Designing AI that Customers Actually Trust

Here’s your full Future Proof episode description for the Ada conversation — written in the same editorial and structured format as the Crunchbase one you shared:

Scaling Empathy: Ada’s CPTO on Trust, Transformation, and the Feel of Great Customer Experience

AI isn’t replacing human support — it’s democratizing luxury-grade service. In this episode, we explore how to deliver empathy, trust, and brand feel at scale, and why AI-first customer experience is really about human-first design.

Guest Introduction

Mike Gozzo, Chief Product and Technology Officer at Ada, leads the company’s mission to bring white-glove service to every brand through AI-powered customer agents. With deep experience in both startups and enterprise platforms (including Zendesk), Mike shares how Ada re-architected its product for generative AI while staying anchored in the timeless principles of great customer experience.

From Luxury Hotels to AI Agents

• The Ritz-Carlton Standard: True customer experience isn’t about technology — it’s about how people feel.

• AI as an Equalizer: What was once exclusive to luxury brands can now scale to millions of interactions.

• Emotion Over Efficiency: Success means building systems that make customers feel heard, understood, and confident.

Building Trust in an AI-First World

• Trust Violations Are Inevitable: Every generative AI product must plan for mistakes — and recover from them transparently.

• People + Process + Platform: Technology alone doesn’t deliver transformation; human partnership and ongoing guidance do.

• Executive Alignment: Every successful deployment has both an executive sponsor and a dedicated owner inside the business.

What Makes AI CX Deployments Succeed

• Always-On Ownership: Ada requires every customer to assign a named steward to manage the agent post-launch.

• Top-Down Buy-In: Executive sponsorship ensures long-term transformation, not just pilot success.

• End-to-End Resolution: The best agents don’t just answer questions — they reason, take actions, and truly resolve.

Measuring What Matters

• Automated Resolution: Ada’s north-star metric, judged by LLMs and audited by humans, measures whether the issue was actually solved.

• Outcome-Based Pricing: Customers pay for successful resolutions, not usage volume.

• Continuous Feedback: Failed interactions become training data, improving accuracy and trust over time.

Rethinking Retrieval, Grounding & Memory

• Smarter Pre-Processing: Ada conceptually chunks content to anticipate questions and ground responses more precisely.

• Context Without Confusion: Only the most relevant knowledge and feedback enter each prompt, keeping answers crisp and fast.

• Latency as UX: Thoughtfulness matters, but so does speed — balancing both defines the “feel” of great AI service.

When to Trust AI With Your Customers

• Start Small: Roll out in one channel or flow — like “press 2 for support” — then expand as confidence grows.

• Follow the ROI: Identify repeatable, high-volume interactions where automation delivers immediate value.

• Build for Feel: Infinite patience, natural tone, and emotional awareness create the next era of customer experience.

Why It Matters

The age of scripted bots is over. Ada’s journey shows how to blend empathy with automation — bringing the attentiveness of a luxury concierge to every brand, at every scale.