455: Riaz Raihan, Improving CX with AI

·27 min·2 clips

Riaz Raihan explains how AI can bridge the gap between helpful and creepy in customer experience.

The episode begins with hosts Adam and Jeanne introducing the topic of AI in customer experience, highlighting the tension between technological power and ethical considerations. They interview Riaz Raihan, President at Alida, who leads product strategy and development. Riaz starts by explaining that AI addresses the problem of scale, allowing businesses to understand customer voices across omni-channel interactions. He categorizes customer feedback into direct, indirect, and inferred types, detailing how AI combines these for predictive insights, like suggesting banking products or retail services. The discussion shifts to ethics, with Riaz referencing the famous Target case from a decade ago to illustrate the fine line between helpful and creepy AI. He emphasizes Alida's core value of empathy and the importance of going beyond legal compliance to the spirit of the law. Riaz shares that Alida sometimes turns down business to avoid ethical pitfalls, focusing on long-term partnerships over short-term gains. The hosts ask about maintaining ethical standards amid competition, and Riaz stresses putting the end customer first. Diversity in AI development is explored next, with Riaz discussing implicit bias and the need for diverse teams in terms of gender, race, culture, and age to create balanced models. Practical applications are highlighted, including AI-driven video feedback analytics that recognize facial emotions and a unique customer identifier that resolves identities across social media platforms. The episode concludes with Riaz's bumper sticker phrase for customer experience and promotional information about Alida's resources.

As heard by us

A grounded CX conversation on making AI answer to customer values, not just short-term advantage.

AI lands here as a customer-experience choice with real moral weight, and Riaz gives the episode a steady center: a company's values should shape how it designs products, builds services, goes to market, and decides which business it will not take.

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Why you'd press play

You want AI to improve CX without drifting into creepy? Start here.

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