The road to AI maturity: Start with a plan to unlock real results

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is rapidly transforming service today and while it’s important to move quickly to keep pace with evolving customer expectations, it’s even more critical to look before your leap. Having a strong plan in place is essential. Without thoughtful preparation, you might not see the results you’re hoping for.

Jumping headfirst without a clear strategy can lead to misaligned expectations, wasted resources, and team frustration.

Today’s customers demand more than just answers – they expect instant, personalized, and proactive care, setting a new and consistently rising bar for service excellence. In fact, 78% of business leaders say AI is forcing them to redefine what success looks like, while 83% of consumers still believe experiences should be better than they are today.

AI is the key enabler for teams to meet these demands. When harnessed the right way, it transforms mundane, repetitive tasks into seamless automation, streamlines complex workflows, and equips agents with real-time insights – empowering teams to create unforgettable, loyalty-building customer experiences.

The proof is in the numbers – companies leading with AI see 33% higher customer acquisition, 49% greater cross-sell revenue, and 22% improved customer retention.

With such compelling benefits, it’s no surprise that organizations – from scrappy startups to global giants – are eager to embrace AI. But to truly unlock its potential, you need a clear, purposeful AI adoption plan tailored to your team’s unique needs and goals.

This post is the first in a three-part series designed to guide you through building that plan, automating high-volume tasks, and equipping your teams with the tools to succeed. Let’s start by laying the foundation for your AI journey so you can transform with confidence.

Start with a plan

AI can do many things, but it’s most effective when you start small and with a clear focus. We recommend focusing on a single use case to start to build momentum before expanding to others.

• Improving efficiency: Use AI to handle routine, repetitive tasks at scale, allowing your team to concentrate on higher priority work.
• Enhancing workflows: Leverage AI-powered insights and recommendations to streamline internal processes and drive smarter operations.
• Supporting agents: Provide real-time suggestions, relevant knowledge and actionable insights to help your team resolve customer issues faster and more effectively.

While AI can support all these areas, most customers begin piloting one use case to demonstrate early value before broadening adoption. For example, finance and healthcare teams often start with tools for agents for a cautious, compliance-friendly rollout, while industries with high ticket volumes like retail typically start by automating repetitive requests to reduce workload.

Understand your baseline and team needs

Once you have aligned on the use case you will start with, it’s critical to understand where you stand today, the needs of your team and where you want to be. This foundational work avoids pitfalls and helps target AI where it will make the most impact.

Start by:

• Aligning on data and metrics: What customer service KPIs matter most—response times, resolution rates, average handle time? Gather your baseline metrics so you can measure AI’s impact later.
• Reviewing your team structure: Map out roles, responsibilities, and escalation paths. How does your team currently receive, prioritize, and resolve tickets?
• Mapping the customer journey: Identify pain points and moments where AI can simplify, speed up, or enhance interactions.
• Determining your channel strategy: What channels do your customers use most? Where do you see the highest volume, lowest complexity asks? By understanding the spread and makeup of outreach, you can begin to see where automation can help.Understand how your users reach out to you and always consider self-service and knowledge as it fuels automation with AI.

Taking inventory of your current state ensures you build your AI strategy on a solid foundation.

Prepare your team and processes

AI changes how work happens, and while AI is intended to make your team’s lives easier, it is still a change and requires enablement.

We encourage:

• Promoting AI as a partner and making sure your team knows AI’s role: it’s here to assist, simplify work, and empower—not replace.
• Giving your agents a voice and engaging them in the planning as their perspective is key to building out great customer experiences.
• Offering hands-on experience and inviting agents to experiment with AI in their daily workflows.
• Maintaining a strong communication plan to drive usage and deeper adoption of what you are rolling out [Pro-tip: Identify subject matter experts (SMEs) and build a champion network that can pilot AI tools and become internal champions].
• Building trust through transparency by sharing clear guidelines and goals, as well as keeping them in the loop on the plan and up-to-date on what’s new with regular training.
• Creating feedback loops to help promote engagement and provide systematic feedback on how to continuously improve.

Laying the foundation for AI success

AI adoption is a journey and real success requires thoughtful planning and team readiness which is where you are at today. By starting with clear use cases, understanding your baseline, preparing your people, and fostering continuous improvement, you’re setting your business on a path to AI success and delivering smarter, faster resolutions.

Stay turned for the second part of our series, which will focus on using AI to automate high-volume tasks and enhance customer experiences.