I'm Ben. I help leaders get AI in CX right before the money's spent, and I come at it from the floor up, not the slide deck down.
I've spent twenty-odd years inside the problems most AI strategies paper over: fragmented journeys, misaligned metrics, and operating models that were never designed for what they're now being asked to do.
AI does not fail in isolation. It inherits the environment it is deployed into.
My contact centre career started as a temp, brought in to handle the relentless demand for Barbra Streisand tickets when she toured Australia. If you want to learn what a queue does to people on both ends of the phone, that's a good place to start.
Next came Triple Zero, taking emergency police calls. Talk about keeping within your KPIs and your AHT down. It's also where I got hooked on why people behave the way they do under pressure. I was studying psychology at the time, so I went a step further and joined the police force, serving as a constable for two years.
When I came back to contact centres, outsourcing was booming. I spent weeks and months at a time across Chennai, Mumbai and Manila, and that's where CX stopped being a process for me and became a human and cultural question. How do you scale a consistent, quality experience when the people delivering it and the people receiving it live in different worlds?
That question took me to Apple, where I led CX programs to lift the AppleCare experience across BPOs in Australia, the Philippines, New Zealand and the US. Then I wanted to understand it from the inside, so I moved to Manila and spent two years running a BPO contact centre.
Around then, the first chatbots turned up. They were basic, and I was designing customer journeys around one of them. Then the space took off. After working with Telstra on digital transformation, I moved to the vendor and consulting side with Nuance, Microsoft and LivePerson, designing customer journeys for some of the world's most influential brands, experienced by millions of people globally. That includes CommBank, Jetstar, FedEx, United Airlines, Chipotle, DBS and HSBC.
So conversation design is my trade: the dialogue structures, turn logic, intent architecture and escalation paths that decide whether AI works for a real customer under real pressure. That foundation shapes how I assess readiness, how I look at vendors, and where I expect AI in CX to break.
Today I'm Head of Growth and Strategic Alliances, Webex CX Solutions APJC at Cisco.
Every one of those jobs taught me the same thing. Customers don't remember your process. They remember how it felt.
My advisory work is personal, selective and vendor-neutral. It's separate from my role at Cisco. I come in before the big decisions are locked in, while there's still time to change them.
The AI Health Check came out of a pattern I kept seeing. Organisations described their AI and CX problems in completely different language but behaved in the same six ways, across industries and geographies. So I turned it into sixteen questions that show you which pattern you're stuck in.
In my speaking work, I take the same ideas to conferences, offsites and leadership teams. Not as a vendor pitching a methodology, but as someone who's spent years on the gap between how AI is sold and how it actually performs. I make it simple without making it shallow. You'll leave knowing what to do on Monday, not just what to worry about.
For interviews and commentary, visit Ben’s media page for TV and radio interviews.
My view is simple: customer experience is cognitive and emotional work, not information delivery. AI is most dangerous not when it fails obviously, but when it fails persuasively. It sounds right, it hits the wrong metrics, and it quietly creates more work downstream.
So I don't start with what the model can do. I start with the environment it has to survive in: the journeys, the data, the operating model, the escalation design, the governance, and the people making the calls.
Psychology and literature taught me to treat language as more than an interface. It carries power, trust and institutional intent. Conversational AI doesn't just answer questions. It exercises authority over access, over outcomes, and over what customers believe is possible. That responsibility can't be delegated to a model.
I'm dad to Lilly and Lewis, which keeps my ego in check better than any board review. I run the Conversational AI and Chatbot Meetup in Sydney, and after my years in Manila I consider myself the unofficial authority on all things Filipino.
Based in Sydney. Shaped by Asia. Speaking globally.
Ben Farrell is an AI in CX advisor, keynote speaker and author of Designing AI Conversations at Scale. He started on the phones, worked Triple Zero emergency calls and served as a police constable, then spent 20+ years across Australia and Asia, from AppleCare and BPO leadership in Manila to designing customer journeys for CommBank, Jetstar, FedEx and HSBC.
Ben Farrell is an AI in CX advisor, keynote speaker and author of Designing AI Conversations at Scale. His career started on the phones, as a temp agent, then taking emergency police calls on Triple Zero. A fascination with human behaviour led him to serve two years as a police constable before returning to contact centres.
He went on to spend months across Chennai, Mumbai and Manila during the outsourcing boom, led CX programs to lift AppleCare across BPOs in four countries, and lived in Manila for two years running a BPO contact centre. Through Telstra, Nuance, Microsoft and LivePerson, he helped design customer journeys experienced by millions, for brands including CommBank, Jetstar, FedEx, United Airlines, DBS and HSBC.
Ben is Head of Growth and Strategic Alliances, Webex CX Solutions APJC at Cisco. His central idea: AI inherits the environment it is deployed into. He is based in Sydney and speaks globally.
Off the page, on the road.
