A week ago we got senior CX leaders across Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland in a room and asked who's approved an AI investment recently. Every hand up.
However, when we asked “Who can articulate the ROI?” Radio silence.
That gap is the whole story right now.
The demos are easy to love. Summarisation, classification – hardly twelve seconds and you're sold.
But the real question was never whether agents can act. It's whether they can act precisely, safely, and without blowing your token budget in a regulated environment.
That's where the conversation gets honest.
Structured memory that cuts token usage by 95% – so the agent gets the right data, not all the data. Governance where someone owns it when an agent misbehaves at scale. And the discipline to start with one napkin-sized problem, not ten.
Thank you to the folks from Serko, ASB Bank, Air New Zealand, Tower Insurance, The Warehouse Group, 2degrees and more for keeping it real.
Precise enough to act. Safe enough to trust. Efficient enough to scale.
That's the bar now.