By: Gesche Haas, founder & CEO of Dreamers & Doers, a curated community and PR Hype Machine™ for extraordinary women entrepreneurs.
If you’re a leader within a company that runs on direct interactions with customers, you may have felt resistant to recent discussions about the transformative nature of AI. What if integrating artificial intelligence makes clients feel like they’re dealing with a robot?
It’s a fair concern, but it’s not necessarily the reality. The most effective founders and leaders are actually using AI tools to enhance the customer experience, boosting personalization, responsiveness, and connection in a way that feels anything but automated.
With the right strategies, AI is quietly becoming the infrastructure behind improved customer experiences, and members of the Dreamers & Doers community are here to share how they’ve used it to handle scale, surface insights, and free up the humans on their teams to focus on what matters most.
“We actively develop and implement AI in customer experience operations, where it helps automate up to 70–80% of repetitive support workflows while maintaining accuracy and speed,” says Daria Leshchenko, CEO and managing partner of SupportYourApp. “AI assists agents by surfacing relevant information instantly and routing more complex issues to human specialists, allowing teams to respond faster while preserving the human empathy that customers still expect.”
While strategies like Leshchenko’s lean heavily into automation, the goal isn’t to automate everything. Instead, intelligent delegation among human employees and AI tools ensures the proper balance between efficiency and compassion.
Leaves of Leisure Tea founder Allison Ullo doesn’t use AI to the same extent for customer-facing tasks, but the way she’s integrated it as a mindset and mental health support tool in her daily life underscores its capacity for empathy. As a solo founder, she often uses it as a sounding board when she needs a quick pep talk, strategic perspective, or a reframe.
“Having that immediate feedback loop helps me shift out of negative thinking faster and get back into problem-solving mode,” Ullo says. “Instead of losing momentum during difficult moments, I’m able to reset quickly and keep moving forward on the business.”
Prior to the rise of AI, many interactions were only possible in one-on-one contexts. But as teams and companies grow, one-on-one opportunities with customers become rarer. Thankfully, AI technology can help, enabling businesses to scale faster. Julia Starr, for example, built an AI-powered tool that delivers the same career design frameworks she uses with clients in her coaching business. In doing so, she’s been able to clone the most valuable parts of her practice.
“People can access my methodology without needing to work with me directly,” Starr says. “It’s multiplied my impact by turning my expertise into a scalable product that feeds a pipeline into my group program.”
In spite of their best marketing efforts, every company is bound to experience shifts in client energy. AI can use smart timing and personalization to help invite potential clients back into the sales funnel, so they stay informed about products and services that are right for them.
CEO of Liquid Collagen Stix, Bea Bennett, has been through the customer drop-off cycle before, but has used various AI retention tools to recapture audiences and retain them as customers. After some experimenting, she and her team were able to consistently appear at the top of customer inboxes and text message queues, and at the ideal time with the most enticing offer.
“I use AI to re-nurture warm and cold leads by structuring personalized email and SMS follow-ups for potential clients who never responded, as well as past clients I want to re-engage, without it feeling generic or automated,” says Beautifuli Digital founder Liane Agbi. “The AI helps me craft messages with the right tone and context for each contact, making outreach feel intentional rather than like a mass blast.”
Since implementing this strategy, Agbi has been able to reconnect with abandoned contacts and dormant client relationships she would have otherwise let go, turning previously unresponsive leads into active conversations.
When founders and teams are too bogged down in the operational minutiae of their work, it can be hard to show up as their best selves for customers. AI tools jump in to handle much of the behind-the-scenes work, so they can be more present in the undeniably human work of building and nurturing connections.
“I use AI to handle the operational side of client relationships so I can focus on the human side,” says Fatima Teos, founder of Vita Nova Media | NJK Partners. “It streamlines the research before a call and the admin after it, which lets me be more present, listen better, and engage more intentionally in the moment.”
Having offloaded a great deal of the operations work to AI, Teos confirms that the client experience has become less transactional and more grounded in trust, connection, and meaningful value. Retention and increased referrals have followed accordingly.
Figuring out the ideal way to make a product or service resonate with its ideal customer has never been an exact science, but AI has certainly helped. As the founder of Noori Skincare, Ambreen Chaudhry uses this technology to interpret ad data, including search terms, negative keywords, and audience behavior.
“I can quickly refine targeting and messaging beyond what dashboards alone show,” Chaudhry says. “As a result, I reduced wasted ad spend, improved click-through rates, and saw more consistent performance across my campaigns while operating as a solo founder.”
Ninety Five Media has taken a similar approach to integrating artificial intelligence in marketing strategy, without losing the team’s signature human touch.
“We believe AI should power the research and pattern recognition behind marketing, while creativity and execution stay exclusively human,” says founder and CEO Emma Tessler. “We’ve built AI agents trained on each client’s brand that help us with strategy research, ideation, and weekly performance analysis. This has saved our team countless hours and allowed us to adjust faster to data, resulting in stronger content and quicker optimization for our clients.”
Before taking her one-woman show on tour to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Kristina Libby needed to rename it, and AI was just the tool she needed to do it.
“With Claude, I built an entire AI dashboard inclusive of synthetic audiences that helped me rank names based on audience types, preferences, and potential to convert to sales,” Libby says. “I also brought in a naming consultant to teach me fundamentals, but I was able to do a huge amount of testing that I would have never otherwise been able to afford!”
Customer research that was once too expensive or otherwise inaccessible to smaller teams and businesses is becoming increasingly democratized, allowing brands to begin to establish a real human connection before they’ve even hit the market.
All individuals featured in this article are members of Dreamers & Doers, a curated community and PR Hype Machine™ amplifying extraordinary women entrepreneurs and leaders through authentic connections, credibility-boosting visibility, and opportunities that accelerate big dreams.
