#86 - Strategy in Uncertain Times, NPS Isn't Dead (Yet), McKinsey on the State of Gen AI in 2025
Welcome to my AI-centric 86th Customer Analytics Newsletter here on LinkedIn. The topics I cover this week are:
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Best strategy in times of uncertainty
Unless you have been hiding under a rock for the last few months, you must realize that you and your customers are now living in uncertain times. And especially in B2B, there is a single best strategy in this sort of climate: do your absolute best to retain your current customers. They don't know what the future is going to bring either, so they must at least feel safe and secure with you as their supplier.
But how can you possibly know how they feel, and I mean each and every single one? Do you really believe that surveys with 10% response rates and conversations with your sales and customer success people are enough? Absolutely not. This is a time when you must change your methodology entirely, and am confident you can do so within three months. It's quite simple: implement Customer AI now!
Customer AI ingests operational, profile, financial, and attitudinal data about each and every one of your customers and predicts how likely each and every one is to renew their existing contracts and to buy more. You can expect predictive accuracy in the 85 to 90 percent range for each customer. Customer AI tells you exactly why customers are likely to behave a particular way and also tells you what you need to do to improve your numbers. You will therefore be able to reduce your uncertainty and theirs, hopefully guaranteeing Net Recurring Revenue numbers above 100% for your company.
This is absolutely, positively what you need in these uncertain times.
NPS Isn't Dead, But It’s on Life Support: The Future of B2B Customer Experience
People love to declare things dead—especially NPS. In our latest CX Iconoclast podcast, Richard Owen and Brian Curry take on the hype, breaking down what’s really happening in customer experience. The verdict? NPS as a metric isn’t the problem. But the way companies have been running their CX programs? That’s another story. The old-school, survey-heavy approach is slow, biased, and increasingly disconnected from reality. AI and operational data are changing the game, making it possible to measure customer sentiment continuously—across all customers, not just the ones who answer surveys.
This shift isn’t about throwing NPS out the window. It’s about evolving beyond the outdated, once-a-year PowerPoint deck that nobody acts on. Executives aren’t ignoring CX because they don’t care; they’re ignoring it because traditional programs aren’t delivering anything useful. The companies that embrace AI-driven, always-on CX will get ahead. The ones clinging to outdated survey programs? They’ll fade into irrelevance. The real question isn’t “Is NPS dead?”—it’s “Is your CX program still breathing?”
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New McKinsey report on the state of AI in 2025
As the authors put it in their opening statement, "Organizations are beginning to create the structures and processes that lead to meaningful value from gen AI. While still in early days, companies are redesigning workflows, elevating governance, and mitigating more risks." Personally, I found the study really interesting, particularly as I reflect on things like which team should be in charge of Customer AI in a large company. I got some insight from 'Exhibit 10' and prefer not to give the game away by telling you exactly what I learned. Other than that, and as you might expect, all business functions other than IT and product/service development expect generative AI to lead to net layoffs, on average.
Note that I believe this will be quite different for Customer AI, since it identifies new work that teams must do to retain more customers and bring in more revenue. Happy days.
You can read the McKinsey report here.
Notes
OCX Cognition predicts customer futures. Our breakthrough Customer AI solution lets enterprises transform what’s possible in customer experience. Reduce your customer risk, break down walls between teams, and drive speedy action – when you can see what’s coming, you can change the outcome. Building on more than 100 years of CX-focused expertise in our small team and thousands in teams we have led, we’ve harnessed today’s advances in AI, elastic computing, and data science to deliver on the promise of customer-driven financial results. Learn more at www.ocxcognition.com.
Maurice FitzGerald is Editor-in-Chief, Content at OCX Cognition. He retired from HP where he was VP of Customer Experience for their $4 billion software business and was previously VP of Strategy and Customer Experience as well as Chief of Staff for HP in EMEA. He and his brother Peter, an Oxford D.Phil in Cognitive Psychology, have written three books on customer experience strategy and NPS, all available from Amazon.