Why does technology whose purpose is to simplify our work so often make things harder? We’ve all been trapped in a clunky checkout flow, stuck with an unhelpful chatbot, or navigated a mobile app that feels like a puzzle.
What separates a good user experience from a bad one? It’s the feeling that lingers long after the interaction ends. A seamless experience leaves the user with a sense of ease—maybe even satisfaction—because everything just works. There’s no unnecessary friction—no wasted time. Just a smooth path to getting what the user needs.
For businesses, the key to delivering this kind of user experience is convenience—making interactions feel effortless to users, whether they’re consumers, business-to-business (B2B) partners, or employees who are representing a brand. When convenience becomes the standard, user engagement follows.
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Limitations of Today’s CX Model
In the race to perfect their customer experience (CX), companies have poured billions into contextual content, personalized recommendations, omnichannel user journeys, and engagement that is driven by artificial intelligence. The goal? Seamless, easy-to-use interactions. Yet, most digital experiences still feel like work.
The problem isn’t a lack of investment, but rather a company’s approach. Rather than rethinking processes from a convenience-first perspective, most businesses focus on optimizing individual steps of a user journey rather than eliminating them. They refine checkout flows, but don’t question why users must navigate them at all. They build smarter chatbots, but still require customers to ask for help instead of anticipating their needs. In this legacy CX model, users still bear the burden of clicking, searching, and piecing together fragmented experiences.
But what if there were a better way? What if a CX intermediary could understand intent, handle complexity behind the scenes, and deliver outcomes without forcing customers through a maze of steps? Instead of making marginal improvements, they would redefine engagement by making interactions not just better, but effortless.
A 2025 Adobe Digital Trends Report (PDF) found that while many organizations prioritize CX, only 14% say they are delivering exceptional digital experiences. (This is down from 25% in 2024.) The widening gap between CX ambitions and execution is becoming more apparent, leaving many customers stuck with fragmented, frustrating user experiences.
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A New Era of Digital Engagement
CX intermediaries that are powered by autonomous, outcome-driven systems could fundamentally transform how people interact with technology. Instead of forcing users to navigate menus, compare options, and manually complete their tasks, these AI-driven systems could understand user intent and deliver results seamlessly.
For example, consider online shopping. Without a CX intermediary, if a user needed supplies for a themed party, she would have to browse categories, estimate quantities, and manually add each item to her cart without any assistance. Even with personalized recommendations, the burden is still on the user. Sure, this might be better than trekking from store to store across the city. But is it really the best experience that technology could offer?
Imagine a different approach. Instead of painstakingly searching for each item, the user could simply describe what she needs in natural language. A CX intermediary—an AI-driven system that understands the user’s intent—could pull in relevant data from the user’s profile and assemble the perfect selection of products in the user’s shopping cart. The user could easily purchase the right products, in the right quantities—all ready to ship from her preferred brands.
Retail giants such as Amazon and Walmart have already experimented with AI-driven shopping assistants, but most online experiences still require users to do the heavy lifting. Amazon’s Just Walk Out technology, which eliminates checkout steps for people who are shopping in physical stores, has been implemented in over 170 locations worldwide, doubling sales and increasing customer satisfaction in venues such as Seattle’s Lumen Field.
This provides the best of both worlds: the expertise of a seasoned store associate in combination with the speed and efficiency of a digital platform. Through a mix of voice and touch-based interactions, the entire experience becomes as simple as having a conversation.
Beyond Shopping: A CX Intermediary in Action
The same principle applies to routine transactions such as bill payments. Instead of the user’s having to navigate a maze of clicks and menus to pay a credit-card or utility bill, a CX intermediary could handle these transactions in response to a simple request. The user would only need to authenticate his identity—via biometrics or another secure method—while the system took care of the rest.
Account-servicing inquiries could see an even more dramatic shift. Imagine a user needing to check whether a particular transaction appears on his credit-card statement. Today, that would mean hunting down the right statement, scrolling through many line items, and manually searching for the transaction. But, with a CX intermediary, the user could simply request the information and get an immediate answer.
CX intermediaries go beyond simplifying tasks by eliminating friction entirely from the user experience. According to a Gartner analysis, digital customer-service technologies are transforming CX by reducing friction and eliminating unnecessary effort, leading to higher user satisfaction and lower churn.
Across all these scenarios, a CX intermediary can reduce multistep interactions to seamless, outcome-driven experiences. Instead of forcing users to move through rigid, task-based systems, a CX intermediary shifts digital interactions toward a model that focuses on user intent. The technology anticipates and actually addresses the user’s needs rather than just responding to interactions.
The guiding principle is understanding the user’s purpose, or in-the-moment intent, and merging this understanding with contextual intelligence to deliver a holistic solution—not just incremental improvements. This requires shifting away from improving individual steps to rethinking workflows and engagement entirely.
A Blueprint for Transforming Customer Engagement
How can organizations move beyond making incremental improvements and truly rethink customer engagement? This requires a multilayered approach, rebuilding experiences from the ground up, as follows:
journey harvesting—Identify the most critical subjourneys—the user intents that matter most—and determine which of them a CX intermediary could handle.
interaction models—Design an easy-to-use system that understands the user’s in-the-moment need and delivers outcomes seamlessly.
headless engagement systems—Build modular, application programming interface (API)–driven frameworks that support these subjourneys without introducing rigid dependencies.
automated service layers—Use an agentic framework to orchestrate processes behind the scenes.
data foundations—Combine the user’s real-time needs with historical customer intelligence to power smarter, intent-driven decision-making.
CX intermediary assembly—Bring all these components together to create frictionless, intent-driven user experiences.
Key Takeaways
CX intermediaries eliminate friction by understanding user intent and automating outcomes, reducing the need for the user to perform manual steps.
Traditional CX approaches fall short by merely optimizing individual steps rather than rethinking user engagement from a convenience-first perspective.
AI-driven systems streamline interactions in shopping, payment, and customer-service experiences, making them easy and almost effortless.
To stay ahead of their competitors in digital engagements, businesses must shift from making incremental fixes to rethinking intent-driven, automated experiences.
A great customer experience isn’t defined just by better user interactions but by the absence of friction. Businesses that do more than optimize their existing processes and start delivering outcomes will lead the next wave of innovation. When technology fades into the background and things just work, user engagement becomes second nature.
Managing Director and Global Practice Leader for Customer Experience at Brillio
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Gaurav is a seasoned digital-transformation leader with over 25 years of information-technology (IT) experience, including more than 15 years in consulting, solution design, and digital implementation for some of the world’s most recognized brands. As the Managing Director and Global Practice Leader for CX at Brillio and formerly as the Global Practice Head of Digital Marketing & Commerce at Wipro, he has partnered closely with C-level and senior leadership to shape strategic digital roadmaps and deliver high-impact customer experiences. Gaurav has deep domain expertise across content, ecommerce, and engagement platforms and user experience technologies and strong capabilities in development, go-to-market strategy, team leadership, and operational management. Read More
