Why experience-led AI and not efficiency-led AI is the next competitive advantage
In the nineties, Amazon played a central role in how we choose, decide and purchase. From a customer’s point of view, their shopping experience became fast, easy, accessible and reliable through a tech-enabled purchasing method they could trust.
Today, as organisations such as Walmart experiment with AI-led shopping journeys, a comparable pattern is emerging. The question isn’t whether AI will change CX, it will — but whether we will trust AI to determine conclusions on our behalf.
Real Competitive Advantage
Amazon’s competitive advantage wasn’t by optimising individual touchpoints or automating parts of the journey. Its advantage came from making experience-led decisions and redesigning customers’ end-to-end journey.
Discovery, evaluation, purchase, fulfilment and returns were treated as a single, seamless experience, designed around customer needs and enabled by technology. Efficiency followed, but it was the outcome, not the objective.
The competitive impact followed quickly. As customer trust consolidated around a new way to shop, new habits formed and purchasing behaviour shifted. In a CX context, market share growth was driven less by persuasion and more by serving customers’ needs, journey orchestration, and removing friction from the purchase journey.
What began as differentiation eventually became the CX baseline that others were forced to match.
That pattern matters because it offers a useful lens for understanding what may now be emerging in the next iteration of customer experience.
AI-Powered Competitive Advantage
Today, the dominant customer problem is no longer speed, access or reliability. Those expectations are table stakes. The pressure point has shifted to cognitive effort. Customers are navigating choice overload, fragmented channels, subscription fatigue and a constant stream of everyday micro-decisions, rendering us short of mental bandwidth.
This is where AI delivers a competitive advantage in a materially different way. Not as an efficiency tool that automates isolated interactions, but as an experience-led evolution that reshapes customer experiences and enables everyday activities to feel effortless.
Applied coherently, AI can absorb many of the decision-making and coordination tasks we currently undertake. As organisations such as Walmart experiment with AI-led shopper journeys, early signals of a familiar pattern are emerging. Not as a prediction, but as precedent.
AI-powered CX introduces the possibility of trust shifting again. This time toward technology that shapes conclusions. Not by removing choice entirely, but by filtering, prioritising and acting in context. Increasingly, customer experience will become less about exploring and evaluating options and more about relying on outcomes that feel low-effort, require lower in-put and are contextually relevant.
This does not mean customers will hand over high-stakes, identity-laden decisions that we believe require our continued human involvement. Most journeys are dominated by low-risk, high-frequency decisions. This is where cognitive relief delivers disproportionate value in everyday life and becomes a driver of behaviour change.
Amazon solved customer painpoints with technology, alleviating the problems of limited, inconvenient and slow retail shopping. Their solution revolutionised the way we shop and led to a competitive advantage that is still felt in today’s marketplace.
Which Path Will CX Leaders Choose?
The open question for CX leaders now is whether they will choose efficiency-led and cost-saving AI solutions or experience-led solutions that redesign the shopping journey to solve customer problems.
If the latter holds, advantage will accrue not to those who automate fastest, but to those who understand which conclusions customers are willing to delegate and which they are not.
Amazon changed the way we shop. Technology enabled that shift, and competitive advantage followed. Today, the question for organisational leaders is whether they will apply AI in ways that merely optimise efficiency, or whether they will make experience-led decisions that change how customers reach conclusions, and in doing so, create meaningful differentiation.