Businesses have spent decades investing in websites and mobile applications to improve customer experience, but the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) agents could fundamentally change how consumers interact with their products and services.
During a masterclass titled “Hyper-personalisation at scale: Rethinking the customer journey with genAI” at IT Indaba 2026, Hans Zachar, CIO at Nutun, argued that businesses must prepare for a future in which customers increasingly transact through third-party AI platforms rather than company-owned websites and applications.
“We are most likely not going to own the interface going forward,” Hans said.
From UX to CX to AI-X
He traced the evolution of digital customer experience from the dot-com boom, when businesses rushed to establish websites, to the rise of e-commerce and mobile applications. These developments gave rise to disciplines such as user experience (UX) and customer experience (CX), with organisations investing heavily in making their digital platforms easier to navigate.
“We stop designing for clicks and we start designing for intent,” he said. Rather than navigating websites, manually comparing products and completing transactions themselves, consumers are increasingly turning to AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok to carry out these activities on their behalf.
“The AI system is going to sit between you and your customer as a business,” Hans explained.
This presents a challenge for businesses whose digital strategies have traditionally centred on attracting customers to their own platforms. According to Hans, organisations will have to reconsider how they structure their data, systems and services to ensure that AI agents can discover their products, explain their offerings and execute transactions.
AI-X, a new discipline
He described this emerging discipline as AI experience (AI-X), predicting that it could eventually become as important as UX and CX. The changing relationship between consumers and AI is already evident in debt collection, an area where Hans’s organisation has deployed an AI agent named Zoey.
Of approximately 100,000 calls handled by the agent, he said only around 10 resulted in customers requesting to speak to a human instead.
More significantly, customers engaging with the AI agent were reportedly more likely to honour their payment commitments than those dealing with human collection agents.
Hans suggested that the reduced emotional pressure of speaking to AI could explain this behaviour, particularly when discussing financial difficulties. “It's quicker, it’s faster, it’s less emotional,” he said.
Beyond accepting conversations with AI, consumers are also becoming more willing to allow the technology to take action on their behalf. Hans cited research indicating that 39 percent of consumers would allow AI agents to make purchases, while 54 percent would permit them to apply for credit.
New challenges
However, enabling AI agents to execute transactions introduces another challenge and that’s verifying that those actions have been completed.
Drawing on his own experience of using an AI agent to review financial products and deal with his financial adviser, Hans questioned how consumers could confirm that instructions had been carried out without personally accessing the underlying systems.
“How can I trust that it's actually done the action and that the one percent is coming off the amount I'm paying every month?” he asked.
While Hans acknowledged that consumers do not yet universally expect businesses to provide AI-driven experiences, he argued that organisations should begin preparing their systems for that eventuality.
