MAM
Brands are deploying AI, but failing customer experience: Wing Communications founder Shiva Bhavani
Using AI to enhance, not replace, human customer engagement.
MUMBAI: Brands in India are rapidly adopting conversational AI to manage customer interactions, but deployment often prioritizes cost-cutting over genuine engagement. For Shiva Bhavani, founder & CEO of Wing Communications, this approach risks eroding trust in markets where relationships matter as much as transactions. In this piece, Bhavani explains the common deployment failures that undermine customer experience, why authenticity and seamless human-AI integration are critical, and how brands can leverage AI responsibly to build long-term loyalty.
There is a moment most of us have experienced recently that perfectly captures where brand-customer relationships are heading, and not in a good direction. You reach out to a brand with a genuine problem. A billing issue, a service complaint, a question that requires actual context and judgment. What greets you is a chatbot that opens with artificial warmth, offers you five options that do not match your problem, loops you through a decision tree designed to deflect rather than resolve, and eventually, if you are persistent enough, transfers you to a human who has none of the context from the previous twenty minutes of your life you just lost.
This is conversational AI in practice for most Indian consumers today. And brands are deploying it at scale, convinced they are improving customer engagement, while quietly dismantling the very relationships they spent years and significant budgets building.
The Deployment Gap Nobody Is Talking About
The technology behind conversational AI has advanced faster than most people anticipated. Large language models can hold nuanced conversations, understand context, detect sentiment, and respond with a level of fluency that was genuinely impressive two years ago and is remarkable today.
The problem is not the technology. The problem is the gap between what the technology is capable of and how brands are actually deploying it.
Most brands are not deploying conversational AI to genuinely improve the customer experience. They are deploying it to reduce headcount, cut service costs, and handle volume at scale. The customer experience improvement is the talking point in the press release. The cost reduction is the actual brief.
That gap, between stated intent and operational reality, is what consumers are experiencing every time they interact with a brand’s AI-powered customer engagement system. And they are noticing.
When efficiency becomes abandonment
There is a fundamental misunderstanding embedded in how most brands have approached conversational AI deployment, and it comes down to confusing speed with service.
A chatbot that resolves a standard query in ninety seconds is genuinely useful. A chatbot that handles a straightforward FAQ interaction, processes a routine transaction, or provides instant status updates — these are legitimate use cases where conversational AI adds real value to the customer experience.
But brands have not stopped there. They have pushed conversational AI into territory it is not equipped to handle, complex complaints, emotionally charged interactions, situations requiring genuine empathy and judgment, because the operational logic is the same regardless of the complexity of the customer’s need.
If AI can handle the simple queries, why not route everything through AI first? The answer is that customer relationships are not built in the simple interactions. They are tested in the difficult ones. The moment a customer needs genuine help and gets a machine that cannot provide it is not a neutral experience. It is a trust withdrawal. And trust withdrawals compound.
The authenticity problem in the Indian market
The Indian consumer market has a specific characteristic that makes the reckless deployment of conversational AI particularly damaging, and that most global playbooks on AI customer engagement completely miss.
Indian consumers across demographics have an extraordinarily high sensitivity to genuine human engagement. The relationship between a customer and a brand in the Indian context is not transactional in the way Western market research often assumes. It is relational. The local kirana owner who knows your name and your preferences has not survived the arrival of modern retail because of price or convenience. He has survived because of relationship.
This is not sentiment. It is commercial reality. And it applies to modern brands just as directly.
When a brand deploys conversational AI that simulates human warmth without delivering genuine human engagement, that uses first names, casual language, and emotive responses while being structurally incapable of actually solving the customer’s problem, Indian consumers do not experience this as efficient service. They experience it as disrespect dressed up as friendliness.
The backlash is not always vocal. It is often silent. A customer who feels genuinely unheard does not always complain. They simply stop trusting. And in a market where word of mouth and community recommendation remain among the most powerful drivers of brand loyalty, silent disengagement is a commercial threat that no engagement dashboard will adequately capture.
What the media and entertainment sector understands that most brands don’t
Indian television’s audience operates at the intersection of media, entertainment, and brand communication, and there is a lesson from this sector that the broader brand ecosystem needs to absorb.
The media and entertainment industry has always understood something fundamental about audience relationships: the audience is not a user to be managed. It is a community to be genuinely engaged. The moment a broadcaster, a platform, or a content brand treats its audience as a problem to be handled efficiently rather than a relationship to be invested in, it begins losing that audience, not dramatically, but steadily and irreversibly.
Conversational AI deployed without genuine thought for the customer experience is the brand equivalent of automating your audience relationship. It sends a clear signal, your time and your problem are not worth a human being. We have optimized you.
Audiences in entertainment know when they are being served and when they are being processed. So do customers. The difference is just the vocabulary.
