Quiet CX Upgrades You’re Skipping While Chasing AI Fireworks

“Too much information running through my brain” —the Police (“Too Much Information”)

The AI hype machine is so loud that vendors need ear protection to pitch a road map. Every briefing, press release, and webinar title arrives sprayed with AI glitter. Try to discuss anything else and the market slides its chair back. Analysts like me are clearly not blameless. We get pitched 12 autonomous whatchamacallits before lunch and start grading on a curve where only AI adjectives count. So practical upgrades that help customers today get buried in footnotes or cut from the deck.

Funny thing, though: Those upgrades keep shipping and saving money; they just need someone to turn them on.

Exhibit A: passkeys. A former colleague called passwords “a tollbooth that charges in rage.” Customers forget them, agents babysit resets, fraudsters surf the wave. Swap in passkeys and the mess shrinks. People authenticate with something they have and something they are, so checkouts move faster and recovery stops becoming a scavenger hunt. Queues stop clogging with “I cannot log in” calls, and finance sees fewer write-offs from credential stuffing.

Exhibit B: RCS. Texting with customers finally behaves like modern messaging across the major phone tribes. Rich media arrives intact and read receipts actually mean something, while sender verification restores a whiff of trust. Service teams can ask for a photo and receive something usable, or present a quick menu to capture a warranty number or schedule a delivery window. The ping-pong that turns simple fixes into nine-message sagas fades. Customers feel heard because the channel acts like a grown-up.

Both examples share a theme: no hallucinations, no model governance drama, no new job title. Just measurable improvements that clean up journeys you already run. Want a simple plan without a sacred strategy deck? Pick three funnels where drop-off hurts and push passkeys there, then track resets per thousand sign-ins and completed checkouts per hundred visits. Choose two text-heavy intents where photos or structured choices matter, move those flows to RCS with plain opt-ins and a clear fallback to voice, then track handle time, first-contact resolution, and customer effort before and after. Publish the deltas so the spreadsheet warriors can relax.

Why do these basics struggle for airtime? A sane upgrade rarely trends; it simply works. Crowds primed for sentient chat bubbles look for spectacle and miss the relief when friction disappears. People breeze through authentication instead of cursing a reset link. They fix problems by texting a photo rather than repeating a serial number over a choppy line. Agents spend less time on grunt work and more on real issues, which shows up in quality scores and attrition without a town hall or a mural.

If leadership wants AI fireworks, fine. Pave the runway while the rocket counts down; passkeys and RCS are the asphalt. Spending stays modest and results arrive fast. These upgrades set the table for whatever intelligent automation appears later. Clean sign-in and a robust messaging channel amplify future agentic magic because the foundation stops wobbling.

One last request from a friendly analyst. If you brief me on CX next quarter, bring the AI pitch, but then bring two slides on nitty gritty tech improvements like passkeys and RCS. Show the metrics that moved. Show the queue that shrank. Show the fraud that failed. The hype machine will keep humming, yet the companies banking quiet wins will walk out with clearer vision and calmer operations. Customers will wonder when the brand became so easy to deal with. The answer will be simple: Someone decided to ship sanity.

Ian Jacobs is vice president and lead analyst at Opus Research.

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