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Home Blog The Future of CX Is AI + Human Help (Especially for Accessibility)
It’s late at night. You’ve just brought home a new TV. The setup instructions are printed in tiny type on a sheet of paper – and you’re blind.
Matthew Tudge
May 8, 2026
Now imagine that happens every day. With medication labels, router error messages, food ingredients…
This is daily life for 340 million people worldwide who are blind or have low vision. And while customer service has rapidly digitized, most systems still weren’t designed with them in mind.
Frankly, this should be unacceptable. It’s a complete failure from a design perspective, an increasing legal risk, but also one of the biggest missed opportunities in customer experience (CX) today.
The AI shift is real. Gartner projects 80% of service organizations will use generative AI by 2026. Companies embracing AI see higher acquisition, retention, and revenue. Chatbots, virtual assistants, and omnichannel integration have all delivered genuine improvements for millions of customers.
But speed alone isn’t a great experience.
75% of customers still prefer a human for complex situations.
And here’s what the CX conversation continues to miss…
AI improves service dramatically, but accessibility depends entirely on how AI is designed and where humans stay involved.
Be My Eyes launched in 2015 with a simple idea from Hans Jørgen Wiberg, a Danish craftsman with low vision: what if blind people could connect instantly with sighted volunteers for visual assistance?
Within just a few weeks of launch, 10,000 volunteers had signed up. Pure human connection. No AI.
Fast forward a few years to when ChatGPT first launched, and we integrated GPT-4 vision capabilities to create “Be My AI”. A visual AI assistant that reads labels, describes images, and answers common questions instantly, in any language, at any hour.
While we thought that launching the AI would reduce sighted volunteer calls, the opposite happened.
Even though the AI sessions skyrocketed, the calls to human volunteers also increased.
There is this thirst, I think, still for human connection as well as a thirst for consumption under an AI model.
What Be My Eyes proved through accessibility is the same lesson leading CX teams are discovering broadly: hybrid isn’t niche. It’s the operating model.
Most companies make one of two mistakes;
The answer is intentional coordination and seamless transitions between the two.
Let AI own speed, scale, availability, and the predictable majority of requests.
Keep humans for empathy, judgment, complex troubleshooting, and the moments customers remember.
How your company supports the person trying to understand why their device or appliance isn’t working reveals more about your CX philosophy than any chatbot metric.
It’s also no longer optional in many cases with the EU Accessibility Act, ADA enforcement, and the UK Equality Act raising the bar.
The future of CX is truly AI and humans working in sync, designed around both from the beginning. AI provides reach and responsiveness. Humans provide understanding and trust. Together, they create experiences that work for more people, including those typically left out of digital transformation.
If you’d like to find out how partnering with Be My Eyes could enhance your human + AI approach while also improving accessibility, then get in touch with our team here. Or, explore our Customer Accessibility Suite.
