[00:00:21] Speaker A: Hello listeners, and thanks for tuning in to this edition of our Metroside Podcast. Beth I'm Beth Schulz. I'm the Vice President of Research and a Principal analyst at Metrogy. And with me today are Matt Craig. Matt is our Senior Director of Product Development and Lainey Huxma. Lainie is a senior Research Analyst. Matt and Lainey have just wrapped up their work on two inaugural quarterly research deliverables from Metrogy. The first is our CX Consumer Index and the second is our AI Sentiment Index. And we are really excited about these two products. We wanted to take a little bit of time during this podcast to share some of our initial findings. So Matt, I'm going to start with you before we get to findings. Walk our listeners through the background on these indexes. You know, what was your vision? Because these are your sort of babies, as we like to say. What kind of framework did you create to turn the vision into these indexes? And then what can you tell us about the respondent profile?
[00:01:14] Speaker B: Sure. Thanks, Beth. Appreciate the introduction. So, you know, traditionally here we have done a lot of more business to business research. So we're going out, we're talking to a lot of companies looking at what they're doing, you know, asking how, how they're running things. And that traditionally has been, you know, kind of our, our sweet spot based on the type of research that we were doing, doing a lot of, you know, communications, enterprise communications, data centers. As we started moving into more of the customer experience thing and later AI, it's now kind of impacting more than just what the internal company decisions are, but also it's impacting customers and just everyday users of a lot of this tech, it's kind of blending that line.
So we've been dabbling into that side a little bit more over recent years of, you know, the user side of things, how they're seeing these impacts from these deployments of customer experience tools, AI tools, things like that. But we wanted to get a little bit more formal around it of what is their actual opinions on these things and how is that changing as the kind of landscape is changing with things. So that's where we came up with the CX index and the AI index. So it's, it's more just trying to take those ideas and putting them into ways that we can track over time. So we do this by, we have a series of questions that kind of feed into an overall kind of score.
So if you think of something similar, you know, the economic side of things like the, the consumer index, consumer sentiment Index that you see coming out there for consumer confidence of where consumer behaviors and feelings are going, that's kind of shifting towards what we're doing with this. So I can speak more closely with the AI side since that's the side that I delve more deeply into. Laney can, can go a little bit more deeply into the CX side. But essentially what we did was we set up an array of questions that, you know, from positive to negative, of feeling how they are feeling about each of these different things. And we roll that up using kind of a diffusion index model where we're looking at those that are most positive and most negative and kind of measuring the differences between that. We decided to kind of keep this a little bit more local. So we're looking at strictly North America or strictly United States in this one, but we are looking at things that are demographically representative of everybody in the United States. So we're looking, you know, we're making sure that we are surveying the people that, you know, the proper breakouts of age groups and proper income groups, genders, things like that.
So that's kind of our vision behind this and how we want to do that. And all of this comes down to one score at the end. And we're going to track that score and see how it moves up and down over the coming quarters.
[00:04:11] Speaker A: Yeah, well, we got to get to second quarter right now. We're in second quarter, we can get this going and start, start doing that tracking, which will be really interesting, I think.
[00:04:20] Speaker B: Absolutely.
[00:04:22] Speaker A: Okay, Matt, thanks for that kind of general overview. Lainey, I'll jump over to you. As, as Matt indicated, you were responsible for the consumer index. So tell us a little bit more about what specific measures you were evaluating in the consumer CX index to det customer sentiment around customer experience.
[00:04:40] Speaker C: Yeah, so for the CX consumer index, we, we gathered the sentiment of consumers regarding customer experience and based on kind of eight sub indexes, we wrapped all of these sub indexes into our overall CX baseline score. So included within the overall score had an ease index which is going to tell us how easy it is for consumers to get what they need.
AI agent satisfaction. So when consumers are interacting with an AI agent, how was that experience? We have an AI Trust index. So how are consumers, how much do they trust AI powered systems to handle those customer service needs? There's resolution. So how do companies resolve the issues presented relationship, how consumers feel that companies are valuing them as a customer proactivity? So how well are companies anticipating consumers needs and reaching out proactively we've got an empathy index. How well are companies showing empathy to consumers? And then finally momentum, where we compare customer service today versus one year ago. With all of these in mind, the overall baseline was a score of 123.8.
The lowest score was the AI Trust. Actually it had a 109.8. Though it is still like, it's still slightly positive. It's not a negative score. It was just the lowest of all these sub indexes and the highest one was our relationship index that was 137.5.
So, you know, overall, I think with the overall baseline at 123.8, I think there's definitely an overall positive look for customer experience. But I am excited to see how this changes over the next few quarters and years, especially with the lower scores with the AI and how consumers are kind of hesitating to adopt and embrace this technology.
Lots to look forward to in the coming indexes for sure.
