During a recent Cavell Cloud Conversations podcast, Finbarr Begley sat down with Ben Booth, CEO of MaxContact, and Barry Tuffs, Chief Strategy Officer at ChorusCX, to discuss AI adoption, outbound engagement and the future of customer experience. One theme emerged repeatedly throughout the discussion: success isn’t determined by the technology itself, but by how organisations use it.

According to Ben Booth, 99% of contact centre leaders believe AI can deliver value both today and in the future, yet only 41% have implemented more than a single AI use case.

The reason for this gap isn’t necessarily technical. Instead, organisations continue to face three fundamental customer experience challenges that AI alone won’t solve.

1. Consumer Trust Remains the Biggest Barrier

Perhaps the most striking statistic discussed during the podcast was brought up by Barry Tuffs – nearly 70% of consumers actively avoid calls from numbers they don’t recognise. At the same time, almost 80% have experienced a negative impact after missing an important call.

The result is a growing trust gap.

Consumers are increasingly cautious due to spam, fraud and unwanted outbound communications. They screen calls, silence unknown numbers and often avoid engaging altogether. The problem for businesses is that important communications, from healthcare appointments to financial services notifications, are getting caught in the same net.

What’s particularly interesting is that the issue isn’t with voice as a channel.

Booth highlighted that 81% of consumers still prefer certain interactions to take place over the phone, while roughly 70% will answer calls when they have confidence in who is calling.

The challenge therefore isn’t convincing customers to use voice. It’s convincing them to trust the caller.

Solutions such as branded calling and pre-call SMS notifications are helping. Research cited by Ben during the discussion found that around 80% of consumers would answer a call if it was branded or if they had received a prior SMS informing them of the reason for contact.

So, a lesson for organisations: before investing in sophisticated AI-driven engagement strategies, they must first address the basic issue of customer trust.

2. Poor Journey Design Creates More Problems Than AI Solves

One of the most important points raised throughout the discussion was that consumers are not inherently opposed to AI.

In fact, the opposite appears to be true.

Booth noted that approximately 85% of consumers say they are comfortable interacting with AI, provided they are clearly informed that AI is involved.

So – transparency matters.

Customers become frustrated when they feel misled, trapped in automation, and importantly, unable to reach a human when necessary. The issue is not the presence of AI itself but the way many organisations implement it.

Both Booth and Tuffs argued that AI must be designed with escalation in mind from the outset. Customers should always understand who or what they are interacting with and have a clear path to human assistance if required.

The discussion highlighted another important finding from consumer research. While attitudes towards AI are generally positive, responses remain split. Across many use cases, acceptance levels were described as being close to 50/50, meaning a significant proportion of customers still prefer human interaction.

There are, however, situations where AI performs particularly well. Ben Booth mentioned during the podcast some research showed that around 60% of consumers dealing with financial difficulties preferred speaking with AI initially because they felt less judged than when speaking with another person.

This reinforces a crucial point: there is no universal AI strategy.

The most successful organisations will identify where automation improves customer outcomes, where customers prefer human engagement, and how the two can work together seamlessly.

3. Organisational Silos Continue to Hold Back CX Transformation

For years, omnichannel engagement has been considered a priority across the customer experience sector. Yet many organisations are still struggling to deliver consistency across channels.

During the conversation, Finbarr referenced recent Cavell research showing that although approximately 90% of contact centre leaders still describe omnichannel as a priority, only around 40% believe they provide a consistent experience across most channels. Around 50% acknowledge they are not meeting their own expectations.

This creates a significant challenge for AI deployment.

Many organisations are attempting to layer AI onto fragmented customer journeys rather than first addressing the underlying disconnect between channels, systems and departments.

Tuffs described a common scenario where businesses rush into AI adoption despite still struggling with basic omnichannel execution. His recommendation is a more measured “crawl, walk, run” approach, where organisations first build visibility into customer interactions, then apply automation and intelligence incrementally.

The emergence of technologies such as automated quality assurance is helping address this challenge. Rather than reviewing a small sample of customer interactions, organisations can now analyse significantly larger volumes of data and gain visibility across contact centres, back-office functions and wider customer journeys.

However, the value comes not from collecting more data, but from acting on it.

As Booth observed, many early AI deployments successfully generated insights but left organisations overwhelmed by the volume of information they now had to interpret. The next phase of AI adoption is about closing the loop, turning insights into action, coaching and workflow improvements.

The Takeaway

AI will undoubtedly reshape the future of customer experience. The technology is becoming more sophisticated, more accessible and more deeply embedded within customer journeys.

Yet as this discussion demonstrated, the biggest obstacles to success are not technological.

Organisations still need to earn customer trust. They need to design journeys around transparency and choice. And they need to break down organisational silos that prevent seamless customer experiences.

Perhaps the most telling statistic from the conversation was that 60% of consumers avoid contacting businesses altogether because they expect a poor experience.

AI can help address that challenge, but only when it is deployed in service of a better customer experience rather than as a replacement for one.

As Booth concluded during the discussion:

“Technology isn’t solving this problem. It ultimately comes down to people.”

For CX leaders, that may be the most important AI lesson of all.