For CX leaders, the question is no longer whether to adopt AI. It's whether your organisation is ready to make it work.
There's a pattern emerging across mid-market and upper mid-market organisations right now. Some CX leaders are watching AI pilots stall, automations underperform, and transformation programmes lose momentum. Others — a smaller group — are quietly scaling. They're resolving 40% or more of customer enquiries automatically. Their agents are faster, more focused, and more effective. Their service operations are genuinely changing.
The difference isn't budget. It isn't the technology they chose. It's the foundations they built before they started.
Most CX leaders we speak to are not short of ambition. They understand the opportunity. They've seen the analyst reports. They've sat through the vendor demos. Many have even run pilots.
But ambition and readiness are not the same thing.
AI in customer service doesn't fail because the technology is wrong. It fails because the conditions for success weren't in place. Fragmented knowledge bases. Inconsistent data. Unclear ownership of automation outcomes. Service processes that were never designed with AI in mind.
When AI is layered on top of these conditions, the results are unpredictable — and often disappointing. Customers get wrong answers. Agents lose trust in the tools. Leadership loses confidence in the programme.
The organisations that are scaling AI successfully didn't skip this stage. They invested in it deliberately.
Trodo is an international e-commerce business operating across multiple languages, regions, and currencies — with over two million product SKUs and tens of thousands of customer enquiries every month. It's a complex environment by any measure.
When Trodo's Head of Customer Experience, Laurent Dathie, began the AI transformation journey, the temptation was to move fast. The volume of incoming requests was growing. The pressure to automate was real.
But Laurent and his team made a deliberate choice: before expanding automation, they would build the foundations that would make it sustainable.
That meant investing in knowledge management — curating documentation, maintaining accuracy, ensuring that the information AI would rely on was structured and trustworthy. It meant establishing clear goals, governance, and success criteria. It meant aligning the AI programme with business objectives, not just technology capability.
"Knowledge management is at the core. If knowledge isn't properly managed, the results will be unexpected or wrong."
— Laurent Dathie, Head of Customer Experience, Trodo
"Understanding what you want to achieve, having a clear strategy, and building the right foundations is ultimately what has made AI successful for us."
Today, at least 40% of Trodo's approximately 40,000 monthly customer enquiries are resolved automatically by AI — with a mid-term ambition to go further. Specialist teams now dedicate their time to complex technical cases. Agents review tickets faster, understand context more quickly, and produce responses more efficiently. The operational capacity that has been created is real and measurable.
This didn't happen because Trodo found a better AI tool. It happened because they built an AI-ready operating model first.
Based on our work with mid-market and upper mid-market organisations, the same gaps appear repeatedly when AI programmes underperform:
The CX leaders who are scaling AI today started this work 12 to 18 months ago. They didn't wait for the technology to mature further. They invested in readiness — and now they're seeing the returns.
For those who are still in the experimentation phase, the question is urgent: what would it take to move from pilot to programme? From ambition to operation?
The answer, consistently, is the same. Build the foundations. Define the strategy. Work with partners who have done this before — who can help you structure the journey and focus on the areas that will create the greatest impact.
"Working alongside experienced partners helped us structure that journey and focus on the areas that would create the greatest impact."
— Laurent Dathie, Head of Customer Experience, Trodo
On 8 July, redk is bringing together CX leaders from across the region for an exclusive event in Manchester — AI Service Leaders: From Experimentation to Operations.
It's a working session for CX directors who are mid-journey: who have started exploring AI, who understand the opportunity, and who want to understand what it takes to scale.
You'll hear directly from practitioners who have built AI-ready CX operations. You'll have the space to discuss the real challenges — the organisational, strategic, and operational ones — with peers who are navigating the same terrain.
If you're a CX leader asking whether your foundations are ready, this is the conversation you need to be part of.
