Fostering breakthrough AI innovation through customer-back engineering

Sponsored Fostering breakthrough AI innovation through customer-back engineering Agentic AI is helping organizations completely reimagine core banking processes and operations from the customer perspective, rather than simply making incremental improvements. In partnership withCapital One Despite years of digitization, organizations capture less than one-third of the value expected from digital investments, according to McKinsey research. That’s because most big companies begin with technological capabilities and bolt applications onto them, rather than starting with customer needs and working backward to technology solutions. Not prioritizing the customer can create fragmented solutions; disjointed customer experiences; and ultimately, failed transformations. Organizations that achieve outsized results from AI flip the script. They adopt a “customer-back engineering” mindset, putting customers at the heart of technology transformation. It’s a strategy in which products and services are developed with the customer experience first in mind, including the customers’ challenges, needs, and expectations. Product development teams then work backward in a nimble and agile way to find the steps necessary to design and build solutions that achieve the desired experience. “When you get your engineers closer to customers, you get a lot more sideways innovation,” says Ashish Agrawal, managing vice president of business cards and payments tech at Capital One. “That leads to a multiplier effect, because engineers can approach a problem from a different dimension that can be unique to the sales or product perspective.” The case for customer-centricity in engineering Engineers are problem-solvers by nature, says Agrawal. When they hear about challenges customers are experiencing, or how they are using products and services in the real world, they can devise ways to efficiently address customer needs, since they are naturally closer to systems and data than many other teams across the company. “Fostering a customer-centric culture has a motivational effect on engineers when they actually start seeing how the core changes they’re making, or the features they’re adding, are having a direct impact on the lives of customers,” says Agrawal. It also takes discipline. Agrawal explains that Capital One has set a goal for every engineer in his organization to establish several touchpoints with customers throughout the year in different forms, including: - Digital empathy sessions to observe user journeys and identify where users hit friction - Embedded customer support for periods of time to deepen understanding of servicing needs - Engineering ride-alongs, in which engineers join customer success, sales, and support staff on calls or on-site visits - Hackathon competitions to build solutions around real customer problems The AI opportunities with customer-centricity “The biggest challenge engineers within large companies face is a lack of direct access to customers,” says Agrawal. “This can make it harder for technologists to work with customers to identify problems and innovate solutions.” AI has accelerated the challenges as well as the opportunities. The lifecycle of launching products has become significantly faster. But the good news is that engineers are closer to the data that feeds into AI, so they can more rapidly apply AI-informed data techniques to solve customer problems. Agrawal outlines…