Using AI to Create a More Human and Hospitable Service Experiences

The Question Is How, Not If

AI adoption among brands and consumers is skyrocketing, resetting customer experience expectations around ease, immediacy, and highly personalized interactions. In most categories, incorporating AI into the customer experience is no longer a luxury, it’s essential for sustained relevance, differentiation and survival.

According to our research, while adoption is on the rise, consumer sentiment toward AI is going down. Many consumers are increasingly anxious and fear a life processed through an algorithm vs. truly lived. They want greater trust, more meaningful human connection, and added value from experiences that thoughtfully pair emotionally intelligent AI with real human interactions.

This insight has considerable implications for the future service strategy and delivery of brands, especially those focused on hospitality and front-line service. It raises the questions about:

• The role of AI alongside human employees in a modern service model that builds emotional resonance, trust, and connection.
• How to ensure a brand’s ethos and differentiators are amplified rather than swept aside in an AI-enabled service model.
• How the service model should be designed for agents playing an increasingly prominent role in the customer service journey.
• How front-line human employees can take on more meaningful and fulfilling roles through the empowerment of AI.

For brands, the question isn’t whether to deploy AI into the front-line service experience — it’s how (and where and for whom) to ensure human connection, emotional resonance and trust, along with signature brand differentiation.

Meeting Consumer Expectations for an AI-Enabled Experience

Leading with the consumer and their expectations is the starting point for brands looking to enhance or reimagine their hospitality and service experience for the age of AI.

What we’ve observed through our multi-year research on consumer behavior and sentiment around agentic AI is that consumer expectations have moved beyond the questions many brands are still debating. For consumers, it’s not a question about whether a task should be handled by a human or AI. What matters is the value delivered and quality of the experience created — with AI often making an experience feel more human by maintaining and relating to consumers’ deep and personal context.

Three expectations frame what consumers want from service and hospitality brands in the age of agentic AI: Emotionally intelligent, anticipatory, and ambient.

Emotionally intelligent: Consumers value service experiences that don’t just get it right, they demonstrate an empathetic understanding of their unique needs and circumstances. While this has always been intuitively true, AI, now makes emotional intelligence a competitive battleground. Brands can now demonstrate emotional intelligence at an unprecedented scale with agentic AI’s ability to hold persistent memory and process millions of contextual data points.

Anticipatory:  Consumers want brands to anticipate their needs and address them proactively before they become issues. AI and machine learning’s predictive capabilities have enabled anticipatory interaction to reach new possibilities. Despite this, many brands are still focusing primarily on GenAI enabled chat to enhance the experience. 

Ambient: Consumers value service that does the hard work in the background, creating a seamless experience. This paradigm of ambient service has been long established particularly in the luxury hospitality space. But AI is making ambient service more accessible and less costly through agentic interactions held by frontline staff or sometimes by consumers themselves.

Brands that successfully augment frontline and hospitality experiences with AI and human interactions design around these three expectations, so the results feel trustworthy, authentic, and engaging as an extension of their brand. These brands aren’t choosing between AI and human – they are thoughtfully intertwining them where it matters, reimagining key elements of the customer journey and employee’s workflows. Let’s unpack that more with some examples.

Consumer Expectations for AI-Enabled Service

AI-Enabled Service Pioneers

We initially set out to identify best-in-class pioneers augmenting the front-line with AI while balancing human resonance with connectivity. What our research revealed instead was a landscape still largely in flux: companies are excelling at certain parts of the customer service journey, but a true end-to-end story has yet to fully emerge.

By looking at these examples of companies advancing key parts of the journey, we can identify patterns and best practices that bring us closer to achieving a model for truly empathetic, AI-enabled frontline services.

Verizon Wireless

In the AI age, consumers expect customer service to deliver better outcomes with lower wait times. In response, Verizon partnered with Google Cloud to bring generative AI, including Vertex AI, Gemini models, and the Customer Engagement Suite, into its frontline service operations. The goal wasn’t to automate employees out of the equation, but to hand them a smarter toolkit for higher-quality customer care.

