Disney, Walmart, And Carnival UK Share Lessons In AI For Customer Experience

Forbes

01-07-2025

Brand leaders are using AI to turn data into winning customer experiences
When it comes to implementing AI for customer experience (CX), the gap between technology promises and enterprise deployment reality can be vast. During the NiCE Interactions conference, customer experience executives from three major companies—Disney, Walmart, and Carnival UK—shared how their companies navigated these challenges with different approaches, offering a glimpse into what works when deploying AI at scale.
The companies' collective experience reveals that successful AI implementation requires more than a focus on finding the right technology solution. Instead, CX success demands strategic partnerships, effective organizational change management, and a fundamental shift in how companies approach customer service operations.
Carnival UK: The Knowledge Management Imperative
When John Wells inherited customer service operations at Carnival UK, he faced a familiar enterprise challenge: 1.25 million annual guest interactions flowing through disconnected legacy systems that couldn't even link a customer's phone call to their email inquiry.
"We had siloed systems," Wells, the company's Contact Center Director, explained. "If guests would phone us or they'd email us, we wouldn't know one interaction to the next."
The cruise line's transformation over 18 months represented a desire to reimagine the experience. "This wasn't a technology change program," Wells emphasized. "This was a business change program underpinned by a technology change." Carnival UK understood that data quality was key to delivering a successful customer experience. The company spent six months consolidating scattered knowledge from multiple systems, recognizing that AI success depends entirely on information architecture.
"Knowledge management and structuring your knowledge is as important to your success as AI management," Wells discovered. "Getting the data and the knowledge in the right place, structured in the right way, enables you to be able to be successful in your development of the AI."
AI guardrails are mechanisms and strategies designed to ensure that AI systems, especially generative AI, operate within safe, ethical, and legal boundaries. Carnival UK's methodical approach to knowledge management enables it to create guardrails that ensure AI responses align with company policies while maintaining the premium service experience that luxury cruise customers expect.
Carnival UK's Key Lesson: Treat AI like a new employee. "You wouldn't just put a new team member in place and just let them get on with it," Wells explained. "You have to train and coach them. You have to work with them every day, tweak (the process), and point them in the right direction."
Disney: Leadership and Security First as a Foundation for Customer Experience
Arun Chandra, SVP for Customer Experience at Disney, shared Disney's vision to build the best CX program globally, serving over 150 million customers in 100 geographies. Disney's approach uses three foundational principles that address the organizational dynamics often overlooked in AI implementations.
First, Disney insists on direct senior leadership involvement, recognizing that executives must work alongside their teams to separate genuine AI capabilities from marketing hype. This hands-on approach ensures that AI initiatives align with business objectives rather than getting caught up in technological possibilities.
Second, Disney places extraordinary emphasis on data privacy, legal requirements, and security challenges. The company focuses on critical questions are data use and management. For example, what data trained the AI models and was it proprietary Disney company data? It also has to evaluare the implications of using models trained on external and potentially inaccurate data sources.
Disney understands that AI implementations can create new security vulnerabilities if not properly managed. Data governance isn't just a compliance issue for a company handling millions of customer interactions across theme parks, streaming services, and merchandise operations. It's essential for securing data and delivering a seamless experience.
Third, Disney views change management as the cornerstone of successful AI implementation. The company recognizes that AI transformation affects not just customer-facing agents but the entire organizational workforce.
"AI impacts everyone across the organization, as everyone ultimately contributes to serving customers and stakeholders," according to Chandra.
Disney's Key Lesson: AI implementation requires comprehensive organizational change rather than isolated departmental deployments. Success depends on addressing security concerns upfront and ensuring executive leadership remains actively involved throughout the process.
Walmart: Consolidation and Strategic Partnership For Scaling Customer Experience
Walmart's journey offers a distinct perspective on enterprise AI adoption, emphasizing the crucial distinction between products and strategic partnerships. Anderson Wilkins from Walmart explains the company's rationale: "We selected NiCE as that one (contact center) platform, not because it was perfect, but because we found a strategic partner. We created a shared vision to co-innovate together, to scale with a microservice architecture and auto-scaling for on-demand capacity."
This approach proved crucial for handling Walmart's massive scale challenges. "When everybody calls us on Black Friday, many of our brands are unified under one Walmart contact center platform."
Walmart shared how it collected stakeholder feedback to manage organizational resistance to change. The key to its success was transparency about the transformation roadmap: "We shared the roadmap of how we would reduce costs, streamline our tech, eliminate friction, and give them a platform where we could deliver changes faster.", said Wilkins.
Walmart's Key Lesson: Enterprise AI success depends not just on technical capabilities but on organizational acceptance across diverse business units with different priorities and concerns.
Common Ground In Customer Experience Transformations
Despite their different strategic approaches, Disney, Walmart, and Carnival UK encountered remarkably similar obstacles that reveal the universal challenges of enterprise AI implementation in customer experience such as legacy system integration, organizational resistance and data quality and governance concerns.
The most pervasive issue was legacy system integration. Each organization discovered that their existing infrastructure created barriers to seamless customer experiences. Carnival UK's siloed systems prevented agents from connecting a customer's phone call to their previous email inquiry, while Disney's complex multi-platform operations spanning theme parks, streaming services, and retail required coordination of multiple data source. Similarly, Walmart's diverse brand portfolio and large number of stores demanded integration strategies that could unify multiple business units under a single contact center platform without sacrificing each brand's unique requirements.
Organizational resistance emerged as another significant hurdle across all three implementations. Each company faced internal pushback when introducing AI-enabled contact center systems, as employees worried about job security and changing workflows. The companies learned that success required more than technical deployment—it demanded proactive change management, transparent communication about transformation goals, and concrete demonstrations of how AI would benefit rather than replace human workers.
Scale requirements presented unique challenges that tested each organization's infrastructure decisions. Whether managing cruise guest inquiries during peak booking seasons, handling Disney's massive theme park operations during holidays, or supporting Walmart's Black Friday shopping surges, all three companies needed AI solutions capable of dynamic scaling without manual intervention. This requirement influenced their architectural choices and partnership strategies, as they sought platforms that could automatically adjust capacity based on demand rather than requiring constant human oversight.
Data governance concerns proved equally critical across all implementations. Each organization recognized that AI success fundamentally depends on clean, well-structured data and robust security protocols. This wasn't merely a technical checkbox but a business imperative that affected everything from customer trust to competitive positioning. The companies discovered that poor data quality could undermine even the most sophisticated AI capabilities, while strong data governance created the foundation for sustained AI success.
The common thread across all three implementations is patience and methodology. Rather than rushing to deploy the latest AI features, successful companies invest time in organizational preparation, data quality, and strategic partnerships.
For enterprise leaders embarking on AI initiatives, one lesson is clear. Getting the technology right is only half the battle at most. The real challenge lies in organizational transformation, data governance, and creating the cultural conditions for AI customer experience success. Companies that master these fundamentals position themselves not just for immediate AI benefits, but for long-term competitive advantage in an increasingly AI-driven marketplace.