When customers, companies, and products collaborate
Product decisions shaped by what customers value. Pricing grounded in real value received. Service that anticipates rather than reacts. That is the future that AI-embedded CX can deliver.
My last several posts have been circling around one idea, which is that when the customer, the product, and the company can operate as three peers rather than as two parties working around a passive third, something better becomes possible. I have called this value co-creation. The implications of this symbiotic relationship are many, and requires a fresh view of where to look.
Before I get to what co-creation produces, I want to be clear about what it actually is, because the word gets thrown around a lot in a way that makes it sound like something a company can decide to do. It is not. Co-creation is not a strategy the enterprise applies to the customer. It emerges, or it does not, from the three actors being in some kind of structured conversation with each other. The company cannot produce it alone. The customer cannot produce it alone, even with a great agent. The product certainly cannot produce it alone. The three have to actually be working together, and the trust framework that lets them do that has to be real. Without both of those conditions, what you get is a nicer-sounding version of the deflection era, not something structurally different.
When those conditions do hold, though, real things start happening that were not possible before. Let me try to describe three of them.
Product decisions start getting shaped by what customers actually value in use. That sounds like an obvious statement, but think about how product decisions actually get made in most companies today. Someone runs research. Another group looks at usage data. Then the product manager forms a hypothesis. The development team builds against the hypothesis, ships, and then watches to see whether the market responds the way the hypothesis predicted. The gap between what the product team thought and what customers actually value is where most product failures live. In a three-body arrangement, the customer’s agent is already telling you what the customer needed, and the product itself is already telling you what is actually being used and where. The gap does not close automatically, but at least you have the information required to close it without a six-month research cycle. Even faster when the product is not physical.
Pricing is the second thing that changes, and this one is more uncomfortable than most companies want to admit. Pricing has historically been an estimate on how the market values a product or service. It’s a well-informed guess in most cases, but still a guess, tested through what the market accepts. The customer knows what the product/service is worth to them, but rarely is an active participant in the pricing strategy. In intelligent product can model how much value it is producing, but has rarely had a voice in the pricing conversation. When both of them can contribute, pricing becomes something closer to a negotiation between what the customer is getting and what the company is actually delivering. That does not mean prices go down. Sometimes it means they should be higher, because the value is greater than the current price captures. What it means is that pricing gets grounded in something real rather than being set by whoever in the room speaks with the most conviction.
Service is the third thing and probably the one I am most confident about. For thirty years service has been measured on how fast it can close a ticket a customer already had to open. That model made sense in a world where the product could not signal problems on its own. In the near future, the product will already be flagging where users are getting stuck before those users have to write a ticket. The customer’s agent will already be flagging patterns of unmet expectation before they escalate. Service gets rebuilt around receiving these signals and acting on them. That is a big change for a function that has spent thirty years being reactive.
That said, co-creation is not simply a marketing message. There are a significant set of operational changes that will be required for enterprises to arrive at a technical architecture that enables the three-body relationship. And, technology alone may enable this shift, but it will also require a fundamental rewiring of how to operate in this new dynamic. That shift will be one of the biggest challenges for the next decade.