruited a team of engineers to build them in Java and Angular. But, because you believe in continuous innovation, you’ve been following what’s been happening in Silicon Valley. It is the Age of AI; of intelligence; of agents. The building blocks are in place, and it is the dawn of a new era. Though AI will save the world, it might get you, a customer support leader overseeing a worldwide network of call centers, fired.
And so, you are marshalling all the money you can to investigate this new future. “It’s critical for us to be at the forefront of this transformational wave,” you say when you get back from the Airport Customer Experience Summit in Atlanta. “Airlines that adopt generative AI technologies will be able to provide better experiences to their customers, and more value to their shareholders. Airlines that don’t will have worse margins, lower earnings, and more frustrated customers. We cannot be Blockbuster; we must be Netflix.” People nod along, because everyone agreed with you already. You secure a big budget. You go shopping. You buy lots of stuff.
