Google Cloud Next 2025 | Cortney Knoll, Capgemini & Sonia Fife, Google Cloud

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More from Google Cloud Next 2025

Cortney Knoll

Executive VP CX Amers

Capgemini

Sonia Fife

Global Leader, CPG Industries GTM

Google Cloud

play_circle_outline Empowering Customer Connections: Personalized Experiences to Combat Frustration and Low Satisfaction Rates

play_circle_outline Improving Agent Efficiency with AI: Balancing Technology and Human Empathy in Customer Interactions

play_circle_outline Evolution of AI agents to handle more complex queries and tasks

play_circle_outline Importance of proactive customer care and personalized experiences

play_circle_outline Impact of AI on turning cost centers into profit centers

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Cortney Knoll, Capgemini & Sonia Fife, Google Cloud

Cortney Knoll

Executive VP CX Amers Capgemini

Sonia Fife

Global Leader, CPG Industries GTM Google Cloud

Join us for an insightful discussion at Google Cloud Next 2025 in Las Vegas with Cortney Knoll of Capgemini, Director of Customer Interactions, and Sonia Fife, Product Strategist at Google Cloud. In this session, we explore the evolving landscape of customer experience, powered by generative AI and the Google Customer Engagement Suite.

Knoll and Fife, experts in customer service transformation, reveal crucial insights into the future of consumer interactions, focusing on the integration of AI technologies in enhancing customer satisfaction. This conver... Read more

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What are consumers expressing frustration about in regards to resolving issues and getting in touch with companies? add

What benefits do agents using technologies like Google Vertex AI and Dialogflow bring to improving job satisfaction and customer service quality? add

What impact do intelligent agents have on the handling of customer queries and requests, and how are they able to handle more complex questions effectively? add

What factors are necessary in order for agents to be able to proactively address customer concerns before they even arise? add

What technology allows companies to track the entire customer journey and personalize interactions for maximum impact? add

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Cortney Knoll, Capgemini & Sonia Fife, Google Cloud

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Savannah Peterson

>> Good afternoon cloud fans and welcome back to Google Cloud Next here in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson, very honored to be bringing you the stories this week with Dave Vellante. Dave, we get to talk a little bit more about my turf in this one. We get to talk about the consumer and the customer.

Dave Vellante

>> We love the consumer because that's where all the action starts, right? That's where all the innovation starts. We've seen it time and time again.

Savannah Peterson

>> Wow.

Dave Vellante

>> Every wave starts with your turf.

Savannah Peterson

>> I know. It's like we're admitting that the healthy tension between the enterprise and the consumer side of our business. On that note, very excited. I've been anticipating this segment quite literally since I saw our run sheet. Sonya and Cortney, thank you so much for taking the time.

Dave Vellante

>> Super excited to be here.

Savannah Peterson

>> Our pleasure.

Savannah Peterson

>> This is going to be awesome. Okay, so Cortney, I'm going to start with you because y'all just came out with a bunch of research and released a report. Give us some of those highlights in the lay of the land.

>> Listen, consumers are telling us every day that they're more and more frustrated with their ability to resolve their issues or to be able to get in touch with a company. And it's never been a more fun time in our ability to meet the client where they're at with end-to-end data. And if you think about something like Google Customer Engagement Suite of products and all the agentic AI capabilities, this is the moment in technology that we will point back to and say, this is the moment where we stitched end-to-end data together to serve hyper-personalized experiences.

Savannah Peterson

>> And that's what people want. I mean, according to this data that you shared with us, only 14 or 16% of agents are satisfied with their job. Less than 50% of customers are satisfied with their customer service. It's broken, right, Sonya?

>> It is broken. And I would say that when you start with the consumer or the customer, they will tell you they want that more personalized experience. In fact, I would go even further and say they want to be deeply understood, whether it's the consumer or the customer or the patient or the client, they all want to be understood more deeply and their needs to be anticipated. And so it becomes more and more important in both service to the agent as well as in service to the customer or consumer to be able to bring new technologies and capabilities that we have with generative AI and agentic AI today.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think this is so important. I love all the data that you released. Thank you both for sharing this with us. Not only are customers craving that and not having their needs met right now, 60% are willing to pay more for premium customer service.

>> Isn't that crazy? They're saying, "I'm so frustrated with your base level of care that I'll pay you to treat me better." Right? And this is where loyalty programs over the past few years have taken off because they will strive to be in that highest level of care. And not only are they willing to now be a participant in a loyalty program that will take years to do it, but they're saying, hands down, I'm just willing to pay for you to treat me better. And this is a really important point. This is a turning point where we can stop thinking of contact centers as cost generators and start thinking of contact centers as a value differentiator with the customer experience and also as a revenue maker.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah. So I was going to ask, how did we get here? We got here because of cost, because of profit, because of competitive pressures. And so it's interesting to hear you say that people will pay up for better service.

