Google Cloud: How AI is Transforming Customer Experience

Customer experience (CX) is critical to business success. And, in an increasingly competitive market, good CX means looking far beyond traditional notions of customer service. 

Instead, CX encompasses every interaction, perception or feeling a customer or potential customer has throughout their entire journey with a brand. A positive experience boosts engagement, enhances loyalty and directly impacts sales. 

Conversely, negative experiences lead to customer churn, quickly damage brand reputation and can have lasting financial repercussions.

Walking this delicately balanced tightrope is more challenging in the digital age. Customers expect seamless, personalised experiences across all digital channels and demand instant gratification and quick resolutions to any problems. 

For businesses, digital interactions generate vast amounts of data making the extraction of meaningful insights to improve CX difficult. Add in the fact that negative experiences can spread rapidly on social media and you have a complex and demanding landscape to operate in. 

AI offers an opportunity to reduce some of this complexity and enable businesses to elevate CX, says Google Cloud’s Senior Director, Industry Products & Solutions Lisa O’Malley.

Reshaping the CX proposition

Writing in a recent Google Cloud blog building on the company’s predictions for how AI will shape businesses in 2025, Lisa says: “When it comes to CX, we often talk about AI automating back-office tasks. That's true, but also a massive understatement. 

“It's not just about making things faster. It's about fundamentally changing how work gets done,” she adds. “With AI, customer support is finally having its moment. We're moving far beyond simple personalisation. We’re getting from point A to Z, faster.”

While AI has the potential to fundamentally reshape how businesses approach CX, it has already made a positive impact on internal business processes. This includes efficiency gains in the onboarding process for CX teams and enabling the real-time transcription of 24/7 support calls to enhance customer experience. 

On the customer-facing side CX has evolved beyond the simple personalisation of services. “AI-powered CX creates the feeling of being understood, of having needs anticipated and met with minimal effort,” says Lisa.

“The evidence is already there: customers are saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to virtual agents, a testament to the increasingly natural and engaging nature of these interactions. This points towards a future of ‘invisible’ CX – experiences so efficient that the technology fades into the background.”

These changes have resulted in the traditional support system at the heart of CX evolving from a cost centre to one that delivers engagement across multiple channels and directly drives ROI.

The role of AI agents

The proliferation of agentic AI models has underpinned much of the transformation in CX, says Lisa. 

Delivering a human-like self-service capability while directing to human agents where necessary helps to reduce complexity for customers, direct queries and requests and collate information in an efficient way. 

AI-powered search brings similar capabilities, as it “enables virtual assistants to quickly find answers to unexpected questions and improve access to knowledge,” Lisa explains.

“They’re multimodal, multilingual and multichannel by design – so even if your customer doesn’t speak your language, finding your service won’t be an issue.”

Google’s Gemini multimodal models give businesses these capabilities. Gemini is designed to be highly flexible and can understand and operate across different types of information like text, code, images and video all at once. 

Gemini can generate creative content, translate languages, answer questions in an informative way and write content. It is used in various Google products to improve search, help with coding and enhance user experience. 

Specifically for customer experience, Gemini helps power chatbots for instant support, analyses customer feedback for insights and can be used to personalise interactions. 

Despite their growth, AI agents and other AI solutions aren’t A CX silver bullet alone, warns Lisa. Crucially, companies should consider the types of knowledge, tasks and interactions AI will handle – they must also ensure data is effectively managed and prepared. 

“The real opportunity lies in augmenting human capabilities: you should make every agent your best agent,” Lisa says, pointing to how tools like Google’s Agent Assist help empower human agents rather than make them redundant. 

The potential of Generative AI in transforming CX can also be elevated by adopting a hybrid agent approach.

The role of AI in CX is one of five predictions from Google Cloud around how AI will shape business in 2025. 

Other key applications for the technology on the list, originally published in December 2024 include how multimodal AI will deliver more context in a data-rich world, the rise of enterprise search systems and how AI will bolster defences and enhance security systems.

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