The three deployment failures brands must fix
Being specific matters here because the problem is not conversational AI itself. It is identifiable deployment failures that brands can actually address.Deploying AI as a barrier rather than a bridge. The most common failure is using conversational AI to prevent customers from reaching human support rather than to complement it. When AI is designed to deflect rather than resolve, customers experience it as obstruction. The fix is straightforward: AI should make it easier to get to the right solution, whether that solution is automated or human, not harder.
Simulating empathy without delivering it. An AI system that responds to a frustrated customer with “I completely understand how you feel” and then fails to solve the problem is worse than one that is straightforwardly transactional. False empathy is more damaging to trust than acknowledged limitation. Brands need to be honest in their AI communication design — warmth without capability is manipulation, not service.
Deploying without disclosure. The question of whether consumers know they are talking to an AI is not a minor UX consideration. It is an ethical one with direct commercial consequences. Consumers who discover mid-interaction that they have been engaging with an AI they believed was human do not feel served. They feel deceived. In an era of heightened consumer awareness and social media amplification, that discovery is a reputational risk every time it happens.
What genuine AI-powered customer engagement looks like
The answer is not to reject conversational AI in customer engagement. The capability is real and the right deployment genuinely improves the customer experience.
Genuine AI-powered engagement starts with an honest brief. Not “how do we reduce service costs with AI,” but “how do we use AI to make every customer interaction faster, more relevant, and more genuinely useful?”
That brief produces a different deployment. AI handles what it is genuinely better at — instant availability, consistent information, routine transactions, intelligent routing. Human engagement handles what it is irreplaceable for — complex problems, emotional situations, relationship moments that determine long-term loyalty.
The integration between the two is seamless and honest. Customers know what they are interacting with. Transitions between AI and human support are smooth and context-preserving. And the measure of success is not cost per interaction but customer trust over time.
This is not a utopian vision. Several brands are already doing this well. They are not the ones who deployed conversational AI the fastest. They are the ones who deployed it most honestly.
The future belongs to brands that earn it
Conversational AI will be a standard part of customer engagement infrastructure within three years. That is not a prediction. It is already happening.
The question is not whether brands will use it. It is whether they will use it in a way that builds or erodes the consumer trust that determines long-term commercial viability.
The brands that treat conversational AI as a relationship tool, one that requires the same thoughtfulness, honesty, and genuine consumer orientation as any other touchpoint, will build engagement advantages that compound.
The ones that treat it as a cost-cutting mechanism dressed in customer experience language will discover, on a timeline they cannot fully predict, that efficiency purchased at the expense of trust is the most expensive investment a brand can make.
The future of customer engagement is not conversational AI. It is what brands choose to do with it.
Note: The views expressed in this article are solely the author’s and do not necessarily reflect our own.
Brands
CNBC-Awaaz Udaan wraps debut season, gears up for bigger second run
Pan-India campus drive empowers youth with real-world career skills
MUMBAI: CNBC-Awaaz has wrapped up the first season of its campus initiative, Udaan Taiyari Kal Ki, with plans already in motion for a bigger and broader second edition.
Run in partnership with UTI Mutual Fund, the programme travelled across more than 10 cities and 18 leading institutions, including top management schools, aiming to bridge the gap between academic learning and workplace readiness.
At its core, Udaan tackled a familiar challenge. While millions graduate each year, many step into the professional world underprepared for its financial, emotional and strategic demands. The initiative sought to change that by offering practical insights into investing basics, career planning, decision-making and mental resilience.
The scale was notable. Over 3,800 final-year postgraduate students participated directly, with sessions spanning cities such as Delhi, Mumbai, Ahmedabad and Bengaluru. The impact extended further through television and digital platforms, turning the programme into a hybrid learning experience.
Each campus stop featured a mix of panel discussions, fireside chats and hands-on workshops, bringing newsroom-style conversations directly to students. The format struck a chord, with strong engagement reflecting a growing appetite for real-world skills beyond textbooks.
Reflecting on the journey, CNBC-Awaaz managing editor Anuj Singhal said, “UDAAN is one of our most engaging and interactive IPs, built around empowering India’s youth. It felt good to be back on college campuses, engaging directly with students. These conversations go beyond classrooms, helping students gain real-world perspective and confidence as they step into their careers.”
From the partner’s perspective, the focus remained on financial awareness. UTI Mutual Fund MD and CEO Vetri Subramaniam said, “It is important to engage with students who are on the brink of their corporate journey. We need to guide them on financial investments so they can begin early and build long-term habits.”
Highlighting the broader vision, Network18 CEO of English and Business News Smriti Mehra said, “Through Udaan, CNBC-Awaaz is taking real-world knowledge directly to campuses while shaping the next generation of leaders. The response shows a clear need for platforms that go beyond academics.”
With its first season striking a strong chord, Udaan has positioned itself as more than just a campus event. As it gears up for Season 2, the initiative looks set to expand its footprint and continue preparing young India for the leap from campus to corporate life.
