Customer Service in the New Era of AI

Conversation Design Institute
Conversation Design Institute • 27 Jan, 2025 • 3 min. read


CDI invites you to our upcoming webinar, Customer Service in the New Era of AI on Thursday, February 20 at 4PM CET / 10AM EST 

To register click here!

Event Overview

Everyone can agree: AI is transforming Customer Service as we know it.

But what does that mean in practice? If you're a CS leader, how will AI alter your strategy and the key metrics you’ll share with your C-Suite? Perhaps more importantly, how has AI already transformed CS—and what can you do to catch up?

These are the type of questions that inspired CDI to recruit Troy Gedlinske (Senior Manager of Customer Support, Amazon Project Kuiper) for a five-month stint as our Expert in Residence for CS Ops + AI. Troy helped us dig deep into the problems CS leaders face and the best practices they use to solve them. We then explored how AI is likely to change both.

In this unique webinar, we invite Troy back to discuss some of the insights and surprises we uncovered during our time working together. First, we’ll introduce the framework we used to break modern CS Ops into comprehensible buckets based on the Five Pillars of CS (Quality, Finance, Scale, Flexibility, and Risk). Then we’ll discuss what we learned as we imagined the impact of AI on each pillar.

Joining Troy in this discussion are the two CDI team members who worked with him on this project: Luke Kempen (CAI Practice Lead) and Joseph Pagano (Managing Director). The webinar will be moderated by Rachel Whitehorn (CAI Consultant), who recently joined CDI after seven years working at the crossroads of customer service and AI at Geico and Allstate

Speakers

 

Troy Gedlinske, Sr Manager of Customer Support (Amazon Project Kuiper)

Troy Gedlinske is a senior customer support professional with an operations mindset and decades of experience using data-driven techniques to plan and improve business operations. He began his career as an industrial engineer before earning an MBA from UT-Austin and then pivoting to customer support operations after. Troy spent 12 years in senior global operational roles at Amazon and Coinbase. He recently joined Amazon Project Kuiper as Senior Manager of Customer Support.

Rachel Whitehorn, CAI Consultant (CDI)

Rachel is an experienced Conversation Designer who specializes in customer-facing chat and voice experiences for customer service use cases in highly-regulated industries. She is a skilled, business-savvy, human-centric designer who also has extensive experience with data-driven design, thanks to her early career as a customer service analyst.  

Rachel joined CDI in January 2025 after a contracting at Allstate as Senior Conversation Designer. Prior to that, she served in various conversation design and customer service roles at GEICO, where she was a CDI client.

Rachel is based in Davenport, Florida.

Luke Kempen, Practice Lead (CDI)

Luke is an experienced AI strategist and enterprise delivery manager with over ten years of experience leading transformative conversational AI programs and projects. As the Conversational AI Practice Lead at CDIS, he focuses on establishing best practices in AI strategy, implementation, and operational excellence with the goal of building the foundation that clients and their delivery teams need to effectively leverage AI technology to solve problems. 

Luke joined CDI in March 2023 to help build CDI’s CAI delivery practice. Prior to that, he spent over seven years as senior AI consultant for Accenture and IBM.

Luke is based in Austin, Texas.

Joseph Pagano, Managing Director (CDI)

Joseph is an experienced business manager and entrepreneur who specializes in helping businesses plan, deliver, and promote products and services. He began his career during the dot.com boom as an instructional designer and information architect, then spent a decade in marketing and strategy communications before transitioning to product management.

Joseph joined CDI in June 2022 to help build CDI’s CAI delivery practice in North America. Prior to that, he served as a senior product manager for multiple B2B and B2C enterprises.

Joseph is based in Austin, Texas.

Don't miss out on this engaging session and register now!