BlogDagmar 19.10.2026

Why do we need AIX alongside CX and UX?

Customer experience development AI Customer experience Customer insight New technologies

It is no longer only people who move along customer journeys, but also their AI assistants. That is why a smooth service alone is no longer enough. What matters most now is how well a company can build trust and a sense of control and security in situations where AI takes part in the encounter. Alongside CX and UX, we need a new term: AIX, or AI Experience.

More and more customer encounters already run through AI: in customers’ own agents, in search engines’ zero-click answers, in chatbots, recommendation engines, Copilot solutions and AI-assisted services.

Gartner estimates that by 2028, at least 70 per cent of customers will begin their customer service journey through a conversational AI interface, and that AI assistants will begin to act as the customer’s representatives along the journey.

When an AI assistant moves along the customer journey, your customer no longer evaluates only the smoothness of the encounter. What matters is whether they can trust what the AI suggests. That is why, alongside CX and UX, we need AIX (AI Experience), meaning the experience of how AI influences the customer’s decisions, feelings and trust.

How is AI changing customer experience management?

McKinsey already talks about a shift towards next best experience thinking, in which AI orchestrates the customer experience across the entire lifecycle and aims to deliver the right interaction to the right customer at the right time. AI is therefore no longer just technology in the background of the customer journey, but part of the experience itself.

CX remains responsible for the overall experience that emerges from all this. UX will continue to design how a person moves through a service. AIX designs how a person converses or works with AI.

Three feelings that determine the success of the AI experience

Customer experience management has always been about managing emotions, and AI does not change that. It only changes the route: emotions now arise more and more often indirectly, filtered through AI. That is why, in the AI experience, everything ultimately comes down to three feelings:

1. A feeling of trust.
   Trust is built through transparency. According to Forrester, consumers still view AI with considerable suspicion. McKinsey points out that using AI in customer service does not succeed through technology adoption alone, but by building trust with customers. The customer needs to know why the AI recommends something, what data the suggestion is based on, how confident it is in its answer and when a human steps in.
2. A feeling of control.
   The customer must be left with the feeling that they decide and the AI helps. The OECD puts it the same way: AI should strengthen human decision-making, not replace it. A poor experience arises when AI makes decisions on the customer’s behalf without them being able to influence those decisions. The same applies to personalisation. According to McKinsey, 71 per cent of consumers expect personalised experiences and 76 per cent of consumers become frustrated if they don’t get them. On the other hand, according to Deloitte, customers want personalisation only if it comes with trust, transparency and responsible use of data. The line between helping and startling is therefore a design decision, not a technical limitation. Not everything that is possible is worth doing.
3. A feeling of security.
   The design of encounters often focuses on the customer getting from one step to the next and the task getting done. AIX must also take into account uncertainty, the experience of fairness and the feeling that the AI will not use the customer’s own information against them. These do not show up in click paths, but they do show up in customer retention.
   

What all three have in common is that none of them is solved by switching models or polishing prompts. They are solved through design: by deciding what the AI says, what it asks, where it stops and when it hands control over to a human. This is exactly why expertise in designing customer journeys and encounters does not become obsolete with AI, but becomes even more valuable. In the future, everyone will have the same technology, and it will be available to more and more people. The difference comes from who knows how to design the experience around it.

Customer journey 2.0: AI gets its own stage

We are used to describing the customer journey as a chain:
Awareness → Consideration → Purchase → Use → Loyalty.

In the future, forerunners will add two stages to it in which AI plays a visible role:
Awareness → Consideration → AI Interaction → Purchase → AI-assisted Use → Loyalty.

At each stage, three things are evaluated separately: CX, meaning how does this feel; UX, meaning how smooth is this; and AIX, meaning can I trust this, do I understand why the AI is suggesting exactly this, and do I stay in control. In practice, every traditional customer journey question is joined by a new AIX question.

The overall experience can no longer be developed without designing the AI experience

The customer experience has always been made up of both a company’s own channels and encounters it does not own itself: resellers, partners and outsourced functions. That will continue to be the case. What is new is that alongside these comes one more layer to be managed: the AI-mediated customer experience. In my view, it is the next natural step from traditional CX thinking towards a customer experience in which AI is an integral part of the service rather than an add-on stuck on top of it.

Want to develop your company’s customer experience? Get in touch!

AUTHOR

Sirpa Toljander

CX Director

sirpa.toljander@dagmar.fi

+358456450616

Sirpa Toljander is Customer Experience Director at Dagmar and a doctoral researcher specializing in customer experience management, participatory design methods, and design thinking. Her research and professional work examine how organizations can create business value through deeper customer understanding, human-centered innovation, and evidence-based development.

Sirpa is particularly interested in the interplay between customers, organizations, and emerging technologies, exploring how artificial intelligence, co-creation, and design-driven approaches can enhance customer experiences, organizational capabilities, and business outcomes.