We need to find a way to build an AI layer that properly harnesses the data and context we accumulate
4 minutes de lecture
This is Part Four of Making Every Conversation Count, an ongoing video series featuring 8x8 CEO Sam Wilson and Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Miller covers customer engagement, CX strategy, and AI-driven business outcomes.
Everyone’s selling data solutions these days. More data gathering. More structured data. More insights and context. And ever more importantly, more data for all your AI to eat. At face value, it makes sense: the pitch is that better data drives better decision-making, better outcomes, and better business.
Data dominates our lives, both in the industry and in our personal lives. Think about the wearables we have that track our sleep, heart rate variability, and pulse oximetry. These numbers and these watches, we’re told, contain the insights to help us optimize our lives so we can live longer and healthier.
But do we know what “healthier” really means? How many of us actually understand the impact heart rate variation has on our lifespan? But when we see the number go down or get a bad sleep score a few nights in a row, all that added information just makes us anxious in the end.
We have the technology, we have the data, but many of us still don’t know where we’re going with it. It’s the same issue we encounter when we attempt to add AI on top of the data and insights solutions we buy for our businesses.
In the scramble to find the perfect data solution, a lot of organizations don’t look at purpose. They don’t consider that all the beautiful data and insights they gain won’t mean much if there’s no strategy to use them. Yes, even if all that beautiful, structured, unified data is ready for the latest AI solution that swears it’s going to fix CX forever and always.
And honestly, organizations shouldn’t clap for themselves just because they did AI. Unless they’re using an AI implementation that properly harnesses data and turns it into tangible business enablement, then all that accumulated context and insights are just floating around in the primordial soup of conversation transcripts and customer histories.
It’s a topic that a lot of us at 8x8 are thinking about. In a recent blog post, Bryan Martin, Co-founder and CTO at 8x8, observed that the AI deployments of recent years have gone one of two ways: they either worked really well, or crashed and burned. The difference, he argues, is that the ones that worked had very specific purposes, with defined guardrails and goals.
“AI is going to make us so fast!” scream the acolytes. But to quote from my recent conversation with Liz Miller, “Speed without direction isn’t velocity, it’s just motion…you can go fast in a circle.”
To avoid eating our own tails, we need to demand proof that the intersection of data, insights, and AI actually generates value. If we want to make conversations count, we need to build conditions that not only capture everything but make it actionable.
Seeing opportunity in data is one thing, and finding ways to act on it is another. According to an MIT report, 98.8% of Fortune 1000 organizations report investing in data-gathering solutions, with 1 in 5 saying they’ve spent half a billion dollars on them. And only 1 in 3 said it actually created the data-driven organization they aimed for.
CX and AI initiatives often fail not because companies lack data, but because they lack connected understanding.
When talking about building successful AI solutions for customer success, Tapan Patel, research director for AI-Enabled Customer Data and Analytics at IDC, had this to say: “Customer data platforms gave us unified profiles, but that foundation alone is not sufficient…AI agents need a next layer—one that provides a detailed understanding of CX relationships, shared business logic across functions, and runtime context that reflects customer intent, life-cycle stage, and prior actions to deliver real value.”
So you’ve got the data and insights solution. And maybe you’ve got an AI layer you’d like to build on top of it. But without a plan—without a vision, you’re not going to get much out of that add-on. Strategic vision isn’t a tool that can be bought, but it absolutely will make the difference between a tool that’s useful and a tool that just raises your IT costs for this year.
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