The impact of AI on customer experience (CX) teams is not limited to the front line. From back-office operations to strategic decision-making, various business roles are being reshaped, and new functional roles are emerging.

The CX team at the application platform Airtable is seeking talent with technical skills that current members lack to drive departmental growth. At the Customer Contact Week conference in Las Vegas last week, Sean Simons, Senior AI Support Manager at Airtable, said during a panel discussion: "I think anyone working in support or operations wants to be as proactive as possible." Airtable is using its operational data to develop a roadmap, determining how the creation of new CX roles can help improve operations.

CX teams are changing on multiple levels. The proliferation of AI has given rise to new roles requiring unprecedented skill combinations, and has also created new opportunities for internal promotion. At the same time, CX teams are becoming central hubs for cross-departmental collaboration.

This change also affects CX leaders. Ashlee Booker, Senior Manager of CX Operations at employee scheduling company Homebase, pointed out that as AI takes over more transactional work, CX leaders are able to focus more on strategy formulation and the direction of business evolution.

AI Creates New Roles

AI is creating positions specifically designed to craft new types of customer interaction experiences, and teams are exploring how to find the right people.

Take Airtable as an example. Its newly established "AI Agent Architect" role is responsible for designing automated customer journeys for multiple use cases. Simons said that while support is the core responsibility of this role, it also collaborates with the marketing team to identify other customer journeys that can be improved through automation.

Simons emphasized that this role exists because the Airtable team demonstrated very clear results in its initial AI deployment. Early successes helped highlight how AI assists CX teams, sparking interest from other parts of the business in investment and collaboration.

Finding the right candidate for a brand-new position requires a certain degree of compromise. Simons said Airtable hoped its first "AI Agent Architect" would be "a perfect unicorn who can do everything for us," but it turned out that such a perfect candidate does not currently exist.

"What we are really looking for is a combination of operational and support expertise with the ability to practically apply AI," Simons said. "But after interviewing a large number of candidates, I found that people tend to lean heavily toward one end, and almost no one is in the middle or meets both criteria."

Change Brings New Opportunities

The evolution of CX functions is creating new career opportunities for front-line employees, giving experienced customer service agents the chance to apply their knowledge in new ways.

According to Booker, many of Homebase's AI trainers come from its customer-facing team. These employees are familiar with both Homebase's products and typical customer support processes, making them well-suited to design automated support journeys.

"We are shifting tasks to software, and who better to do that than our customer team?" Booker said. "This actually creates new career growth, more mobility, and more excitement for our team, and it's been wonderful to see."

Craig Reines, founder and CEO of consulting firm ServiceHive, believes that adding a career path beyond the contact center, opening up back-office positions for customer service agents, is exciting for both leaders and front-line employees. Reines said that employee experience has always been an important part of quality customer service, and now leaders can offer employees a stronger career path than ever before, enabling entirely new recruitment and retention strategies. "This is a huge change for future operations."

CX Teams Become Connection Hubs

Modern CX teams do more than just serve customers. CX professionals are becoming key links connecting the increasingly interconnected business functions created by AI.

"I think in the CX field, we are at a stage of bridging the gap between product, engineering, and customer experience," Booker said.

One of the ways Homebase handles this is by providing Voice of the Customer (VoC) data to other teams, helping them understand how their work impacts sales or other KPIs. Booker said that in this way, the CX team treats leaders from other departments like any other customer.

CX teams also need to collaborate with technical teams to build tools needed for features like self-service. Booker mentioned that Homebase's CX team participates in hackathons in other departments to help bridge the gap between functions.

Airtable's leadership adopts a "pod" structure, where different teams contribute their expertise to help deploy technology investments. Simons said that CX teams have access to large amounts of data, which, along with input from other functions, supports the pods.

"Our large language model is fed by customer call records, marketing team demos, sales team pitches, and internal content feedback," Simons said.