Savannah Peterson

>> I was fascinated when I read that.

Dave Vellante

>> And I would too. So that says to me that people will invest in whatever capital or technology they need to solve the problem and monetize it in a variety of ways. So how do we get here and where are we going?

Savannah Peterson

>> I think one of the great things is that we're seeing that even though people would invest as consumers for better customer care and customer service, today with the capabilities that we have with generative AI and agentic AI and Google's new customer engagement suite, there's now the opportunity to bring those capabilities in service to the existing human agents and even at today's cost, be able to provide better experiences for our customers. And as Cortney just said, what we do find is that when that happens, there's a higher level of engagement, a higher level of conversion, and we get that higher level of loyalty. So capabilities that now begin to assist human agents are going to be transformative in the customer experience arena.

Dave Vellante

>> I mean, there's so many examples we could bring up.

Savannah Peterson

>> Absolutely.

Dave Vellante

>> The one that drives me crazy, and I'm sure a lot of consumers, is when the agent repeats a very simple problem and either just simply repeats it correctly or sometimes incorrectly. And I compare that to when I'm using whatever LLM. Let's say I'm using Gemini and it's thinking, and I can see it basically repeating to itself and it gets it perfectly every time. It understands me. And that's just scratching the surfaces to the potential. So how do you see this playing out? People of course say, well, it's going to replace jobs, which perhaps it will, but as well, it's going to make the life of an agent, which must be a very high-turnover job, so much better. How do you see that playing out?

>> What's super fun about the agents is that we're going to empower our human empathy to be stronger and better so that we can increase those scores. We're going to be able to use the agents that are using things like Google Vertex AI or Dialogflow in order to be able to take all the monotony out of the job away. So we're decreasing that job turnover, increasing job satisfaction, but letting the humans have human-to-human contact to drive empathy and satisfaction.

Savannah Peterson

>> And to really think about ways to surprise and delight. I mean, we're talking about 84% of people being dissatisfied with their job. That's a very large portion of the market that's probably higher than most job categories out there, but it's because they're frustrated. It takes forever to find the answer they need. They're not able to provide that quality, empathy-driven customer service. They're not maybe even necessarily able to know about their loyalty status within a company and that this person is really consistent and all you got to do is maybe this one little favor and they'll continue to be loyal for another 20 years without that. So I think there's a lot of psychology to the work that you're doing as well.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah, and what's interesting is that the psychology would tell you that we need to give consumers and customers that better experience. And at Google, we think that the best customer experience is so seamless, it's invisible. And so today we're not only enabling the humans in this process, but we're providing new agentic capabilities that can first of all help our agents be far more productive by the low-hanging fruit of summarizing the call, being able to give that additional information that needs to be done for later. Secondly, the ability to be able to combine human agents with now human-like agents that can be done with agentic AI. And these agents now are multimodal, they're multilingual. Think about that ability to be able to follow that consumer wherever the consumer is across channels so that their experience becomes far more seamless. On top, we're aiding the agent ... Moving away from the rules-based chatbot that you mentioned. We're aiding that agent by being able to serve up to them with capabilities like assistive search or general knowledge assist, our ability to be able to help them providing the agent just the right amount of information at the right time so that they are fully equipped to be able to handle consumer concerns and questions. So this is definitely a new season.

Dave Vellante

>> One important piece that Sonya is bringing up is that if you look at the average training time of a human agent, it's anywhere between three to six months before they're handling complex cases. In the case of agentic AI, we are now able to pair all of this data at exactly the right time in the right call at the right moment to assist that human. And now they're able to take calls at two and three weeks into their job because the data is on hand right when they need it. And it's a huge differentiator in the turnover and the satisfaction, but also ends up being a major driver in the empathy to the consumer overall.

Dave Vellante

>> So you're painting a picture where the human is still very much in the loop.

>> Very much.

Dave Vellante

>> But I'm sure there are also plenty of times where I can say AI agents, please be able to solve the problem. How do you see that evolving? In other words, what percent of the remediation do you think maybe today, roughly, even if rough percentages can be done by AI? Of course, AI can't do everything. It's going to need to bring the human in. And then I have a follow-up question as well. Will that move up the curve where AI will do more and more and more? I'm sure it will, but will it get to a point where it's more than two-thirds or three-quarters will be AI?

Savannah Peterson

>> Go ahead.

