97: Why I'm betting my business and my career on customer experience

Subscribe to my new podcast, The Gobsmack Podcast here. Summary: In this episode I explore why customer experience, not AI, is the real competitive advantage of the future, and how service businesses can escape commoditisation by entering the experience economy. 4 things you'll learn in this episode Why 'predicting the future' is no longer a viable business strategy in the age of AI, and what to focus on instead. How AI is collapsing the margins of service industries, and why doing things that don't scale becomes your real edge. The four economic stages every business sits in (commodity, product, service, experience), and why climbing this ladder is the biggest unlock for premium pricing. The data that justifies investing in customer experience, including how it can grow revenue 25% faster and explain up to 60% of organic growth.

Transcription: The world of business is changing in ways that are equal parts mind-bending and terrifying. Needless to say, it's Artificial Intelligence that is acting as the absolute driving force of this transformational shifts in human civilisation. It's not only the change, but the rate of change. We're in the middle of the singularity. In technical terms, this is '…the point where artificial intelligence becomes capable of improving itself so rapidly that technological progress accelerates beyond normal human ability to predict, control, or understand.' (OpenAI, 2026). Again, '…beyond normal human ability to predict, control, or understand.' It's our inability to 'predict' that really interests me. And the interesting part of that word is the idea that until now, the world of business has been built on the idea that by predicting human needs, desires and behaviours, we can build and position our businesses for success. This is often referred to as 'skating to where the puck is going'. The concept is pretty self explanatory. It's an ice hockey term. The puck in ice hockey moves so fast, that by the time you get to it, it's gone. Instead, the best players have learnt to skate not to where the puck is, but to where they predict it will be. They 'skate to where the puck is going'. There's that word again, 'predict'. They skate to where they predict the puck will be. But remember, the pending AI singularity is characterised by changes that are '…beyond normal human ability to predict…'. We no longer know where the puck is going. And so we don't know in which distance we should skate. Business owners and entrepreneurs who have always built their success off the back of prediction are now playing ice hockey with a blindfold on. This is something I've thought a lot about over the last few years. And it's made me wonder if we might be asking the wrong question. The question shouldn't be 'where is the puck going?', but 'is there a puck that's staying still?'. If the puck isn't moving, we avoid the need to make predications all together. There's another convenient ice hockey term that allows us to continue this analogy, 'freezing the puck'. It's when the goalie covers the puck to stop play. The question becomes, 'in a world of unprecedented change, what will stay the same?' What is the frozen puck? The answer, as best as I can see, comes down to a single word. Experience. The human desire to live an experience. Something that they can actively participate in. Something that makes people feel a certain way. Something that gives people stories to tell. These experiences will be the currency of the future. Singing Beatles songs while toasting marshmallows around a campfire with the people you love. Getting clay under your fingernails while crafting a bowl on a pottery wheel with your best friend. Watching the sun set with your feet in the Indian Ocean, then racing your kids up a sand dune in time to watch it set again. People are always searching for the meaning of life. These things are better and more important, because they allow you to find meaning IN life. And so, I'm going all i