‘Je ne sais quoi’ is now ‘Je ne sais quAI’: From metrics to experiences at Genesys Xperience 2025

As Tony Bates, CEO of Genesys, took the stage at Genesys Xperience 2025, I was reminded of the French phrase je ne sais quoi (literally, “I don’t know what”), often used to describe that special, hard-to-define quality that makes something stand out. In today’s digital world, that elusive magic is increasingly being shaped by artificial intelligence — or as I thought while listening to Bates, je ne sais quAI: the new ‘special something’ that emerges when AI combines efficiency with empathy. His keynote was not about automation alone, but about augmentation; not just intelligence, but empathy-driven intelligence. Bates painted a picture of agentic AI as a co-worker, ushering in a new era of digital labour with its own realities, challenges, and opportunities. At its heart lay one promise: using technology breakthroughs to deliver experiences that build lasting customer trust.

Bates transported the audience to a scenario that many of us have faced – and on both sides of the table. As a business, it is trying to gain and maintain customer trust. And as a customer hoping that trust is never broken or tainted with rough experiences.

He made everyone imagine a car insurance situation. "You have a relationship with your insurance provider. It's a stressful moment. It involves many steps on the journey. It starts with that initial claim. Then you have to submit documentation. There are status updates. Eventually, you get an assessor who conducts an assessment and makes a decision: Do I repair the car? Is it a write-off? What kind of payment? How am I going to get it? How is it going to affect my ongoing 'no claims' moments? Sometimes you have an appeals process. It's a major emotional decision. And if any part of this journey gets stuck or feels slow or there's friction or there's tension, it's not just a delay in that process, it's a breakdown in trust that you as business owners have with your customer."

He twisted the knife exactly where it hurts, underlining a key reality and challenge for many businesses. "Customers don't remember the form they filled out. They don't remember even who they talked to on the phone. They remember how they felt. That's what they remember. And we all know that if that experience fails in any way along this complex journey, the likelihood of the customer moving away from the provider is very high. That's what's at stake. That's where we are today. That's what the experience economy is about. It's no longer about processing the claim. It's about building trust and fostering loyalty. It's about honouring that contract that you, as business owners, have with your customers."

The experience chase continues and gets tricky

As he gave this example, Bates slid softly but deeply into an unbreakable truth. The irreversible impact of experiences. He added, "The world is literally changing under our feet as we are walking around, trying to absorb all of these different things coming out. Our job at Genesys is to help you through that and create incredible customer experiences. Now the world isn't just changing in terms of the demands that people are looking for when they want unique customer experiences. We also know that the world is changing at a rapid pace due to technology. AI is completely reshaping the way businesses connect with customers, and the conversation is happening in every single boardroom everywhere. It's about how I'm going to keep up? How am I to deal with the pressures to create the best possible customer experiences for my customers and understand all of this technology that's coming at us?"

"When I talk to CEOs and I go around, what I hear over and over again is they're not looking for just a point solution, but they're looking for strategic partners who can help them transform. This is a major transformation to embark on," he said, and he rewinded the talk to the massive transformation of the internet to cloud computing, going from product to delivering services. "But this is the biggest transformation, this is the one that will literally change what we do and how we interact with employees and customers alike. Customers are now measuring you, not just across your industry, but across every industry. In fact, they're now measuring you across the best experience they may ever have, anywhere, anywhere around the world."

He brought in those three simple things, and he opines that the customers are now looking for.
First, they want to solve their problem. Second, they don't want their time wasted. And finally, they want to be treated right; they want to be treated with empathy. "You have to be emotionally intelligent in the way that you work with them in conversations. If you don't do this, we all know that customers will find a better option and leave. The stakes, hence, have never been higher for all of us. That includes Genesys. We have to continue to make sure we have the right capability and the right systems to create customer lifetime value, create that trust, and create that world."

He moved on to the advent of AI here and how it intertwines with this puzzle of experiences. "We all know that this incredible technology with AI has come along, and it started slow, but it's picked up pace in a way that's almost astounding for all of us. We went from perception to prediction to conversation. And then something really magical happened, with generative AI, we got to a moment where you could start to think about creation – creating some of these incredible experiences that you all want to deliver to your customers."

"We're now at agentic AI. Agentic AI is a significant development for our industry. It moves the way we think about business, from automation, which is primarily focused on efficiency, to really start thinking about the fullest relationship with experience. We've been on a deliberate multi-year evolution of Genesys so that we can help you succeed. We have a mission. This mission has been upgraded, and it's here. It's to orchestrate the world's best AI-powered experiences on the strategic platform for the experience economy."

