Many businesses still treat AI as isolated pilots. While helpful in parts, it’s disconnected from the customer journey. The real opportunity isn’t in technology for technology’s sake. AI’s overlooked value is aligning how your teams work together for a better customer experience.
That’s the case Sylvain Grande, Chief Product Officer, PayFit, makes on a Loop podcast.
“AI changes the way we work,” he says. ”It changes the way we look at things, at processes, at the world. It’s about combining the power of the technology with the domain expertise of different teams. But you need both, and for that, it’s really where collaboration happens,” he adds.
Addressing the silo problem
Imagine a customer reaching out to support, product and sales and getting three different explanations. That’s what happens when teams operate in silos. AI can drive the opposite outcome by giving everyone a consistent source of truth.
Sylvain recommends starting with the basics: run joint training across departments, share working prompts and best practices, appoint cross-functional champions and create clear standards for everyone to follow.
“We will harness the power of AI when we get the foundational layers right and when we act on collaboration and training,” he says.
Making the voice of the customer a shared source of truth
The foundation for that source of truth lies in the voice of the customer. But in many organizations, the information is scattered across sales notes, support tickets, disparate databases and analytics. Unless aggregated, there’s no true picture.
AI makes it easier to unify those inputs and deliver them in a format any team can use.
“AI is actually one of the very best technologies to be able to assemble various data sets of large quantities,” Sylvain explains.
A simple monthly report with sentiment analysis, paired with an assistant that answers natural-language questions, creates shared context. Sales learns faster, product identifies patterns earlier and support teams prioritize more consistently.
A blended approach for better experience
Ultimately, this unified view enables a better customer experience by providing more clarity, speed and choice — namely a handover from tech to people.
For support delivery, Sylvain advises, “Prioritize AI for most things, but there should be a very easy and intuitive fallback to human support.”
AI and agentic systems can handle Level 1 and some Level 2 issues and must know when to escalate complex cases without causing friction. Pass the full context to the agent so the customer doesn’t have to repeat information.
This human-in-the loop approach is especially important for situations requiring empathy and nuanced expertise.
Building AI-driven alignment for better outcomes
AI has the potential to lower barriers between functions, but only if there’s alignment.
The path to this transformation? “Rethink everything you have learned while keeping your experience and intuition,” Sylvain says. Challenge what no longer serves, keep what does, and use AI to connect teams around a single view of the customer and a faster path to value.