[00:06:52] Speaker A: Absolutely. So, Matt, let's go back over to you. Let's do the same thing for the AI Sentiment index. But first, how are we thinking about consumers relative to the AI Sentiment Index? Because we asked questions that went beyond sort of the customer service question types that we asked in the CX Consumer index.
[00:07:10] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So when you think about like on the customer service side, the opinions that we're asking them about is from their role as a consumer because they're actually consuming these things, interacting with these companies. So they're giving their opinions based on their role as a consumer. On the AI side, while we do have a little bit of that in terms of use of different types of tools, you know, consuming it. But we really wanted to delve into just their opinions and beliefs about AI in general. So it's not their role as a consumer in this, of what they're going to buy, how they're interacting with tools or companies. Think of it closer to like political polling, where you're going in there and asking, what's your opinion about this person, about this policy, about any of that that you see so many times throughout the year, especially in. In these election years, focusing that more towards the AI side. So it's kind of like opinion polling based on their opinions of AI.
[00:08:09] Speaker A: Maybe you can give us a couple questions that might help to explain it.
[00:08:13] Speaker B: Yeah, so, so how we kind of created the AI index is very similar to the CX index, though a little bit more confined. So we broke it out into kind of three different aspects. So it's built up of six total questions in general. Of how has AI impacted your current life right now? You know, has it made it better or worse? Stayed the same? How has it, in your opinion, how has it impacted society and in your opinion, how has it impacted the economy in general? Because those are kind of the three big pillars of what the impacts are going to have on a person.
So we ask those three questions and then we want to know what do you think is going to happen in the near future? So then we ask those questions again about what they think is going to happen in the next one to two years. So that's where we're starting to get some of those future looking pieces. From each of those, we then created like little sub indexes of the current sentiment and the future sentiment. And then those are what make up the total sentiment index.
[00:09:15] Speaker A: Okay, so tell us about those scores.
[00:09:17] Speaker B: So on the current side we're at 124 is kind of what it's showing right now. That is actually a little bit more skewed towards the future. Not, not much. It's pretty close. The Future Index is 124.5 where it's 123.4 for the current. You know, it's interesting, we see a little slight uptick from, you know, a lot of the people that are neutral in the current moving towards a little bit more positive, but the detractors are still kind of there and actually even slightly a little bit more negative. So we're kind of seeing this really interesting divide in it, especially from the economic standpoint. But that's kind of where they're sitting right now. Now in the future you'll see, you know, with these being the baseline scores, you'll see things like the index is moving to 105. That'll represent a 5% increase instead of looking at it from a raw score standpoint. So now we can track increases and decreases really easily compared to what this baseline is.
[00:10:19] Speaker A: So now why don't you, each of you tell me what are the top two or maybe three most interesting findings from your respective indexes? Lainie, you want to start with CX Consumer index.
[00:10:31] Speaker C: So for me it stems around like the people versus technology idea. First of all, we ask consumers, you know, if they're given the choice, would they prefer to interact with AI or human agents? 85% of consumers, they do prefer to interact with human agents. So what's interesting even further though is that even if they were assured that their issue would be resolved, 77% of consumers are still going to choose that human agent. So it really Just gives us some more color around our AI trust and AI satisfaction index too. We go a little bit deeper into other questions there and then also the people versus technology thing when we also ask this question in our business view studies. So I have that unique comparison that we can do here where we pull it CX and business leaders like Matt was saying, our typical research studies and we asked, you know what's more important in providing a stellar like customer experience and is it people or is it the technology? 75% of consumers they choose people compared to only 59% of businesses that choose people.
And in fact our research success group that we have where these are companies that score above average on things like revenue and OPEX reduction and customer scores and things like that are. So our successful companies are actually selected technology more so than people. So there was more, more than 50% selected technology there. So it's interesting that I think those are just really interesting pieces from this study just to see quarter over quarter how that's going to change. But yeah, that's probably my top two for diving into the indexes.
[00:12:30] Speaker A: That is always a touchy subject or is for now humans versus AI for sure. Matt, what about you?
[00:12:37] Speaker B: Yes, kind of going, going on into, you know, the humans versus AI. That is kind of an interesting piece that that comes out of this too is you're typically hearing about what are the top concerns of AI of like what people are fearing about it and job displacement is one of them. It's one of the top three that you have there. Between the spread of misinformation, that's a big concern as well and then privacy, that's becoming more and more of an issue especially as you see it in the news of what type of data that these models can know about you and being able to very efficiently correlate a lot of things around you. People are getting a little bit more concerned with that. But people aren't necessarily kind of ignorant to just the huge shift of this.
So almost a majority. So we're like I think it was 49.8% are viewing AI and specifically some of the gen applications of it as just a fundamental shift. So similar to the advent of the Internet or the popularization of the smartphone. Heck, you could probably go back to the advent of the transceiver for those
[00:13:54] Speaker A: of us who've been around for that.
