Professor Mohamed Zaki, Deputy Director of the Cambridge Service Alliance, recently visited NHH to speak about the future of AI.
Zaki began his career in informatics at a time when databases and software were just starting to gain popularity. Working as an IT consultant for companies like IBM and Oracle, he witnessed how organizations were increasingly collecting and storing data, but doing very little analysis with it. What truly sparked Zaki’s interest was the growing conversation around business intelligence being the future.
"That caught my attention. So I decided to step away from industry for a while and move into academia,” he says.
When Zaki joined Cambridge in 2013, he began collaborating with the industry, on how AI can be used to design and manage service experiences. His research focuses particularly on the integration of AI technologies powered by natural language modeling, and more recently, large language models (LLMs) and agentic capabilities, within customer experience design and management. These technologies are transforming the landscape of customer service and digital sales.
Traditional customer service faces challenges related to personalization and responsiveness, often resulting in increased wait times and operational inefficiencies. AI-driven customer service agents, equipped with generative AI and natural language processing (NLP), are addressing these challenges. They do so by interpreting customer conversations, emotions, and psychographic profiles.
Zaki’s visit also followed up on DIG’s recent study trip to the University of Cambridge, where researchers and partners explored how AI can drive business innovation and value creation. Read more about the Cambridge trip here.
One of the key themes in Zaki’s recent talk at NHH was the rise of AI agents: autonomous tools capable of planning, accessing tools, reasoning, decision-making, and communication. Unlike traditional chatbots, these systems go beyond scripted and rule-based responses.
“If we talk about the definition of AI agent, this is a new technology with varying levels of intelligence that does planning, accessing tools, reasoning, learning and takes action on our behalf. This can create great benefits, whether in employee experience or customer experience,” Zaki explains.
This allows for personalized responses and product suggestions, significantly improving customer satisfaction and increasing purchase intent. Some of the benefits that Zaki especially highlights, are shorter wait times, increased customer loyalty, and reduced costs.
Despite these advantages, there are also challenges to adopting AI agents. The most prominent one, according to Zaki, is cost. As the agents become more intelligent, the price for the service will also go up. This can especially cause problems for businesses that base their service around this model.
“With any business, there is typically a focus on return on investment. So if you invest in a cost like this, you are dependent on what you will get out of it.”
Zaki points out configuration as the second biggest challenge. Unlike traditional automation, these systems demand careful coordination to ensure that agents collaborate effectively, and minimize the risk of generating false or misleading outputs. This challenge is particularly important in industries like healthcare, where the consequences of errors can be severe.
For companies that are thinking of implementing AI, Zaki recommends starting with the customer. This implies collecting CX data and identifying the pain points in your customer experience, and then building your use cases from there. He also encourages businesses not to rule out open source LLM, as well as combining different tools and AI methods to build more effective systems. Finally, he underscores the importance of measurement. Whether it's customer satisfaction, employee productivity, or sales growth, companies need clear metrics to track the return on their AI investments.
