Hardened customer experience officers with public-facing cred emerge as critical amid AI transformation

Chief customer experience officers are emerging as a critical C-suite role in the AI era, with technical expertise becoming essential alongside traditional customer advocacy skills. The position combines deep technological knowledge with human-centered leadership to deliver measurable business impact, as organizations increasingly recognize the need for dedicated executives to navigate complex customer relationships in an AI-driven landscape.

What you should know: The customer experience officer role remains relatively new, with most current leaders pioneering the position within their organizations.

• According to Deloitte Digital, a consulting firm, 51% of experience officers are the first in their organization to serve in such a capacity, highlighting how emerging the role remains.
• The average annual salary for US-based chief experience officers exceeds $150,000, according to ZipRecruiter, a job search platform.
• These executives lead substantial teams—Cisco’s chief customer experience officer oversees 20,000 people directly involved with client contact.

Key responsibilities: Experience officers focus on proving customer value while driving technological innovation with human-centered approaches.

• Top priorities include demonstrating the value of customer and employee experience to the bottom line, gaining organizational buy-in, and pushing technological boundaries.
• The role requires extensive direct customer interaction to identify and develop use cases, as well as analyzing both quantitative metrics and qualitative feedback.
• Officers must use surveys and real-time data streams to decipher customer issues, looking beyond surface-level numbers to identify underlying problems.

Why AI makes this role more critical: Artificial intelligence capabilities are reshaping customer experience expectations and creating new opportunities for personalization.

• Responsible AI tops experience officers’ priority lists for the coming year, requiring leaders to steer technological development with human-centered focus.
• “With generative AI and agentic systems, we can train our models to know customers, maybe sometimes better than they know themselves,” said Liz Centoni, Cisco’s chief customer experience officer.
• AI enables greater personalization, predictive services, and proactive issue resolution that addresses long-standing customer challenges.

Essential skills for success: The ideal experience officer combines technical proficiency with strong interpersonal capabilities.

• “It’s fundamental table stakes,” Centoni explained regarding technology knowledge, emphasizing the need to “completely rethink how to change how our customers experience us.”
• Success requires spending significant time directly with customers while setting vision and direction for the organization.
• Advancement to the role demands product knowledge, technology expertise, and the ability to think around “big, audacious goals” while continuously validating approaches with customers.

What they’re saying: Industry leaders emphasize that customer experience should be everyone’s responsibility, even with dedicated officers in place.

• “Everybody in the company is a customer experience person,” Centoni noted, while explaining her team’s specific focus on ensuring smooth delivery of functions like customer renewals.
• “It’s my job to make sure every customer, no matter if it’s a mom-and-pop network or a large customer with massive networks and many applications, feels like they’re our only customer,” she concluded.