Stefan Kolle introduces FutureLab, infinit.cx's think tank, tracing the shift from product-centric to customer-centric business models. AI and data now enable real-time customer insight and autonomous agents, but trust, EU regulation, organizational change, and data privacy remain major obstacles.
Chapters
Hi, my name is Stefan Kolle. When we founded FutureLab in 2004, customer centricity was a radical idea. Most companies organized themselves around their products and processes. Setting up customer-centric companies would take a lot of time and effort and a lot of investment, particularly into new technology. Because the technology that would allow you to truly know your customers, to anticipate what they need before they ask, that technology barely existed. CRM systems were basically just glorified spreadsheets, and personalization meant putting someone's first name in an email. 20 years later, the technology is extraordinary. When I see AI that can predict behavior or agents that can act autonomously, I think that our time is finally here. We can do all the things we wanted. Customer data and insight can flow in real time to everyone who needs it. Everything we imagined back then is now technically possible. And yet, I cannot say that we have achieved everything we wanted. Because of course, the new era brings new challenges. Customers are changing. The world is changing. Trust is increasingly harder to earn and even easier to lose. The rules of customer experience are being rewritten as we speak. By regulators, by geopolitics, by consumers who expect things to be better, cheaper, and faster. The technology has arrived, but the experience has not caught up yet at all. So in 2026, the question is still the same. How do we bridge this gap? How do we build a better customer experience? Not just for now, but for the years to come. And I think to answer that, we have to look beyond the technology. Like, how well do we actually know our customers so that we can anticipate what they need? Predict an issue instead of resolving it after the fact? Can we use this knowledge to train those AI agents to take care of the mundane tasks on behalf of people? And if everything is run on this perfect technology, how do we keep the human touch alive when automation becomes the default? And we cannot just stop there because the topic of customer experience is now so much bigger than just Surveys and service. If we want smooth experiences, how do we build the internal infrastructure that holds it all together? How do we make sure our customers feel safe with the data they are entrusting to us, the data we need to make their lives better and easier? And internally, how do we create organizations or transform organizations into trusted institutions capable Genuinely listening to customers and acting on what they hear. All of those things need to happen, and they need to happen in the context of the European Union, with its own rules, its own values, its own relationship with technology and trust. Those are the questions we are working on at FutureLab. We would be thrilled to work on them with you.
