We are in the middle of the biggest business transformation since electrification. The World Economic Forum's 2025 Future of Jobs Report names customer service among the most exposed occupations globally, forecasting 92 million jobs displaced by 2030.
MIT's 2025 State of AI in Business report found 95 percent of enterprise AI pilots are delivering no measurable impact on P&L. Across the world's largest companies, almost none has a standalone chief customer officer at executive level. Business is redesigning customer operations without customer leadership.
That is the silent CX crisis. Loud customers. Regulators moving in. Burning out employees. Quietly disappearing leadership.
The role is shrinking
CCW Europe Digital surveyed more than 100 senior CX leaders this year. Twelve months on, there were 13 percent fewer dedicated customer leaders on their books.
Yet 94 percent of boards still call CX a strategic priority. Ambition is up. Ownership is down.
Apple, Amazon, Meta, Walmart, JPMorgan Chase – none has a chief customer officer on the executive committee. Walmart created the role in 2018 and hired Janey Whiteside. She left in 2022. The role has not been replaced.
AI decisions reshaping customer operations are increasingly made by IT, procurement and transformation – mandates of efficiency and cost. Customer outcome becomes secondary because no one in the room is accountable for defending it.
The customer role is not being abolished in headlines. It is vanishing on org charts. Quietly. One reorganization at a time.
The customer becomes a report
LinkedIn has 1.3 billion members. Meta 3.58 billion daily users. Apple and Amazon hundreds of millions each. None has a chief customer officer. These are platforms whose product is the customer relationship – the customer was supposed to be wired into every leader's job.
But look at what happened. The voice of the customer has been reclassified as insight – a monthly report, a quarterly slide deck, a color-coded NPS trend. None of which has a seat at the table.
The CMO owns brand. The CIO owns technology. Neither owns the customer.
When everyone owns the customer, no one does.
I spent six months this year trying to get my LinkedIn profile verified. When I went public, I was offered the head of customer escalations and the office of two vice presidents. Each owned a piece. None owned the customer.
The customer is not managed. The customer is processed – by default, not by design.
Metrics without meaning
CX is the most measured function in the business – response time, first contact resolution, CSAT, NPS, effort scores, sentiment. More dashboards than finance has. Not one is the language the CFO uses.
AI procurement walks into the budget meeting with a productivity number. The customer function walks in with another NPS dashboard. One of those wins the room.
HuddleCX research puts the per-employee swing between weak and strong customer leadership at US$21,000 a year – $3.2 million annually for a 150-person operation. That is the kind of number that wins the room.
The crisis on the front line
There are around 2.8 million customer service representatives in the US. In UK contact centers, 800,000. Millions more across the world. A global workforce on the front line of the AI transition – and it is breaking.
As many as 81 percent report verbal or emotional abuse from customers as a daily occurrence. Up to 74 percent are at risk of burnout. In UK retail contact centers, 31 percent missed work in 2023-24 because of mental health issues.
Customer anger is real and rising – landing on employees who did not design the experience that produced it. The bill for not owning the customer is being paid by the people closest to them.
A real customer crisis
In the US, the CFPB found 43 percent of households had difficulty paying bills in 2024. In the UK, 73 percent of adults show characteristics of vulnerability or low financial resilience.
Vulnerable customers are no longer a special category. They are the majority. The standard of care regulators demanded for the exception is now the standard the rule demands for itself – happening while the function meant to lead it is being dismantled.
The consequence is visible. PwC says one in three customers will walk away from a brand after a single bad experience. Qualtrics puts $3.8 trillion of global sales at risk annually. We are inadvertently creating a customer crisis.
What it takes
For customer leaders, the road map is clear.
Find and show value. With the numbers the C-suite already uses: gains and losses, complaint cost, retention, lifetime value. Reframe cost to serve as value to serve — in whatever currency your CFO thinks in.
Rob Pike – a leader I still admire today – led a major customer service transformation at RBS in the years before the financial crisis. He created an internal Customer Board, pulling teams together from across the business and leading from the front. Not a steering committee. Not a working group. A board the main board had to listen to.
The customer leader who knows how to do this builds the room they need.
For CEOs and CFOs: stop asking for sentiment. Ask for the commercial number — and develop them until they can give it.
For boards: 94 percent of you say CX is a strategic priority. Ask the harder question. Who owns the customer P&L? Name them. If you cannot, that is the problem the next reorganization needs to solve.
Who gives a damn?
The customer does. In the US, the CFPB received 3.19 million complaints in 2024 – the highest on record. In the UK, Financial Ombudsman complaints hit a six-year high, up 54 percent on the year before.
Not giving a damn is becoming an expensive business.
The regulator does. The FTC's $2.5 billion settlement against Amazon showed what not owning the customer looks like at scale. The UK's FCA and Competition and Markets Authority are investigating digital wallets and drip pricing.
IT/AI is taking the customer seat. If customer leaders do not reclaim it – fast, and in commercial language – it will be taken permanently.
The customer leader that cannot prove value will not survive this decade. The customer leader that can, will succeed.
I give a damn. After 35 years on the inside, across more than 100 organizations and 200,000 people, I have never seen a function more at risk of being dismantled – or a more important moment for customer leaders to step up.
Quick links
- Is AI taking CX jobs?
- Surviving the crisis in CX: Unlock potential, articulate value, and avoid lock-ins
- 10 trends changing CX in 2026