Gladly unveils Customer AI to reverse the decade-long decline in CX

Customer AI helps brands deliver radically efficient and radically personal service—addressing the decade-long decline in customer experience quality with context-rich, relationship-driven AI.

Gladly, the customer experience (CX) platform powering some of the world’s most customer-focused brands, including Crate & Barrel, Ulta, and Tumi, today unveiled Customer AI to give brands the ability to deliver radically efficient service and radically personal experiences at scale.

According to Joseph Ansanelli, CEO of Gladly, “For too long, customer experience leaders have been offered a false choice between solutions providing either high-touch, personalized service, or seemingly cost-effective solutions built to deflect customers. We created Gladly for brands that want it all: a radically efficient and radically personal CX platform that delivers both internal cost savings and long-term customer loyalty.”

Gladly developed Customer AI to address the ongoing decline in CX quality, which has reached its lowest point in nearly a decade. Forrester’s most recent U.S. Customer Experience Index shows CX declining for the third consecutive year, with 39% of brands reporting drops across effectiveness, ease, and emotion. Just 3% of companies are considered truly customer-obsessed.

“Customer experience didn’t decline because companies stopped caring,” said Ansanelli. “It declined because the introduction of AI has supercharged systems built to scale ticket-based transactions rather than relationships. Customer AI is AI designed specifically to understand, serve, and nurture customer relationships while simultaneously driving meaningful cost savings and efficiency.”

As AI has entered the CX space, most platforms treat it like a bolt-on, a rules-based tool to patch over workflows designed to minimize human contact. Gladly was built on an entirely different vision that puts customers at the center. Customer AI brings a deep understanding of customers’ orders, preferences, behaviors, and full conversation history to experiences to power personal, efficient conversations at scale, without compromising on experience or operational impact.

New capabilities extend Customer AI across the customer journey

Alongside Customer AI, Gladly is also announcing the next version of Sidekick, its AI. Sidekick handles, routes, and resolves requests across voice, chat, SMS, in-app, and social while giving agents a unified view of every conversation.

With Customer AI, Gladly offers six powerful new capabilities to companies looking to bring customer intelligence to more channels, teams, and customer moments:

• Sidekick Voice: Brings natural language conversational abilities to voice calls to answer customer questions, take action, provide follow-up via SMS, or seamlessly transfer to a support hero, with full context intact.
• Sidekick Sales: Helps customers find the right products faster by answering questions and offering real-time, personalized recommendations, making it easier to buy and less likely they’ll leave without what they need.
• Sidekick Email: Brings the power of Customer AI to the inbox, crafting fast, on-brand replies that reflect your brand’s voice and fully understand each customer’s history—so email support feels just as efficient and personal as every other channel.
• Guides and Journeys: Simplifies AI setup and optimization with no-code tools, real-time performance data, and suggestions for improvements to help Sidekick get smarter over time.
• Sidekick for Zendesk and Salesforce: Brings all the above together to extend Customer AI to SMS, chat, and voice—even inside legacy systems—while delivering fast, on-brand support across every conversation.

Customer AI matters today more than ever

Today’s market is increasingly competitive, cost-sensitive, and customer-driven. Brands face heightened expectations for personalized, efficient, and empathetic service. Customer AI uniquely enables brands to address these expectations by offering operational efficiency and exceptional experiences simultaneously. Gladly’s Customer AI balances automation and empathy, operational efficiency and deep personalization, human connection and technological innovation to deliver AI that’s both efficient and personal.

About Gladly: The world’s most customer-centric brands use Gladly’s CX platform to drive down costs, nurture relationships, and increase loyalty. Powered by proprietary Customer AI, Gladly is the only CX platform that puts the customer, not tickets, at the center of every conversation. Gladly is simply powerful, maintains a continuous conversation across channels, and balances human connection with intelligent and empathetic automation. For B2C leaders who refuse to compromise, Gladly delivers radically efficient service and radically personal experiences. Learn more at www.gladly.ai.

Note: This article was created by Gladly.