In competitive, customer-focused markets, speed is everything. Not in serving your customers, though that’s essential. It’s the speed at which you deliver a better experience than the one you're offering today. In an experience management (XM) platform, we’ve moved beyond collecting data and reviewing dashboards. Now you need a program that interprets feedback in real time, connects insights across functions and the full experience journey, and surfaces what matters most, all before your competition does.
That’s where AI comes in, but not as a bolt-on feature or an afterthought. AI is evolving into a core driver of how your XM program delivers on its purpose: to create exceptional brand, customer, and employee experiences that lead to greater loyalty, retention, and growth. But this is the future, so you don’t just want to experiment with AI around the edges, you want to use it to serve your core strategy. Done right, that gives you a head start and a higher top speed.
If your XM program isn’t built with AI specifically designed to address your core objectives at its foundation, you’re not just falling behind, you’re racing with an underpowered engine.
The pressure is real: why legacy XM approaches are falling behind
Most XM platforms were built for a different era where static dashboards, survey metrics, and manual interpretation were enough to drive decisions. In that world, the most successful providers were those that could distill that information into actionable insights for brands. In today’s environment, those legacy approaches are evolving to deliver actionable insights faster and more efficiently.
While AI has been able to improve bandwidth, the organizational data structure under the AI is becoming more important to consider. Many experience programs rely on outdated data models that weren’t designed to work with AI. As a result, even when organizations attempt to layer in AI tools, they run into friction: inconsistent data models, unreliable insights, and AI that needs constant teaching and adjustment just to be usable.
That’s not just a technical hiccup, it’s a strategic disadvantage.
Without AI-native architecture, brands face real limitations:
- Too much feedback and not enough insight
- Siloes across brand, customer, and employee experience that obscure the full picture
- Missed opportunities for personalization and proactive operational improvement
And while those brands are stuck trying to connect the dots, competitors with smarter infrastructure are already making moves and responding in real time to deeper insights and delivering better experiences, faster.
Legacy programs and strategies weren’t built to do what modern customers, and modern brands, now demand. The longer brands wait to evolve, the wider the gap becomes.
What AI-powered experience management unlocks
For years, the goals of experience management have been the same: understand what’s happening across your business, identify the moments that matter, and act quickly to improve them. But as the volume and complexity of feedback explodes, the path to those goals has become increasingly difficult to navigate unless your program is powered by intentionally built AI from the inside out.
When AI is embedded in your XM platform—not just added on top—it changes the game entirely.
Instead of hunting through dashboards and interpreting charts, teams can ask direct questions and get focused answers. AI can analyze structured and unstructured data at scale, pulling out not just what’s being said, but what it means and what to do about it.
Here’s what that unlocks:
- Precision: Context-aware, sentiment-smart models can capture nuance, find patterns, and even forecast which actions will have the greatest impact on the most critical parts of your experience strategy.
- Scale: Whether you’re managing insights across 50 locations or 5,000, AI helps deliver consistent, comparable insights that don’t get lost in the noise or bogged down by manual review.
- Speed: Immediate analysis means teams don’t have to wait for a weekly recap or monthly report. You can uncover and unpack trends in real time, while there’s still time to respond and correct course.
- Inter-connectivity: With the right platform, AI can help you drive unified experience management by combining your BX, CX, and EX strategy under one platform—connecting the dots between how your brand is perceived, what your customers feel, and what your people deliver.
- Potential: This isn’t about replacing your team’s expertise. It’s about helping them go further and faster with sharper insights and less friction.
The idea is to go beyond incremental improvement to redefine the way and the speed that your team works to improve experiences and drive business results.
Not all AI is created equal
It’s easy to assume all AI-powered platforms are delivering the same value, but that’s not the case. Many providers are rushing to integrate AI into systems that weren’t built to support it. As a result, you get functionality that is limited by outdated data models, inconsistent structures, and rigid architecture.
This bolt-on approach lowers the ceiling on what AI can do.
To unlock meaningful, scalable performance, the data foundation matters. A data model purpose-built for AI enables:
- Efficient development of new AI applications
- Faster onboarding and fewer custom configurations
- Reliable insights even as volume and complexity grow
That’s why SMG built Ignite®, our new AI-native data platform, from the ground up. Ignite standardizes how experience data is collected and structured, eliminating client-specific quirks that lead to manual processing and drag down performance. With Ignite, our AI agents don’t just work—they deliver real value right out of the box.
But a data platform alone isn’t enough.
To generate useful, trustworthy insights, you need expertise behind the models. Just because AI can find a trend doesn’t mean that trend is meaningful. With over 30 years of XM experience, SMG has built that expertise directly into the platform, so the insights our AI surfaces are the ones that drive smarter decisions and not just more noise.
The difference between AI that’s merely functional and AI that’s truly future-ready starts at the foundation. And most platforms just weren’t built with that future in mind.
Raising the ceiling on what’s possible with AI in XM
AI shouldn’t just make your experience management program more efficient; it should expand what your program is capable of.
That’s SMG’s vision for Ignite. We didn’t just want to tack on AI. We wanted to create a platform where AI scales faster and delivers on our core promise: insights that drive meaningful action at every level of your organization. Ignite enables SMG to deliver the same actionable intelligence we’re known for, but with more frequency, more flexibility, and a higher opportunity for potential.
That starts with redefining what experience management actually means.
Today’s brands need to manage the entire experience journey from designing the experience to delivering the moments that truly drive loyalty. And brands need to unify experience management at the brand, customer, and employee level to find cross-functional connections. Ignite is designed to work with AI from the ground up and across functions, creating a smarter, more agile way to manage and interact with experience data. It gives your team the power to move beyond response and analysis into foresight.
In a world where the race to improve is accelerating, the XM winners won’t just be the ones who adopt AI. They’ll be the ones who use it to serve their core purpose: delivering experiences that create forever-customers.
Ready to go further, faster?
AI is no longer optional, and not all AI is created equal.
To stay competitive, it’s not enough to adopt any AI. Your experience management program needs a platform that’s built to maximize it. SMG’s Ignite platform was designed from the ground up for AI, giving brands the infrastructure to uncover deeper, more meaningful insights faster and without constant support.
Reach out today to learn how SMG’s AI strategy helps brands outpace the competition by finding and focusing on what matters most from how you design experiences to delivering moments that create lifetime-loyal customers.