Verizon’s Gemini-powered agents, including the “Personal Research Assistant,” predict customer needs and generate tailored solutions that customer service staff can use in live interactions. A separate “Problem Solver” agent gives frontline workers personalized, step-by-step troubleshooting guidance, eliminating manual searches, and helping associates find the right answer quickly.

Deployed across 28,000 representatives, the initiative achieved 95% comprehensive answerability for customer inquiries and a 40% increase in sales. Most importantly, Verizon was able to augment their human employees to strengthen customer relationships rather than replace them.

Marriott International

As the hospitality industry shifts from digital-first to AI-native models, Marriott International has emerged as a trailblazer by redefining service for the “agent economy,” where what LLMs answer matters as much as what humans search. Marriott is pioneering a dual-customer architecture that treats agents — including personal GPTs, corporate travel bots, and voice assistants — as a distinct and vital customer segment.

To support this shift, Marriott has made its inventory and real-time amenities machine-readable, allowing agents to negotiate complex guest preferences, such as allergies or specific gym equipment, and find – then book – the right stay. This strategic focus on the “Agent Customer” offloads the mechanical friction of search, negotiation, and transaction to seamless AI-to-AI communication, which clears the path for deeper human connection. The guest gets an invisible layer of anticipatory service that provides high-quality recommendations without the current administrative burden of travel planning — leaving more room for the “Spirit to Serve” that defines Marriott’s brand.

In addition, by making information more machine-readable, Marriott creates loyalty with AI agents early. This sets up its brand and loyalty programs to be at the forefront of how modern users search and navigate the internet. In an era where efficiency often clashes with empathy, Marriott shows that becoming agent-optimized can make a company more human-centric.

The Home Depot

As The Home Depot continues to drive growth by offering not just products, but expert project guidance customers can’t get elsewhere, GenAI is playing a critical role in how the company scales that experience.

For decades, customers have gone to The Home Depot for high-quality, hands-on advice from their iconic, orange-aproned associates. But in a world where consumers often start and end their journey interfacing with LLMs, the retailer has had to quickly develop a suite of GenAI tools and experiences for DIYers and pros that match the care and expertise that is synonymous with brand.

Two of these solutions, Magic Apron and Outdoor Assistant, help users find answers and expertise they need instantly, 24/7. Customers can ask anything, from “What aisle can I find this pressure washer in?” to “How can I build a shaded area for my back patio, and what houseplants thrive in the shade?” and receive responses that are not only correct but aligned with The Home Depot’s tone of voice and customer experience guidelines.

Rather than offering the generic chatbot responses consumers have come to expect, The Home Depot delivers an AI experience rooted in thoughtful expertise and design to give customers the confidence that even the most complex projects are achievable.

Creating A World-Class AI-Enabled Service Experience

To help brands build a more modern AI-enabled service experience, we apply Prophet’s Human Centered Experience Model in the following ways:

We start with Ambition — The Why. “What service experience vision, strategy, and principles will create the most value for your key audiences, leveraging both human and AI pathways?” This becomes the North Star, ensuring every touchpoint decision ladders up to a coherent purpose and aligns with the brand’s promise. Without ambition, you have activity without direction.

We then use the outer layer of the Human Centered Experience Model as the diagnostic backbone to assess and reimagine critical touchpoints in the end-to-end service journey, from discovery through long-term loyalty cultivation. Specifically, we address:

• Audiences — Who? Who do we need and want to serve? In any critical point within the service experience, there is the customer, who may be human, machine or human with machine, but also the employee, or other stakeholders, each with specific needs and circumstances to be addressed.
• Contexts — Where? What channels, products, services, and environments will we meet them with relevant, desirable experiences? Contexts have exploded in complexity — spanning mobile apps, voice assistants, wearables, and conversational AI interfaces – many of which sit outside a brand’s direct control. Without context awareness, experiences become inconsistent across touchpoints.
• Expression — How? How might intuitive language, symbols, cues, gestures, and rituals bring our ambition to life? Expression is where strategy becomes tangible — through the words you use, the visual language, the micro-interactions that create emotional resonance, and needs to ensure survival through AI translation and summarization. Without coherent expression, experiences feel generic or, worse, inauthentic.