Constellation Research Ambient Experience Summit 2025: 10 CX takeaways on people, data, AI
Customer experiences and employee experiences are often comingled, AI has CX potential but it's only as good as the data quality, and maybe you should think of your AI agents as your children.
These were a few of the takeaways from Constellation Research's Ambient Experience Summit 2025. Constellation Research analyst Liz Miller referred to customer and employee experience as a soup where data, people, process and AI all blend together to create a holistic approach.
Here's a look at the takeaways on customer and employee experience at Ambient Experience.
People
Customer and employee experiences are often cast in digital, data and AI terms, but in the end it's all about people. Heather Wilson, SVP, Head of Communications & Marketing at AccentCare, said customer experience in health care boils down to the human in front of them. Sure, there are data stores and systems for operations, but the front lines are about human connections.
"If your front line workers are happy, they are doing good work that affects the patient experience," said Wilson. "The human piece is how we grow."
CX and EX are one in the same. Thomas Rocharz, Director, Contact Center, Cape Air, said when he joined the company his first mission was to address attrition and burnout among service agents. He said:
"When you talk about the intersection between CX and EX, my approach is there is no intersection. For me, employee experience and customer experience are the same thing. My employees are customers. They are my customers. When they call HR, they are HR customers. We're all in this experience soup, and that's my approach to it. How do you stop the morale the same way you create good customer experience, give them what they want, listen to them."
Jaylene Owen, HR Director at Hames Corp., a retailer based in Sitka, Alaska, has a customer base that is also employees. The reason? Sitka has 8,300 people and most of them worked at Hames at some point. "When it comes down to treating my employees and my customers, I consider them the same," said Owen. "It's like a big family, and you have to realize that your part of a bigger picture than it just being about profit."
Remember your physical channels and experience touch points. Casey Carl, Founder of North Coast Ventures, has been an executive at Walmart and Target. He said customer experience can be aided by data and AI, but for many people retail is about the interaction they have with people in the community.
Christian Manzella, Head of Digital/UX at Ford Pro, said his unit is focused on fleet management and software, but business-to-business interactions also rely on "sitting down and talking to customers." The same approach applies to employees.
Data
It's the data quality. It's always the data quality. This refrain was heard repeatedly from executives. "If you train AI on crap data, it's going to give you crap results," said Laura MacDonald, Chief Growth Officer of Hotwire.
Data quality is an integration issue between silos. Raja Renganathan, Chief Growth Officer at Randstad Digital, said enterprises have different tools, data silos and applications that don't talk to each other. This data work never stops and your ability to use AI to personalize the customer experience depends on it.
Data is a team sport. Kristina Chambers, Chief Data and Analytics Officer at TTX Co., said her company's goal is to get railroad assets to the right place at the right time and optimized. Much of the data is structured, but also cross-functional. Chambers started a data camp program modeled after Google to get employees experienced in data. "We bring together employees across all the different functions to work hands on with our data using the new technologies that we brought in," she said. "It's all about creating good data habits, good hygiene, and a solid digital footprint especially in developing dashboards."
AI
AI will revamp CX, but enterprises aren't organized to benefit. CX is one of those things that are owned by everyone and no one at the same time. The customer experience is hampered by silos with different returns. AccentCare has a patient experience leader and the idea is worth following for other companies in various industries.
AI can enable strategic transformation. GE Healthcare VP of marketing Joseph Anzalone said the primary customer for his company is clinicians. GE Healthcare is training foundation models to give clinicians predictive analytics to save lives, streamline processes and drive patient outcomes.
"In the future, a clinical application will pull all the structured and unstructured data, images, wave forms, clinical notes, patient history, family history and genomics, put that together and give you a diagnosis or recommendation," said Anzalone, who noted that the technology is there but the healthcare model isn't. In addition, healthcare innovation varies by system, hospital and even division.
Personalization. MacDonald said that AI agents will ultimately be able to know the customer through interactions to tailor experiences. Another area will be leveraging AI to create synthetic personas that will further refine customer targeting and inform individual interactions.
Think of AI agents as your children. In analogy of the day, Constellation Research analyst Holger Mueller compared AI agents and your children. Children at first need to be trained. It's messy. You have to feed them. Eventually they learn how to feed themselves. "What we really want is for them to be autonomous," said Mueller. "An autonomous being is one you can bring to school and they come back in six hours. The teenage years are like AI hallucinations."
In the end, children and AI will continue to be shaped by experiences, new inputs and training. The good news? You can swap models if your AI doesn't behave.
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