406. Rick DeLisi. AI ROI.
Rick DeLisi
April 9, 2026
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In this episode, Rick DeLisi, Lead Research Analyst at Glia and co-author of the bestselling business book The Effortless Experience, discusses findings from his research showing that despite widespread AI adoption in customer service, less than 30% of organizations achieve full value from their investments.
DeLisi identifies this performance gap as the "AI maturity gap," where organizations implement technology without operational readiness to support it. The problem is not adoption but adaptation, with most companies treating AI primarily as a cost-cutting tool or a task performing tool, rather than recognizing its potential to transform contact centers from cost centers into growth engines.
Key points from the discussion:
Organizations focus narrowly on efficiency and cost reduction rather than leveraging AI as an insight generator, revenue driver, and experience enhancer.
Barriers to ROI include organizational readiness gaps, integration challenges with existing systems, trust and buy-in concerns from leadership and frontline staff, and measurement attribution difficulties.
The measurement challenge extends beyond simple call deflection metrics to quantifying AI's true value across customer experience, agent performance, and business intelligence.
High-performing organizations approach AI differently by making operational changes beyond technology deployment and securing leadership commitment to transformation rather than just implementation.
Building on principles from The Effortless Experience, where low-effort customer experiences drive loyalty more than delight, positioning AI's primary role as removing friction rather than adding features.
Contact centers can strategically reposition from service endpoints to intelligence hubs that inform broader business decisions when AI maturity reaches advanced stages.
DeLisi emphasizes that the gap between AI adoption and value realization is widening, making operational readiness and cultural transformation as critical as technological capabilities for achieving meaningful returns on AI investments.
Rick DeLisi is Lead Research Analyst at Glia, co-author of the bestselling business book The Effortless Experience and a multi-time contributor to the Harvard Business Review with more than 20 years of experience in the customer experience industry.
Glia is the leading AI customer interactions solution for banks and credit unions. Their platform unifies AI and human agents across every voice and digital interaction with our proprietary ChannelLess® Architecture. With Glia’s AI for All™, organizations solve the tradeoff between efficiency and experience by using AI to automate interactions, elevate agent performance, and transform reporting and insights for leaders. Glia has been named a Deloitte Technology Fast 500™ company for five consecutive years and is certified as a Great Place to Work (with a 98% employee satisfaction rating). With an industry-leading 72 NPS score across over 700 organizations, the company has raised over $150 million in funding from top investors and was recently valued at over $1 billion.
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