Is Your Customer Experience Ready for AI Agents?

Not long ago, most people experienced AI as a search box or a bot: ask a question, get an answer, move on. That is already changing. AI is becoming embedded in how people interact with businesses. 

That may feel like a small shift, but it is an important one. It’s the first glimpse of a future in which AI becomes the primary layer through which people discover, compare, and act on information. Soon, fewer people will begin their journey by visiting a website directly. Instead, they will ask an AI agent, which will gather the relevant details and decide what to surface.

The rise of agent preference

This is where agent preference begins to matter. The question changes from “How do we build a great customer experience?” to “How does our experience work when the visitor is an AI agent?”  

For example, soon a customer might open their personal agent and ask “Go book me a flight”. Instead of needing a UI, the agent will converse directly with an airline AI agent to compare options, check availability and finalize the booking.  

Sami Ghoche, Vice President of Applied AI at Zendesk, speaks to this future state: “AI Agents will start to serve other AI agents directly, they’ll be conversing with each other in their own AI language. You don't need a UI for that.”

This marks a significant shift in how businesses need to think about service design. It’s no longer only about creating an experience that works well for a customer who arrives directly. It’s also about making sure the business can be understood and acted on by the AI agent representing that customer.

In practice, that could mean:

• Designing services with clear context, actions and workflows that are easy for AI to interpret

• Enabling AI-to-AI service interactions between a customer’s agent and a business’s agent

• Structuring information in a way that supports both human understanding and AI-driven action

If AI is talking to AI, what does the customer need to consume?

That leads to a more practical question: if AI is talking to AI, what does the customer actually need to see?

The answer is: not always as much as we think. Some experiences will still require a rich interface, especially where nuance, trust, comparison or complexity matter. But in many cases, customers won’t need to navigate a heavy UI if AI can complete the task directly. The interface may become lighter, more intentional, and more focused on the moments where human attention really adds value. 

The real work may happen behind the scenes, while the customer experiences something simpler, faster, and more seamless.

As Sami Ghoche notes, “a company’s brand website won’t ever be irrelevant, people will always look at things AI doesn’t necessarily need to. Websites may become less about discovery and more about depth.” 

For businesses, that means decoupling the UI from the back end more clearly. The execution layer can live behind the scenes, while the front end becomes something more selective and purpose-built. In other words, design for the machine that reads your content, not just the person clicking around it.

What happens to customer service?

AI will make many things dramatically faster and more efficient. But that doesn’t mean customers will want less human support. In many cases, the opposite will be true.

As AI raises the baseline for quick, easy resolutions, customer expectations will rise with it. They will want more information and more contact, not less. Websites may become the place where customers go when they want to verify, compare, or explore beyond what an AI has already surfaced. The human role will remain essential wherever empathy, judgment, trust, or nuance matter most.

That is good news for customers: faster service, better routing, more intelligent support, and fewer frustrating handoffs. But it also raises the bar for businesses. “Good enough” digital experiences will no longer be enough.

The future is built for agents

If a customer’s default action is no longer “I’ll search the web,” but “I’ll ask my AI,” then the business experience must be designed for that reality.

The future is not about replacing humans. It is about recognizing the first interaction may no longer be human-to-business. It may be agent-to-business, with the customer one step further back, and the business one step more responsible for being machine-readable, machine-usable, and machine-ready.

Start preparing now, because the way people discover and use your business is already beginning to change.