[00:13:55] Speaker C: For that.
[00:13:56] Speaker B: Or the transistor. Or the transistor, sorry, not transistor, transistor.
You know those were huge parts of history where just kind of the paradigm changed of how the World worked after that and almost half are seeing this as that. You know, that's not type of the stuff that we saw with some more flash in the pan type things like cryptocurrency, which is still around but not as huge on the tip of tongues like it was know, maybe eight years ago, seven years ago as being the next big thing with blockchain or you know, NFTs with blockchain versions like that. You know, it's, it's not seen as that flash of the pan as much. People are genuinely split about the long term impacts though.
So we did ask them, okay, now outside of that one to two years look out, 10 years and, and what do you think will be, you know, the impacts then? And it is split almost in the, you know, in thirds of people saying that it will be widespread growth and opportunity that AI will bring that people say not much is going to change. About a third saying that and about another third saying yeah, this is going to be a big problem for people and it's going to be, you know, destructive and bring instability to the country and world. So people are really split on that. You know, some of it is people just in their camps of being huge promoters or huge detractors of things. You're always going to have that no matter what you're talking about.
But it's going to be really interesting to track how that changes as more and more development happens.
[00:15:34] Speaker A: I know where I sit, like if I sit on that, that far left or the far right, but I definitely don't, I don't sit in the middle, that's for sure. Like it is going to have some sort of impact. It is already having some sort of impact. So that's interesting.
[00:15:46] Speaker B: That group and I think you get some of those group that, not necessarily that see it as a flash in the pan type aspect, but those who see.
I've seen a lot of other things come through that promise the moon and not much came out of it. So if you're not really dialed in to what's, what's happening, what it can do, you know, you may perceive it as that it's like, yeah, it'll have an impact but it's not going to change too much.
So I don't know if that's what's, what's going to happen or you know, what people are expecting. It's something we definitely want to look a little bit more deeply into in subsequent waves. The last thing that I found, you know, pretty interesting was we, we wanted to see what are people using AI at work for different aspects. You know, about 40% of people say, yeah, I do use it for work tasks, you know, being able to do any of that. Then we wanted to know, are you getting permission to do this? And 34% said that they just started using it without employer permission. So there's kind of this shadow AI, you know, that we're calling aspect out there of, you know, employees just coming in, using it on their own, trying to eke out the productivity from it, that they can make their jobs a little bit easier, be able to do more with the same time that they have. And then on top of that, if you add in the percentage of people who are still bringing it on their own, it's not an employer, you know, it's 62% are bringing AI into the workplace on their own. Of those that are using it, you know, within the workplace, bringing in on their own. So it's not an employer effort to do that. So it's really coming from the individual employees themselves and not as this top down, you know, push all the time. Like you might see headlines about, of like we're rolling out this huge AI initiative.
[00:17:45] Speaker A: Yeah, that's interesting that, that shadow. Shadow AI, shadow it, you know, definitely a trend. We'll see here too. Okay, what about, what, what, what have you guys found that really surprised you as you put together the index? Does anything stand out to, to you guys? Lainey, you wanted to start there, if anything?
[00:18:05] Speaker C: Yeah, so for me, the, the proactivity, like the, the details that we got along. Proactive outreach was pretty surprising to me this quarter. The reason I say that is because we. Okay, I had a little bit of a unique experience here because I got to do the consumer a consumer study in fourth quarter of 2025. Now it wasn't. This is our first, this is our inaugural index, but, but I was able to ask some a trending question. So compared to fourth quarter of last year, consumers who rated proactive outreach from companies as extremely valuable jumped 17.5 percentage points, which is a huge jump.
That means some of those consumers, you know, previously that may have put slightly somewhat more valuable or they may have switched to extremely valuable or whatever, but that jump in just specifically extremely valuable is significant. You know, it's pretty surprising just seeing that big of an increase. But thinking about it a little bit more, it did make sense because when we did the fourth quarter consumer study, it was, it was pulled in November. So you think about the type of proactive outreach consumers are getting around that time, it's inundated with the Black Friday sales and the holiday sales and, you know, don't miss out. So I'm sure there were a lot more than consumers typically would like to receive from companies around that time of year, which may have dropped their sentiment around proactive outreach. But I think just the proactive outreach topic in general is, has been super surprising and interesting to me that consumers actually are kind of, they're kind of wanting more than what they're getting. They appreciate proactive outreach in certain settings. When it's relevant to flight delays or, you know, shipments or appointments. They're a lot more willing to have more outreach and more interaction from the companies versus things like maybe the sales or reminders of things that aren't really as pertinent to them. So, yeah, just seeing the, seeing the shift in acceptance of proactive outreach from consumers was surprising and I think, I think it'll continue to, I think we'll continue to see a positive sentiment there.
[00:20:25] Speaker A: What about you, Matt?
