New Delhi, Jan 26 (IANS): Consumers in the Asia-Pacific region are expected to spend $32 billion via AI agents that run independently on their smartphones to programmatically shop for goods, services and considered purchases, according to a new report.

AI has an integral role to provide highly-personalised experiences for customers to help the region’s businesses differentiate themselves from competitors.

Customer experience (CX) executives will adjust their business strategies based on such initiatives and seek to incorporate a more AI-infused approach in their campaigns, according to an IDC report.

Tech-driven CX enhancements have always been Asia-Pacific retailers’ top go-to differentiator in a highly commoditised market with indistinguishable products and services, said Abhishek Kumar, associate research director, head of AP Enterprise Applications and CX, IDC Asia/Pacific.

A key challenge for them is to refocus IT and digital initiatives to improve operational efficiencies.

Many look to AI to modernise and unify their underlying data infrastructure, breaking down existing organisational silos, moving towards a holistic experience-orchestrated (X-O) approach that creates meaningful value for all key stakeholders and not just customers, he mentioned.

According to the report, this AI pivot for CX means truly integrating AI into every aspect of business operations to drive growth and stay competitive.

IDC predicts by 2028, 40 per cent of CX vendors will shift to new, outcome-based, pricing models making the value exchange for their clients more transparent and improving the monetisation of their AI investment.

As AI implementations scale, human-in-the-loop approaches will be eliminated, resulting in 25 per cent of CX teams creating new, dedicated roles for the systemic governance of AI by 2028, said the report.

The report further stated that seeing value in referral growth and in controlling costs, by 2028, 30 per cent of A2000 companies will have restructured and aligned their customer-facing teams under a CRO to optimise CX outcomes.