470: Practitioner Stories: AI-Driven Customer Self-Service with Ancestry and AppFolio

Angelina Gennis and Max Ball speak with Joe Wang of Ancestry and Guneet Singh of AppFolio about what it takes to move conversational AI into production—grounding deployment in customer experience, organizational readiness, and measurable outcomes. Featuring: Joe Wang — Director of Customer and Commnunity Experience at Ancestry Guneet Singh — VP of Customer Experience and Global Operations at AppFolio And guest host Max Ball, Principal Analyst, Forrester Show notes: The next horizon includes more proactive onboarding, stronger voice authentication, and expanded API-enabled capabilities. It also points to an emerging need for CX leaders who combine product thinking, technical fluency, and a strong service culture. Jo Wang, Director of Customer and Community Experience at Ancestry, and Guneet Singh, VP of Customer Experience and Global Operations at AppFolio, are candid about the journey to AI adoption. Their advice: Lead with an experience-first deployment strategy. Start small with pilots and A/B testing before scaling. Prepare knowledge and content, as well as the APIs needed to enable useful actions. Measure customer effort and outcomes rather than relying on deflection alone. Partner early with legal, risk, information security, product, and finance. Support frontline teams through thoughtful change management. Look beyond service efficiency to revenue and retention opportunities. Learn how these CX leaders use the quality of the customer journey, not the technology itself, to guide priorities, deployment choices, and measures of success.