[00:20:26] Speaker B: I think the, the most surprising and since we've done this, I, you know, I've had more conversations with people and other people are seeing it too. Which is, which is really interesting, is the hesitance of some of the younger generations and the younger portion of the population around AI.
You know, we knew that there was going to be a generational divide when it comes to AI. There is about most other technology things, but it is usually predictable, a little bit more predictable. It's just to what extent this one came a little bit different. The, the youngest generation. So those 18 to 25 that, that we pulled, they are some of the most hesitant and negative about AI, especially going forward to the future. Typically, when it comes to, you know, some technology advancement parts, it's usually the older generation, the ones who's gone through their whole lives not needing that. So why does, you know, why does it need to continue, you know, need to advance? Because they were doing just fine without it. But this one, it's really that youngest cohort and they're concerned about what it's going to mean for their lives over the next 10 years. You know, is it going to completely change their, their life and job landscape out there of how they're, they're impacting and because of how fast everything is moving, it's, it's kind of hard to, to really pinpoint down. It will be able to predict.
[00:21:59] Speaker A: I would imagine if I was in college, getting out of college or just recently out of college, I would be pretty concerned myself, but.
[00:22:05] Speaker B: Oh, absolutely. A lot of these, you know, the More entry level jobs, which, you know, can obviously be more tedious, but they're, they're valuable learning grounds for a lot of recent graduates and you know, those just moving into an industry of, you know, of their choice.
You know, you kind of have to sink your teeth in and learn the basics in order to be successful higher up. And now with AI being able to necessarily do a lot of the tasks itself, you know, where is that learning ground to be able to sharpen your tools, you know, for some of these more higher level positions and decision making?
[00:22:46] Speaker A: Yeah. Okay, in the last few minutes, why don't, you know, you both talked about some of the things that were of interest to you and that surprised you. Tell us now quickly, what are you going to be watching closest for Q2 and beyond? And then are you expecting the scores to shift much for next quarter, quarter over quarter throughout the year, or are we going to see more subtle changes? Lani, why don't you go ahead and start us there as well?
[00:23:13] Speaker C: Yeah, I think for me I'm going to be watching the AI trust. I think with that being the lowest index score this year and you know, clearly has the most potential for improvement or the other way. I think it's interesting, it'll be interesting to see how consumers shift with their trust for AI. Just as far as a custom customer experience and customer service goes, I do anticipate these changes to be subtle. I mean, just having the privilege of asking some of these questions over the past couple years. I think they have been somewhat subtle for the most part. So that's what I'm expecting. But it'll be interesting to see if it's the other way. Yeah.
[00:23:53] Speaker A: And how about you, Matt?
[00:23:54] Speaker B: I think the thing I'll be watching most closely is kind of the interaction between the current sentiment and the future sentiment. I did find it quite interesting that it didn't move in any type of linear, positive or negative direction. It was kind of all over the place, especially when you're looking at personal societal and economic impacts. So seeing how each of those kind of shift independently of one another, I think is going to be really interesting. Especially like I said, with how fast AI has been moving, I do think that things are going to shift quite a bit, especially when it comes to the future, you know, with more uncertainty. You know, some of these companies are moving, moving at blazing speed and putting out new features and capability. You know, it seems almost daily with this. I, I think I just read yesterday that in the past two months, Anthropic has had like 75 product releases. How does that not impact people's perception when every day they're seeing something new coming out? So while I don't expect any massive swings from quarter to quarter, I do expect it to be, at least on the future side, a little bit more volatile than what Laney is going to be seeing on the CX side of things.
[00:25:07] Speaker A: Okay, so Matt, where can listeners find the Q1 index and the reports? We've got a lot of information and when can they expect to see the Q2 indexes publish?
[00:25:19] Speaker B: So the Q1 reports are already on Metrogy's website. So you can go and if you are not a metrogy client, you can go in and see the index itself as well as a overview which is still a pretty detailed overview of, you know, some of the findings we have. If you are a client you can get a full in depth review of it.
You know, pretty detailed report about the findings and you'll be getting Those every quarter. Q2 right now is on track to be launching in June, so expect that towards the first half of June.
[00:25:55] Speaker A: And with that I think we are pretty much at time. So I am going to welcome all of our listeners. To follow Matt's instructions, go to our website which is brand new by the brand new, brand newly redesigned. So pretty cool. Check us, check us
[email protected] look for those new CX Consumer Index and the AI Sentiment Index. The reports, the summaries, you'll find them right front and center and you can also find all of our research and reports there as well. As always, we're happy to hear from you. Feel free to reach out to us directly via email. You can find us at all of our first namestrogy.com, so Matt or Lainey or myself use the contact button on the Metro G website. And everybody, that is all for now on behalf of Matt and Laney and the rest of the metrogy team, goodbye till next time and take care everybody.
