This blog is part of Accelerating Frontier Transformation, a four-part series exploring how organizations are turning AI into business value. Based on conversations with industry leaders at Microsoft AI Tours, the series looks at AI’s impact across employee experience, customer engagement, business processes, and innovation. This second post focuses on reinventing customer engagement.
The word “customer” can take on different meanings depending on the industry. In retail, it may mean shoppers. In healthcare, patients. In education, students and teachers. In nonprofits, the communities they support.
Despite this difference, the leaders we spoke with at several Microsoft AI Tours around the world described a common challenge with the people they serve: expectations continue to rise. They expect experiences that are timely, relevant, and tailored to their needs. At the same time, organizations are being asked to do more with limited resources.
That tension is why reinventing customer engagement has become one of the clearest opportunities for AI—and one of the key paths toward Frontier Transformation.
Many organizations are using AI to better understand their customers and make engagement more meaningful at scale by bringing together information from across interactions and getting deeper insight into their needs.
At Lifeline Australia, a nonprofit that provides crisis support and suicide prevention services, AI is helping their teams gain deeper insight into the services they provide and the people who rely on them.
We are looking into more specialized, tuned AI […] from a data science point of view, to really tease out some of those insights or look at behaviors. Getting that insight into the actual service that we deliver, not just how we deliver it, has been a key game changer for us.
Mark West, Head of Data and Insights, Lifeline Australia
When organizations have a clearer understanding of the people they serve, engagement becomes more relevant, responsive, and impactful.
AI can help organizations uncover deeper insights, identify emerging needs, and make more informed decisions. That understanding creates the foundation for more personalized and meaningful experiences.
Personalization has always been one of the main goals of customer engagement. The challenge has been delivering it consistently across large and diverse audiences.
AI is helping organizations address that challenge.
At Brisbane Catholic Education, which supports approximately 80,000 students across 150 schools in Australia, AI is helping educators tailor learning experiences to individual student needs.
With AI we’ve been able to get to the point of what I would call hyper personalization, where a teacher can write just one curriculum document and then have Copilot come in and personalize that for every single child in the class.
Leigh Williams, CIO and Education Executive, Brisbane Catholic Education
Healthcare organizations are seeing similar opportunities.
At Sciensus, a European life sciences organization that helps healthcare partners bring the right medicines to the right patients faster, leaders believe that when AI helps manage information and surface relevant insights, it creates more room for people to focus on relationships, empathy, and expertise.
Sciensus recently launched the CareTranscribe pilot project, an AI-enabled initiative designed to improve clinical documentation workflows so clinicians can spend more time with patients during home treatments while improving visibility into patient interactions and care journeys.
Behind the scenes, Sciensus is also building knowledge systems and using AI to help teams learn from interactions and prescriptions and make information more accessible across the organization. Patient data stays protected at every step, with privacy, security, and responsible AI practices built into how these systems are designed and used.
We massively spiraled into an area where a lot of ours is production-ready AI. So, we’re building live agents, we’re building knowledge bases that we didn’t have beforehand, using unstructured data that’s available across all our domains. Copilot has really helped in that because of the secure aspect of it.
Joseph Frost, Director of Data Science and AI, Sciensus
For many organizations, the real return on AI is what they can do with the time given back to their people. Freed from documentation and repetitive administrative work, employees can spend that time listening, understanding what someone needs, following up, and building the kind of trust that only comes from being present. Customers, patients, students, and communities all feel the difference.
At Everything Suarve, a nonprofit that supports at-risk youth across Australia, AI takes care of the case notes and reporting, so staff can give the young people they serve their full attention and spend more time with them.
What AI has done is actually enabled us to get a lot of time back to spend it where it’s needed. For us to make a difference it’s about being with the young person and not sitting behind a computer.
Joseph Te Puni-Fromont, Founder, Everything Suarve
Uniting NSW.ACT, a community services organization that provides care and support services for older adults, families, and communities across Australia, is seeing similar benefits. Its AI-powered platform, Buddy, helps frontline workers to retrieve and create content in less time, so they can spend more time supporting communities.
Activities that used to take 10 to 15 minutes are now taking one to two minutes. So, times that by 9,000 frontline workers, it’s an incredible amount of time back in the day for them to actually look after our customers and provide better aged care and community care.
Andrew Dome, Chief Digital Information Officer, Uniting NSW.ACT
Overall, through the conversations with customers, we’re hearing that AI is helping them create experiences that are more relevant, more personal, and more responsive to the people they serve. As engagement becomes more contextual and individualized, organizations can build stronger relationships while extending their reach and impact.
Next in the Accelerating Frontier Transformation series: Reshape business processes.
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