The customer experience industry is in the middle of a rebrand. User Experience is becoming Intelligent Experience. UX to IX. The idea is that AI will make interactions smarter, more adaptive, more personalized. And on paper, that’s exactly right. Intelligence should be the evolution of experience.

But here’s the problem. Most organizations pursuing IX aren’t thinking about the experience at all. They’re thinking about the technology. They’re bolting AI onto existing touchpoints without asking the only question that matters: does this make things better for the customer, or does it just make things different?

Different isn’t better. Different, done poorly, is worse.

The Taco Bell Test

If you want to understand the gap between UX and IX, look no further than Taco Bell. Not because they’ve figured it out, but because their journey illustrates everything that goes wrong when technology leads and experience follows.

Taco Bell first introduced in-store ordering kiosks back in the late 1990s. The idea was ahead of its time, but the execution missed entirely. Customers would place an order on the screen, then walk to the register and repeat the entire order to a cashier before paying. The technology added a step instead of removing one. It created friction where there had been none. The kiosks were pulled.

Fast forward to the modern kiosk rollout. When the new systems first appeared, they were confusing. Hard to navigate. The interface disrupted the ordering experience so much that customers abandoned it and returned to the counter to talk to a person. Simple things were broken. The system asked you to enter your name for the order, even though you were already logged in to an account with that name. It didn’t remember your preferences. When you selected email for your receipt, you had to manually enter the address even though the system already had it. There was no option to print a receipt on-site. Every interaction felt like the technology was working for itself, not for the customer.

Then came the AI drive-throughs. Taco Bell rolled out voice AI across more than 500 locations, and the results became internet fodder almost immediately. A customer ordered 18,000 water cups, crashing the system. The AI asked someone what they wanted to drink right after they’d ordered a large Mountain Dew. Taco Bell’s Chief Digital and Technology Officer publicly acknowledged the system was unreliable, and the company began pulling back.

To their credit, the most recent kiosk experience has improved significantly. When I log in now, it recognizes me. It surfaces previous orders. When I request a receipt, it sends it to the source it already has on file. That’s more intelligent. That’s a step toward IX.

But Taco Bell still has a long way to go. And they’re further along than most.

Technology for Technology’s Sake

To be clear, I don’t mind kiosk ordering. I just don’t like Taco Bell’s system. McDonald’s, for example, is much more intuitive. The interface is friendlier and easier to navigate, and it connects seamlessly with the McDonald’s app. And they still have people helping people as needed. The kiosk doesn’t replace the human option. It complements it.

But there’s something else worth noting about McDonald’s that goes beyond design. McDonald’s introduced kiosk ordering almost ten years ago, well before the current AI rush. That matters. We, as customers, have had time to get used to it. Kiosk ordering has become part of the McDonald’s experience. It isn’t jarring. It doesn’t feel like a disruption because it was introduced gradually and given time to become familiar. Adoption isn’t just about the quality of the technology. It’s about the pace at which customers are asked to change their behavior.

Taco Bell, and many organizations like it, are trying to compress that adoption curve by introducing new technology faster than customers can absorb it. And the pattern is playing out across industries. Organizations see the potential of AI to transform customer interactions, and they rush to implement it. But the implementation starts with the technology, not the experience. What can AI do? becomes the driving question instead of what does the customer need?

The result is experiences that are technically more advanced but functionally more confusing. Chatbots that can’t understand context. Voice systems that can’t handle the basics. Kiosks that ask customers for information that the system already has. Each one of these is a case where the technology actively disrupted the experience it was supposed to improve.

This is the critical difference between UX and IX that most organizations miss. UX is about designing interactions around human behavior. IX should be about using intelligence to anticipate and adapt to human behavior. But what’s actually happening in most implementations is neither. It’s technology insertion. Placing AI into the customer journey without redesigning the journey around what intelligence makes possible.

Intelligence Means Knowing What You Already Know

The simplest definition of an intelligent experience is one in which the customer never has to tell the system anything it should already know.

If I have an account, the system knows my name. If I’ve ordered before, the system knows my preferences. If I’ve told you how I want my receipt, the system remembers. If I’m a loyal customer, the system recognizes that and responds accordingly. None of this requires cutting-edge AI. It requires basic intentionality about the customer experience.

The more advanced version of IX goes further. It anticipates. It recognizes patterns in my behavior and surfaces relevant options before I ask. It adapts the interface to how I use it, not to how the design team assumes everyone uses it. It reduces steps, removes friction, and makes the interaction feel effortless, not because the technology is invisible, but because the technology is working entirely in service of the customer.

That’s the shift from UX to IX. No more technology. Smarter application of technology in the service of the person using it.

The Question That Matters

Organizations racing to implement AI across their customer experience need to stop and ask one question before every deployment: Does this make the customer’s life easier, or does it make our operations look more innovative?

If the answer is the latter, you’re not building an intelligent experience. You’re building a technology demo with your customers as the test audience. And customers will tell you exactly what they think of that, the same way they told Taco Bell. They’ll walk past the kiosk, ignore the chatbot, and wait in line to talk to a human being.

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Chris Hood is an AI strategist and author of the #1 Amazon Best Seller Infailible and Customer Transformation, and has been recognized as one of the Top 30 Global Gurus for Customer Experience. His latest book, Unmapping Customer Journeys, will be published in 2026.