From Pilot to Payoff: The Path to Successful AI Adoption in CX

Published 20/07/26 under:

The most successful AI journeys aren’t giant leaps – they’re a sequence of carefully planned steps. Leading organisations start small, prove value and scale with purpose, using each win to build momentum for the next. When benefits are visible, adoption accelerates. When they aren’t, enthusiasm for more advanced AI quickly fades. 

So, what separates the winners that turn AI into a competitive advantage from the also-rans whose projects never make it beyond the pilot stage? 

Stuck on AI? You’re not alone

For many organisations, the challenge isn’t whether to adopt AI – it’s knowing which opportunities are worth pursuing. Yet, in the race to get on board with AI, it’s easy to arrive at a crossroads. 

No wonder many customer service and contact centre leaders feel overwhelmed. The market is crowded with tools, bold claims and success stories. Every vendor promises efficiency gains, cost savings and better customer and employee experiences (CX and EX). Yet, with so many options competing for attention, separating genuine value from hype can feel impossible. 

That’s why many AI initiatives never make it beyond the planning stage. Leaders aren’t lacking ambition – they’re struggling to identify the right starting point and build a business case they can trust. 

Success begins with the right use case

Consider deploying AI to help summarise customer interactions, categorise enquiries, generate standard responses, search internal knowledge bases or automate routine administrative processes. These types of use cases are relatively easy to implement, measurable and more likely to deliver quick wins.

The best opportunities are usually hiding in plain sight: repetitive, time-consuming and low-risk tasks that consume valuable employee hours. 

That’s precisely what Walsall Council did. Faced with supporting a diverse population, it reimagined its Customer Experience Centre around a smarter, AI-enabled service model. Today, hybrid agents manage customer conversations across phone and webchat from a single interface, with email integration on the way. 

One of the biggest breakthroughs has been removing language barriers. Kerv CX Translate instantly detects and translates messages between residents and agents, enabling natural conversations, faster resolutions and significant savings on interpreter services. 

Other AI-based tools include Genesys Knowledge and Agent Assist, providing agents with contextual guidance and relevant information at the point of need. So, they can work more efficiently and deliver better customer outcomes. 

Avoid gotchas and common mistakes

Sadly, too many organisations still rush to adopt the latest AI trend without a clear business objective. Others attempt to tackle too many challenges at once, making success difficult to measure. Some focus so much on the technology that they overlook the people, process and change management levers needed to realise its value. 

Utility Warehouse (UW) doesn’t leave anything to chance. Guided by a ‘move fast, learn fast’ mindset, its AI strategy is clearly focused around empowering employees, reducing customer effort and removing friction from journeys. 

Now, more than 1,400 UW employees benefit from AI-powered knowledge that is continuously updated and maintained. Predictive routing connects customers with the advisor best placed to help, while agentic virtual agents independently resolve issues such as Wi-Fi faults and mobile top-ups, using intelligent triage and summarisation to streamline escalations when required. 

Meanwhile, speech and text analytics analyse customer interactions at scale, uncovering sentiment, emerging trends and compliance risks while generating actionable insights that strengthen coaching, quality assurance and overall performance.

Organisations winning with AI all follow a similar playbook

They don’t treat AI as a standalone contact centre or IT initiative. Instead, they: 

• Align AI initiatives with clear business objectives
• Build strong executive sponsorship and stakeholder engagement
• Invest time developing accessible, high-quality data
• Drive adoption through effective training and close IT and contact centre team collaboration
• Establish robust governance frameworks to manage risk, ensure compliance and promote responsible AI use
• Create cross-functional AI teams that continuously evaluate performance, capture insights and drive ongoing improvements

Instead of pursuing large-scale transformation immediately, they start with small, targeted pilots, learn from the results and expand proven use cases. This measured approach delivers improved CX and EX, ultimately generating stronger business performance and financial returns. 

West Lindsey District Council (WLDC) is a prime example. ‘Lindsey’, an FAQ bot, helps customers navigate website journeys and find information faster. In the background, Genesys AI assists with smart call deflection. For example, by monitoring customer utterances and intents for non-WLDC queries, which are swiftly redirected instead of being routed to officers as was previously the case.  

However, what really stands out is the Council’s humanistic approach – embracing AI as a tool that supports the wellbeing, development and empowerment of the people it’s designed to serve. 

 

As the longest standing Genesys Cloud partner in EMEA, Kerv has successfully deployed Genesys Cloud to over 25,000 agents in 100+ customers. Drawing on our unrivalled technical support, 24/7 managed services and customer success practice, we obsessively ensure Kerv customers always get the greatest benefit from their Genesys investment.

For further information on Kerv and Genesys AI solutions or to register for forthcoming Kerv events, please get in touch.