Anik Devaughn on what happens when the customer is a bot, in CXM

Customer Experience Magazine's report ahead of CX Vision 2035 opens and closes on Anik Devaughn: consumer agents arrive the moment someone watches their own bot win a refund, and the companies that priced margin into friction find the wall has turned into a cost.

On 26 August 2026, Customer Experience Magazine published a report by Kieran Devlin on what it calls bot-to-bot customer experience: the point at which the party on the other end of a contact centre is not a person but an autonomous agent acting on their behalf. The piece frames the shift ahead of CX Vision 2035, the magazine's conference at Wembley Stadium in November, and it opens on Anik Devaughn's answer to the question the industry keeps circling, which is when any of this actually starts.

His answer is that it will not start with a vendor keynote. CXM introduces him as founder and CEO of Karo, the AI-native commerce platform for multi-store retail and restaurant chains that he built through Wired to Create, and quotes him on the moment adoption ignites: the first time an ordinary person watches their own bot “claw back a wrongful $400 charge, kill the gym membership in ten seconds.” One screenshot of an agent winning a financial dispute, the report argues on his framing, will do more for mass uptake than any corporate roadmap.

The closing argument is his as well, and it is pointed at the people running the systems on the receiving end. For years, the piece notes, large companies have leaned on procedural friction, long queues, cumbersome forms, and opaque cancellation paths, to protect margin and slow churn. An agent does not experience that friction the way a customer does. It simply keeps going. His warning to leaders is to “stop pricing margin into friction, because the friction is now a cost you have to defend rather than a wall that holds.”

The practical consequence, in his reading, is that whoever builds open, structured, machine-readable interfaces now inherits the default loyalty of the algorithmic customer, because an agent routes to whatever answers cleanly and abandons whatever does not. It is the same operating position he runs from inside Karo, where the team ships fixes the same day they are found.

Stop pricing margin into friction, because the friction is now a cost you have to defend rather than a wall that holds.

Anik Devaughn in CXM, August 2026