>> Yeah, I think that we see with intelligent agents, of course it differs by industry, but for the questions and the query that consumers and customers have, we definitely see where agents are able to take even more complex questions. We know that in some of the customers that we work with, even 70% of the queries can be taken and brought offline, allowing human agents to be able to then handle more complex questions. So that ability is rooted in the fact that these agents are, as I mentioned, far more intelligent, they're far human-like. In fact, we've even seen consumers and customers saying, "please" and "thank you" to these agents because they are so much mimicking the human-like quality.

Dave Vellante

>> I think AI all the time, just in case. You never know.

Dave Vellante

>> Yeah, it's a conversation-

Dave Vellante

>> And so my next question is when you have those exceptions where you have to go to the human, will the agents be able to learn from what the human does? And then do you take up more of the slack going forward?

Dave Vellante

>> Not only are they going to learn and help impend that training into the humans, but a fun aspect of this is that we're going to get to a point when we hit the right percentage level where we're proactively solving consumer needs before the consumer ever knew they were going to have a need. And to be able to do proactive revenue-generating contact center support is something that we've talked to and about for years, but never had the data across the entire end-to-end channel to be able to serve that. And the fact that we're talking about proactive customer care and knowing about the problems before the consumers even do is a whole new world.

Dave Vellante

>> So you're saying it's a data problem first.

>> It is.

Dave Vellante

>> So what's changed from a data standpoint to give you access to that data so that you can act on it with agency?

>> Yes. We absolutely know that for agents to perform at their best, the data needs to be properly cleaned. And of course, you want to have that in a secure and scalable format to be able to enable AI to be trained on the right type of data. And we see that the more that we have our agents continuing to learn, the more they are equipped to not only handle questions, but also to be able to coach in real time. What's interesting is that agents are helping in this aspect of customer experience on the call, but they're also helping in creating new relationships. And these relationships are occurring even in the brand space, in consumer goods, where we see these relationships changing with agents being able to assist in areas like beauty advisory or we now have a gardening sommelier, or we have a pet care advisor or a pet care coach. So I think where we're evolving to is where with the right level of data and training and the evolution of agents that we're going to see a whole new level of brand engagement and a whole new level of not just productivity, but also growth.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think what you're bringing up is something that's so exciting because it allows people to do their best work. We know the doomers in our industry always say, AI is going to take my job. No, it's not going to take your job. It's going to take away the repetitive tasks that bored you to tears at your job that didn't allow you to be the great person that you want to be and remove that sandpaper frustration that comes from situations where a customer service or a chatbot just isn't getting it, and you feel that struggle in that issue. I'm curious from a ... You all get to talk to those frontline agents who are out there doing the frontline work. What is the reception like from your observations when they get to interact with these tools and see the efficacy?

>> So, listen, these are people who are people-people, and they love to be the superhero of somebody's day when they get to make a connection or solve a problem that helps boost their esteem and they do better at their job. And the reception has been massive because it's making them better and they see that it is taking away all of the stuff that they used to complain about and the monotonous parts of it. And so what's really fun and what's really empowering about this is it's data-served at exactly the right time to empower not only the consumer and what they're seeing, but for the contact center employees to get to be and have those moments of superhero, heroics in their day.

Dave Vellante

>> When you get a really competent agent and they solve a complex problem, it feels so good.

Savannah Peterson

>> It does.

Dave Vellante

>> You're like, "Can I send you money?"

Savannah Peterson

>> Statistically, you do know. And y'all correct me, you may have far more in-depth data than I have on this, but from my experience and analysis, it is one of the most pivotal moments in someone's brand loyalty journey. So you can call in with a bad moment, but if it's handled in a way that you like it, you have a 75% more likelihood of being loyal to that brand long-term.

>> That's right.

Savannah Peterson

>> Because we all understand things happen. And it's okay. I mean, we talk about it on the show, we talk about it with experimenting with AI. It's not going to be perfect every time, but can you make me feel seen and heard and perfect about how the company is going to take care of me, my data and my experience moving forward? So I think that's so critical.

Dave Vellante

>> So are organizations, how are they thinking about this? Are they changing their strategies? Are they leaning in heavily? What's the maturity curve look like?

>> Good question. Yeah, I think that their low-hanging food is definitely the area of summarization. You can take that work out of the field of a human agent today by doing, for example, just a summarization of the call so you can get the learnings. And generative AI is helping there. But what's interesting and where companies are really leaving in is how to make every agent their best agent. And that really unleashes the power that's potentially here to be able to broadly improve the level of consumer experience and customer experience that's available today. So companies are definitely leaning in and they're mining the benefits of this. As we've said, to some extent they're seeing it in cost. But what's really exciting is that we're now in the age where they're seeing it in terms of growth in revenue generation.

