OPINION: Something Big Is Happening in Customer Experience. Just Ask Maya.
Written by: Phoebe Keates, Enterprise Account Director at Choir Digital
Let me introduce you to Maya.
She is not an early adopter. She does not work in technology. She is not experimenting with artificial intelligence or trying to optimise her digital life.
She is 34, lives in Sydney, works in project operations and, like most people, starts her day slightly behind schedule.
Before her alarm fully registers, she reaches for her phone. What happens next is easy to overlook, but it matters.
Maya does not open Google. She opens ChatGPT.
Without overthinking it, she types:“What should I wear today in Sydney? I’ve got a client meeting and it might rain.”
Seconds later, she receives an answer that feels complete. The weather is summarised. Outfit options appear. Shoes are suggested. The tone feels reassuring, as though someone understands her quiet desire to look capable and prepared.
She closes the app satisfied.
No websites were visited
No brands were consciously encountered
No search results were compared
For two decades, organisations built digital strategies around a predictable journey: search, scan, click, arrive. Entire industries optimised themselves around that pathway.
But Maya’s morning reveals something different. Discovery is no longer a journey. It is a conversation.
On the train into the city, she asks another question.
“Is it worth switching banks right now for better savings rates?”
The response reads like an informed explanation. Certain banks are described as competitive, others as stable, some praised for strong digital experiences. Financial context, reputation and customer sentiment are synthesised into a single, balanced narrative.
Maya does not open comparison sites. She does not bookmark links. She simply remembers two names.
One bank has entered her consideration set without advertising to her, without earning a click and without knowing she exists.
No media placement drove it
No marketing funnel captured it
No analytics dashboard recorded it
Yet reputation shaped the outcome all the same.
By lunchtime, Maya is walking through Martin Place wondering where to eat.
She asks her phone for somewhere healthy but still enjoyable. Within seconds, a recommendation appears conversationally, referencing atmosphere, food quality and convenience without exposing the thousands of reviews and articles informing the suggestion.
She chooses a café she has never visited before.
She never opens Google Maps reviews
She never scrolls Instagram
She never reads a media article about the venue
The evaluation work has already been done for her. Large language models deliver conclusions. They compress attention and synthesise reputation into answers that feel authoritative, even when built from probability rather than certainty.
These systems interpret information. They transform fragmented digital signals into a single explanatory voice that increasingly feels objective to customers.
For people like Maya, that voice feels less like persuasion and more like understanding.
For decades, organisations optimised for search engines.
Visibility meant ranking highly. Success was measured in traffic, impressions and clicks.
Generative systems operate differently:
They do not rank pages
They construct answers
Visibility now depends on whether a brand becomes part of the reasoning itself.
Most customers will never notice this shift. Across Maya’s day she never thinks she is “using AI”. Her decisions simply feel easier. The internet feels quieter and more decisive.
Somewhere along the way, the internet has changed shape.
Inside organisations, ownership of this new reality is unclear. Marketing assumes it belongs to SEO. SEO assumes Communications will handle reputation. Communications looks to Digital, Risk or Innovation.
The result is predictable: Nobody truly owns it.
We have seen moments like this before. Every major shift in the internet follows a familiar pattern. First comes dismissal. Then behaviour changes quietly. Institutions catch up later.
Social media did not eliminate websites
Mobile did not replace desktop computing
But both fundamentally reshaped customer expectations.
The organisations that succeed next will not be the loudest publishers or the fastest adopters of technology. They will be the ones who recognise a deeper change in how customers experience the world.
Something significant is happening in customer experience.
The question is no longer whether customers will use AI. They already are.
The real question is this: Who inside your organisation understands that the customer journey has shifted and new avenues for discovery are already creating opportunity?