Align Gen AI With Your Customer Experience
In the evolving landscape of customer experience, leaders across industries are navigating how to integrate generative AI into their operations without compromising the human touch. For Craig Crisler, CEO of SupportNinja, this isn’t just a technical challenge. It’s a strategic imperative. His company, which partners with fast-scaling tech companies to manage customer support, has taken a deeply consultative approach to aligning Gen AI with client CX goals. The message is clear: AI must serve the brand, not dilute it, as my interview with him shows.
Strategy Before Technology
Crisler brings a unique lens to AI adoption. Having worked on language models even before founding SupportNinja, his view of Gen AI is grounded not in hype, but in how it genuinely enhances business outcomes. At SupportNinja, the emphasis is not on flashy deployments for internal gain. The real focus is on how AI can optimize client operations. This client-first mindset drives everything, starting with a strategic diagnostic phase that examines client systems, processes, and data readiness well before any tooling is introduced.
“It’s about taking five or six steps back before implementing anything,” Crisler explains. “We start with understanding the customer journey, the data structure, the integration landscape, and then move forward with proof-of-value deployments.” That depth of preparation helps defuse the common fears around AI, especially concerns about security and brand misalignment, by proving that any tool introduced has been selected and tested with rigor and precision.
The Maturity Mismatch
SupportNinja’s clients span a wide range of AI maturity levels. Some are just beginning to explore Gen AI, while others are actively piloting their own tools. But regardless of where they are on the spectrum, few have reached optimal deployment. According to Crisler, “Most are still struggling with implementation. Even among the 40 percent of CX executives we surveyed who say they’re actively using AI, few are doing it effectively.”
One reason is a misalignment between the technology deployed and the customer experience expected. Crisler points to a high-end luxury brand client who installed a chatbot to handle online inquiries. While the intention was good — automate repetitive queries — the result was a generic, impersonal experience that clashed with the brand’s high-touch identity. “Their average transaction is over $10,000,” he notes. “You can’t have a basic bot representing that level of luxury.”
The solution was to replace the bot with behind-the-scenes tooling that empowered human agents with faster access to customer data. This allowed for quick responses without sacrificing nuance or brand voice. The experience stayed personal, and the brand integrity remained intact.
Data, Design, and Deployment
SupportNinja’s approach hinges on a thorough current-state analysis using proprietary tools like their internal Ninja AI. By analyzing sentiment, language, and customer-agent interactions, they uncover how well a client’s CX actually aligns with its brand promises. “From there,” Crisler says, “we map the customer journey, identify where data can be integrated, and propose specific tools that fit those touchpoints.”
This design process is deeply human. SupportNinja conducts interviews with client-side teams, from frontline agents to engineers, to understand the full picture. “It’s funny,” he reflects. “AI is supposed to be about automation, but deploying it the right way takes a lot of conversation. At the end of the day, these are still human-to-human interactions.”
That insight underscores why Gen AI in CX is not simply a software problem. It is a change management challenge. Clients worry about the risks—data security, brand misrepresentation, job loss. Crisler and his team respond by embedding transparency and education into every step. “The opposite of fear is knowledge,” he says. Every SupportNinja agent—referred to internally as “ninjas”—receives training in AI fundamentals and prompt engineering. They learn not just what the tools do, but how they make their jobs better.
A Human-First Future
Despite growing fears about agentic AI taking over large swaths of customer service work, Crisler remains optimistic. He sees a future where AI handles repetitive Tier 1 and Tier 2 tasks such as password resets and basic refunds, which allows humans to focus on more complex, Tier 3 empathetic interactions. “The idea isn’t job loss,” he insists. “It’s job evolution. The work becomes more proactive, more human. You’re not stuck in repetition. You’re solving problems.”
Still, Crisler acknowledges that the path to fully autonomous agents isn’t short. Building agentic systems requires sophisticated data aggregation across multiple platforms, something most organizations aren’t yet ready for. “Data wins in AI,” he says. “And right now, most internal IT teams aren’t comfortable centralizing data to the degree that agentic agents need.”
What this means for the near future is clear. AI will become increasingly present in CX, but humans remain central to its success. The companies that thrive will be those that treat AI as a partner in the customer journey, not a replacement for the human element that defines great service.
In the end, aligning Gen AI with customer experience is not about chasing trends. It is about understanding your brand, your customers, and your people, and making thoughtful, strategic choices that elevate all three. As Crisler’s work at SupportNinja shows, the future of CX may be digital, but it remains deeply, and necessarily, human.
Key Take-Away
Successful Gen AI integration starts with strategy, protects brand identity, and empowers people, not replaces them. Share on XImage credit: Yan Krukau/pexels
Dr. Gleb Tsipursky was named “Office Whisperer” by The New York Times for helping leaders overcome frustrations with hybrid work and Generative AI. He serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts. Dr. Gleb wrote seven best-selling books, and his two most recent ones are Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams and ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators: Unlocking the Potential of Generative AI. His cutting-edge thought leadership was featured in over 650 articles and 550 interviews in Harvard Business Review, Inc. Magazine, USA Today, CBS News, Fox News, Time, Business Insider, Fortune, The New York Times, and elsewhere. His writing was translated into Chinese, Spanish, Russian, Polish, Korean, French, Vietnamese, German, and other languages. His expertise comes from over 20 years of consulting, coaching, and speaking and training for Fortune 500 companies from Aflac to Xerox. It also comes from over 15 years in academia as a behavioral scientist, with 8 years as a lecturer at UNC-Chapel Hill and 7 years as a professor at Ohio State. A proud Ukrainian American, Dr. Gleb lives in Columbus, Ohio.