Noel Harris

Noel Harris is a customer engagement and digital transformation leader with over 20 years’ experience driving service excellence for global brands. As Vice President of Sales & Customer Success, Europe at eGain, he partners with top enterprises to deliver measurable outcomes from their digital engagement strategies. Renowned for aligning technology, people, and process, he consistently helps organisations achieve higher customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.

About the session

AI for CX: Why It Fails and How to Succeed

Shocking prediction from Gartner: 60% of AI projects will be abandoned in 2026. 61% of respondents in a KMWorld survey said they do not trust AI-generated answers since they could be erroneous or inconsistent. Lack of trust craters adoption and value creation. How can you avoid AI pitfalls and guide your project to CX success? What do real-world success stories look like?

Join to learn:
• Make or break barriers to AI success in CX
• Proven way to deliver trusted service with AI
• The symbiosis between modern knowledge management and AI
• Best practices for AI-powered value creation in CX

5 questions for Noel

What do you think is the biggest challenge in finding the right balance between technology and human empathy in customer contact?

The real challenge lies in deploying technology that enables and enhances empathy rather than replaces it. At the minimum, AI should empower frontline employees with real-time knowledge and guidance so that they can focus on listening, understanding, and helping the customer rather than struggling to find answers. Without trusted information at their fingertips, even the most empathetic agent can fall short. When implemented correctly, AI serves as a bridge-not a barrier-to better human connection.

In your opinion, which technological development has had the most impact on customer experience in recent years – and why?

We believe AI knowledge—AI and modern knowledge management (KM) working together—has been the game-changer. AI automates knowledge sourcing, creation, and management while knowledge provides the trusted foundation for AI so that AI delivers correct, consistent, consumable, and compliant answers and process guidance. Our clients are seeing a 5-10x increase in speed of knowledge creation with AI. And with trusted knowledge, clients are experiencing 45% increase in call deflection, 32% increase in FCR (First-Contact Resolution), 50% improvement in agent time-to-competence, and more while reducing the cost of service!

How do you ensure that customer focus does not just remain a nice word, but is really woven into the daily practice of your organization?

At eGain, customer experience is operationalized through every layer—from our mission of enabling clients to deliver better CX while reducing service cost to our CX solutions, powered by AI Knowledge to our operational metrics for our business functions which have customers—both internal and external—to our customer-centric culture. Customer focus isn’t a concept; it’s a set of shared metrics we live by.

What is a striking insight or 'eye-opener' that you recently had in the field of customer experience?

What surprised us is a recent quote from Gartner that said 100% of generative AI virtual customer assistant and virtual agent assistant projects that lack integration with modern KM systems will fail to achieve their customer experience and cost-reduction objectives. We always knew that trusted knowledge is foundational to delivering better CX but had never seen Gartner make any other prediction with 100% certainty! Our savvy clients are quite aware of this and working with us closely to strengthen their knowledge infrastructure to accelerate their AI for CX initiatives.

What tip would you give to professionals who want to continue to grow with the rapidly changing world of customer contact?

CX stars know this secret—it is KM that can swing the CX needle in a transformational manner. AI has eliminated the barriers to the adoption of KM while AI is bound to fail without trusted KM. Customer contact professionals can ride this golden age of AI knowledge to turbocharge their carriers by learning about this technology, implementation best practices, value modeling, value communication, and more!