In sectors like lending and collections, AI is becoming key to how companies communicate, evaluate needs, and act. Customer service environments have become the main testing ground for generative AI in business. AI excels at understanding conversations, figuring out what a conversation is about, and what the customer wants to achieve. Before generative AI, this was mostly about recognising keywords.
In an AI-first world, customer experience involves expressing intent and receiving intelligent, emotionally aware support that is fast, relevant, and humane. Loyalty will come from trust in systems that understand you, act in your best interest, and evolve with your needs.
Today, companies utilise AI systems to monitor live voice conversations and provide human agents with guidance on how to better serve customers. Calls via video conferencing platforms now employ AI to remove background noise or add virtual backgrounds. It’s easy to imagine a future where a realistic avatar acts as your assistant when you’re unavailable to take calls. This is far from the days of simple voicemail.
Response Generation and Smart Actions
However, smart actions are challenging to coordinate in a business setting. How do you decide whether to offer a customer a refund or an upgrade to achieve the best customer satisfaction and loyalty? AI will increasingly handle these decisions from multiple already available options.
AI is now widely used for generating text responses in messaging and messengers, from WhatsApp and Webchat to SMS and its more recent arrival, Rich Communications Services (RCS). This ranges from simple smart replies to more complex action routines such as validating a person’s ID or checking their real disposable income. We can ascertain if someone is experiencing vulnerability, and AI-powered message routing and queue management help companies prioritise urgent or important conversations faster. For example, AI can flag language patterns that suggest distress or financial strain, prompting tailored responses like offering a payment break or referral to support services.
Conversational AI supports two-way dialogue with customers, enabling them to seek support, change plans, or check affordability without waiting in call queues. Tone, pace, and vocabulary all provide the AI with additional signals. This adds even more data to your AI generated vulnerability assessment. Anyone familiar with generative AI systems understands how this influences how we search for and evaluate information.
It’s easy to imagine asking a system about your cashflow health with a simple voice command. It feels different. It will feel even more different when the AI recognises you are worried about the cash flow situation.
The next generation of AI will develop entirely new ways to satisfy customers that we haven’t yet imagined. You might think of these as unstructured actions, as they have not been explicitly specified or approved. The term Agentic architecture is frequently used to describe this future.
If your goal is to book a holiday and an agentic system can plan your itinerary, find transport, and handle booking and payment, where is the user interface? Where is the middleman? Who oversees the process? This is all to be decided, but the future belongs to companies that understand that we won’t choose service options ourselves; we will simply ask services to create the right option for us.
What Makes Experiences Successful
Successful experiences share common traits. They are convenient, fast, and require minimal effort from customers. They are also more than basic transactions; they create meaning. Services from challenger banks act as brand experiences that communicate friendliness, convenience, and accessibility. These services learn about users over time, becoming both personalised and intelligently assisted.
These challenger banks don’t just show spending—they categorise expenses and display trends over time. When users set goals, these services help them save towards those targets. When users want to grow savings, they assist with investing.
Changing Traditional Industries
The credit and collections industry is following this path. Companies can no longer simply remind customers about missed payments and request payment. They must understand the context and circumstances of each individual. Just as you might get a payment plan when buying a car, companies must offer new repayment plans when circumstances change.
If you are missing payments or if payments are causing significant financial pressure, consider a future where you can ask a service to create a more suitable finance plan, find the right vendor to fulfil it, and present it back to you for approval.
The Evolution of Convenience
In the past, great experiences were defined by simplicity and speed, like completing a purchase with a single click and having it delivered the next day. Personalised social media platforms don’t wait for you to choose—they present content they know you’ll like; content you don’t even realise you want. The future of finance might offer instant, tailored financing options for any product or service while you’re still considering it.
You may have seen an AI generated video of a new car racing down a country road. Except it’s the car with the options you just selected, in the colours you wanted, and with the actual view a person your height would see from that seat. It is driving down the road, on the Italian coastline that the itinerary chose. You are pre-experiencing it. You love it. You want that experience.
This shift represents a fundamental change in how services will anticipate, simulate, and meet customer needs, especially in the moments that really matter. For industries like credit and collections, it’s about creating compassionate, adaptive services that respond to people’s real lives.
