The Dual CX library
Reading for when customers arrive with AI.
Articles, briefs and essays on customer AI agents, agentic commerce and contact centre readiness. Search everything, or start with the pocket audio and the live sessions.
Dual CX — in your pocket
Short audio episodes with Maria and Martin, drawn from the live sessions. Five to nine minutes each. Press play and listen here.
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What this is all about
Your Next Customer Is A Bot
Maria McCann and Martin Hill-Wilson, live on LinkedIn. Each session comes with a brief to read first.
All 32 pieces
The Service Handshake: who may agree to what?
Pre-reading for the LinkedIn Live. Goals, boundaries, permissions and authority when an AI agent acts for the customer.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · November 2026
The transparency deadline has passed. What Article 50 actually changes for a contact centre.
Article 50 of the EU AI Act came into force on 2 August 2026, with the Commission's final guidelines adopted on 20 July. A working note for contact centre leaders: what changes on the queue, what a leader needs on the record now, and how the transparency logic reads across to Modes 3 and 4.
Maria McCann
August 2026
The CX blind spot that's going to cost you: introducing Dual CX
The framing piece. Why the customer is now the second designer of your service, and what CX, service, and product leaders need to see before they finish their next AI roadmap.
Maria McCann
2026
The moment trust breaks: inside Jess's escalation
The customer-side story of an agentic commerce failure. Operating models have to account for what customers actually experience when AI transactions go wrong.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · May 2026
The AI called the contact centre. Nobody knew.
We built a customer-side AI voice agent and pointed it at a real UK contact centre. Three calls, three human agents, none detected it. The surprise wasn't verification, it was that the AI set the temperature of the interaction.
Dual CX
Field test · ID 003 · March 2026
The front door is now open! Now what?
An external agent can reach the same service through a website, an API, a company agent or an adviser. What it may do, what evidence each action needs, and how to enforce it on every route.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · October 2026
Why the modes matter: reading Dual CX from the floor
A shorter working note on the four modes, and why the interesting conversations right now sit in Modes 3 and 4, the ones where the customer brings AI to the interaction.
Maria McCann
2026
One message. No phone calls. 4.2 seconds to resolution.
What happens when a customer's AI contacts a brand's AI directly, and both parties speak the Service Handshake. Aligned handshakes resolve in seconds; misaligned ones escalate cleanly with full context inherited.
Dual CX
Mode 4 demo · 2026
CX Is Dying? Verdict: wrong diagnosis, right symptom
Rebuts the 'CX is dying' headlines: it's the bolt-on measurement version of CX that's dying, while CX as strategic operating philosophy is intensifying.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · June 2026
Machine Customers and the Future of Customer Service
CX Foundation's primer on machine customers, delegated AI assistants, autonomous procurement, multi-agent networks. Features Maria on the Dual CX framing and why both customer and brand now design the interaction.
Charlie Mitchell
CX Foundation · May 2026
Features Maria McCann · Neos Wave
The Four Conversations Nobody Is Having Together
Agentic commerce is outpacing the operating, governance, and dispute models needed to make it trustworthy, and customer contact is feeling the gap first.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · May 2026
How to Use the Agentic AI Readiness Assessments
Practical guide for CX, Ops, and Digital leaders on applying Brainfood's 12-dimension readiness assessments, moving from AI awareness to a sequenced action plan.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · May 2026
The seventh dimension: the dispute gap nobody has solved
As Universal Commerce Protocol adoption accelerates, contact centres remain unprepared for the dispute-handling gap created by agentic transactions.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · May 2026
Six readiness dimensions your contact centre needs now
Opens Brainfood's agentic commerce series, UCP's 2026 expansion means agentic commerce is operationally relevant to contact centres now, not later.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · May 2026
The transaction ended. The liability didn't.
The regulatory dimension of agentic commerce, UK CMA, GDPR, and EU AI Act obligations already enforceable against AI-mediated transactions.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · May 2026
MAS at Scale: When Multi-Agent Systems Become a Systems Problem
Multi-agent systems shift AI risk from individual task errors to systemic, organisation-wide coordination problems. An executive framing.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · April 2026
What Kind of AI Pilot Are You Really Running?
A diagnostic framework, stage, objective, design archetype, agency type, measurement, for figuring out what your AI pilot is actually testing.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · April 2026
We audited 100 UK brands. None were ready.
A field audit across 17 sectors. Zero brands had a published AI-interaction policy. 73% had no fallback path when a customer's AI reached them. The gap isn't technology, it's design and governance.
Dual CX
State of Dual CX · Q1 2026 · Q1 2026
The Dual CX Shift: When Both Sides Have AI
Customer-side AI is already in market. An AI voice agent called a real contact centre, passed security, and resolved a complaint. Most companies aren't ready.
Maria McCann
March 2026
The Four Roles Your Organisation Actually Plays
Most leaders can recite their values and vision. Almost none can articulate the role their organisation actually plays in employees' lives. A working theory in four parts.
Maria McCann
March 2026
Stop Hiring Chatbot Implementation as a Personality Trait
Rolling out a chatbot isn't leadership. It's procurement. The real value of AI in customer service isn't the interface, it's what you do with the data underneath.
Maria McCann
March 2026
The Middle of the Sentence
There's a particular kind of paralysis that settles over an industry in the middle of a technological shift. People stop making decisions, not because they don't know what to do, but because every option feels wrong.
Maria McCann
March 2026
Agency, Autonomy, and the AI That Speaks for You
Most CX leaders are focused on the company's AI. But the real disruption is the customer's AI. When your customer sends their agent to deal with yours, the relationship changes fundamentally.
Maria McCann
March 2026
The Outsourcing Model Nobody Wants to Talk About
Most outsourcers aren't incentivised to fix customer problems. Their business model depends on volume. More contact, more revenue. AI is accelerating the same broken logic.
Maria McCann
March 2026
Measuring Movement Without Meaning
When things wobble, sales dip, call volumes spike, NPS flattens, the instinct is to act visibly. But without a social contract, the numbers are untethered.
Maria McCann
March 2026
CX and Customer Service Are the Same Promise
In the Japanese tea ceremony, the person who designs the experience is the person who serves. There is no 'CX designs, Service delivers' split. Customers don't experience that split either.
Maria McCann
March 2026
Standing Outside the Circle
On going to a CX conference, being called aloof, and realising the difference between disengagement and clarity. What happens when you've been in an industry long enough to see through its cycles.
Maria McCann
March 2026
Your AI Is Only as Good as What You Feed It
Most companies rush to deploy AI on top of bad data. The conversations your team has with customers are training data. Quality in, quality out.
Maria McCann
March 2026
What If Mumsnet Sold Products?
A thought experiment about trust, social economics, and why most organisations don't fail because of their data, they fail because they never define the deal with their customers.
Maria McCann
March 2026
One Engine, Six Deployments
The Neos OS thesis: the same platform engine serves both company services and human services. The difference between deployments is configuration, not architecture. Build the engine once.
Maria McCann
March 2026
Why AI's Productivity Pay-off Is Lagging, And What To Do About It
The AI productivity paradox isn't a technology problem. It's a failure to redesign work, decisions, and governance around AI.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · March 2026
CX Leadership In The Age of AI
AI is disruptive to every business unit's transformation agenda. The readiness actions CX leaders have to take first.
Martin Hill-Wilson
Brainfood Consulting · February 2026
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