From automation to augmentation

He then encouraged everyone to think about the next pillar post. AI orchestration. "It's really about having a coordinated system of capabilities, and they're happening all at once, all at the same time. Indeed, it's about automation. There's no question. That's where most organisations start. That definitely helps. Utilising AI to enhance productivity and increase efficiency is an absolute prerequisite. But it's not enough, not by a long way. You also need to think about augmentation. Augmentation is tools and capabilities that elevate an employee, making them better at their job and helping improve customer performance. This is how you can scale that human touch. You empower the people where they're strongest.

Now, what's great with AI is that it can start to understand context, begin to understand emotional tone, and understand your preferences, so it's actually giving you the experiences that you're looking for in your context, in the way that you want happening," Bates drilled deeper into how AI is empowering the experience game. "This is where empathy meets intelligence. We've been discussing the power of empathy as a force multiplier for many years, particularly in terms of personalisation and capabilities – this is where you really start to change the game. Now, last but not least, it's also about optimisation. You have to improve your systems continuously, and you need an AI not just to react." At this point, Bates urged CEOs not to look at these in isolation anymore. "You can't just build an automation tool. They're not isolated features. They're compounding capabilities, each reinforcing the next, each working in harmony."

Press that button 5 on the elevator

He mirrored that path to the company's own journey. "That's what we think about at Genesys every day. Our evolution has reflected this journey. We moved from manual to prompts to virtual agents. But now the AI can plan and adapt. It can reason through a situation in real time. This is what people want. I'm shocked at how quickly we've got here. This has evolved at light speed. Genesys is here today at level four, but we need to take it to the next level. That's level five. That's where we start to talk about orchestration, being fully autonomous."

He argued that we would soon see the emergence of virtual personal concierges or AI agents that proactively guide customers and can anticipate their needs. They'll deliver value without any human intervention. These systems will start to learn from the outcomes. They won't wait for the humans to retrain models. "Now I know this is bold. This is where the industry is headed."

The 'and' magic

Bates also discussed how the experience economy will evolve and become stronger. "It's going to be much more about return on experience than anything else. You're going to have to get to the power of the 'and'. Of optimising efficiency and creating trust and loyalty, doing it together. The next shift we have to make, and this is a big one, is this concept that we think about at Genesys, moving from tools to teammate."

This is really about redefining the relationship between humans and AI itself, Bates explained. "AI is just a tool that's waiting for instruction, and AI has to become your trusted co-worker, working alongside you, working alongside your teams. AI will take advantage, but then humans are there to step in with the empathy that matters. AI is a teammate that never sleeps. It never loses context. It's always trying to find the best action and be ready for you. It also helps clear all the noise out of the system. So, you, the humans, and the people on your teams, focus on the judgment complexity, handling genuine customer care, and the real, personalised customer experience that everyone wants.

It means, as Bates elucidated, that we can have human and digital labour side by side. You need to have a unified system. You need to onboard your people and your AI in the same system. You need to plan according to the same schedule, measure, and improve your performance using the same framework.

We hence move from point solutions to platforms, he underlined. "AI-powered outcomes don't come from isolated tools. They come from systems that work together. One system that can automate, augment, personalise, and optimise – in real time." At this point, he indicated how recent collaborations and announcements with players like ServiceNow.

"Think about what that means. This means we're closing the gaps between Genesys's front-office systems and ServiceNow's back-office systems, enabling us to share context, synchronise workflows, and orchestrate seamless customer experiences across these systems. That's level four orchestration happening right before our very eyes. I'm extremely excited about the work the development teams have been doing and the accomplishments they've made together. It's an amazing breakthrough, and I think it speaks wonders to the capabilities of our platform, but also the recognition of working on some of the most important strategic platforms now."

To wrap up our journey, we've built a transformative ecosystem. "You need to have a platform that scales with you. Last year, we shipped over 500 new features. This is a platform built to evolve, and it's open by definition. It's cloud native. It's architected for the speed and innovation you need."

If delivering experience was that 'hard spot to a finger on' for enterprises, AI orchestration and agentic ecosystem could be keys to guiding that finger to the right spot. As Bates emphasised the value and challenges of 'experience economy meeting AI', he left the audience with a strong feeling that they needed to get ready for this. You need to embrace it. The future is right now, but we need to rethink how we approach it.

(The author was invited to attend Genesys Xperience 2025 in Nashville.)