Dave Vellante

>> So connect those dots because Cortney, you talked about that before. So how does it go from a cost center to a profit center?

>> What's really exciting is that we used to talk about omnichannel, right? And people hear that word now and their eyes glaze over and go, yeah, yeah, yeah. But again, this is the moment where especially with something like Google Customer Engagement Suite, where this is the pivotal moment where we can take data along an entire journey. You could have talked to us four years ago and we can serve that information today at exactly the right moment and know how and when to upsell. Every call isn't an upsell, right? And you can lose customers the same way that you can grow them in loyalty by knowing exactly what to say, when to say it and how to say it. With AI, we can do all of that and act like we know you or we have as much on you as your mom does, right? And we know exactly what look is going to generate-

>> Maybe more, let's be honest.

>> Sometimes more.

>> Yeah. Yeah.

>> So this truly is omnichannel, and I feel bad that we wasted all of those years previously using such a good word to encapsulate what is such a big moment now in being able to truly do end-to-end omnichannel experience.

Dave Vellante

>> Well, but is some of that data plumbing an advantage for us now? Or do we have to throw all that away? All that omnichannel bedrock that we laid.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think she more meant the term omnichannel because there's been a-

Dave Vellante

>> Sure, but there were actions around omnichannel. There were attempts-

Savannah Peterson

>> We're definitely harvesting-

Dave Vellante

>> to wire them, right? So that's an asset that is-

>> Yeah, absolutely.

Savannah Peterson

>> Well, I think we're definitely moving into a time of unified commerce, but this idea of being able to connect with the consumer wherever they are along that journey really is transforming the experience area. I think the omnichannel reference there of being able to connect with that consumer. We have a large customer we're working with where they're connecting with that consumer or customer online beforehand, whether that be in web or mobile. That customer is coming into the store and they know exactly from the information that's available, everything about that customer, the engagement continues all the way through engagement into delivery. And so our ability to be able to make that experience seamless really is getting to that invisible age of customer service with a Customer Engagement Suite.

Dave Vellante

>> That's super interesting too because you just made me think of something, Sonya, is the difference sometimes between the laptop or desktop experience and the mobile experience is often dramatic, especially things like booking flights.

Savannah Peterson

>> Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Dave Vellante

>> It's like night and day when you go to the website on the laptop, and although some sites you have to go to the website in order to make a change, and so that hopefully all goes away. I talk to it and it solves my problem.

Savannah Peterson

>> Hopefully it sees that we're texting each other about something and it adjusts our flights because we're going to stay and do a couple extra segments of the show for us naturally with an upgrade because we're loyal frequent flyers. Yeah, you heard it here first folks. You heard it here first. We talked a lot about how the market has changed, how this is such a pivotal moment. My final question for both of you and I am very excited to hear your answer actually. So we get to get together again at Google Cloud Next in 2026. Now that a lot of this is rolling out and starting to scale up, what do you hope to be able to say then that you can't yet say today? Cortney, I'll start with you since Sonya's been in my hot seat the whole time.

>> We know that 82% of all organizations are experimenting with AI right now and trying to figure out what they do and how they leverage it. It's going to go from a playful experiment to a massive differentiator and revenue generator. And so we'll be sitting here next year talking about not the companies trying to figure out how to roll out yet another technology or another SaaS or another contact center engagement, but we'll be sitting here talking about all of the change that's been driven from the autonomy that we can drive through all of the new AI agents.

Savannah Peterson

>> I'm excited for that.

>> I agree. I mean, I think last year we were talking to companies and they were looking at pilots where they could begin to roll out these kinds of capabilities. This year we're talking to companies who have now moved into production and they're beginning to realize the benefits. And it's interesting when I think about what the future of this space will be with generative and now agentic AI in this space, it's very funny because the future is right here.

Savannah Peterson

>> Right here.

>> And the space is moving so fast that we are seeing today that opportunity for our customers to be able to realize some of the benefits that we talked about even now. So I think the future is bright in this area. We'll see far more movement into production and far more creation of value in this space.

Savannah Peterson

>> I think that was beautifully stated. We look forward to being able to tell those stories. I hope Dave and I have an example for you both of how we feel we might have been impacted by the hard work that you're doing. And this cries of delight on the customer service side.

Dave Vellante

>> Can't wait for that.

Savannah Peterson

>> I know. Me neither. Thank you both for taking the time today, seriously.

>> Thank you. Appreciate it. .

Savannah Peterson

>> This was an absolute blast. Thank you, Dave, as always, and thank all of you for tuning in to our three days of live coverage from the show floor here at Google Cloud. Next in Las Vegas, Nevada. My name's Savannah Peterson. You're watching theCUBE, the leading source for enterprise tech news.