Good… But Not Enough: Reflections from the 2026 Smarter Services Executive Symposium

Last week, 500+ leaders got together in Chicago for our 2026 Smarter Services Executive Symposium. It’s been both instructive and rewarding to read the many posts from attendees sharing their own summary, takeaways and highlights after three days of interaction. These inputs are already making us think hard about the next questions that will continue to drive our research, and hopefully, continue supporting the advancement of Service.

However, in-between the bold objectives, the lingering challenges, and the lessons learned, I felt an implicit theme starting to emerge… efforts, capabilities or outcomes that appear GOOD in and of themselves, but when put under the scrutiny of scale and time, are NOT ENOUGH.

My initial list has six such distinctions.

1. An Initiative alone, is not Culture

During the Advisory Board meeting that preceded the event, ‘Technological and process adoption’ was identified as the top executive pain point, being called out by almost 1 in 4 service leaders (23%). This was not a fluke. Throughout the event, challenges ranging from ‘frontline engagement’ to ‘AI adoption’ to ‘voice of the customer’ left me with the same feeling: an initiative is good, but it’s not enough. Unless these efforts are championed and systematically reinforced through the organizational culture (including the associated incentives and long-term clarity), their impact is very likely to remain localized and the energy tends to dilute over time.

2. Technology alone, is not Innovation

All respondents to Service Council’s 2026 State of AI and Service Technology survey are actively engaged with some form of Artificial Intelligence (AI). However, only 22% report already ‘experiencing significant benefits from AI in production’. There’s a phrase that has recently stuck with me: “Innovation is only such, if it changes behavior”. The subtle adjustment I advocate is that use case relevance, technology selection, change management, governance, and performance visibility are not to be sequentially designed; they’re interrelated and inseparable elements of true innovation.

3. Confidence alone, is not Trusted Accuracy

This one’s a bit more on the technical front, but I believe it creates the bridge between one of the loudest themes I heard during the event, ‘the lack of trusted data and intelligence‘, with the extent to which the latter impacts performance. The underlying concept is quite simple: ingenuity can (falsely) make a novice feel like an expert. The application of wrong assumptions or the ‘unknown unknowns’ has historically been the root cause to many failed transformation efforts. Therefore, when a sophisticated model makes confident prescriptions, but it’s built on data that people who are accountable for those decisions do not trust, then accuracy will be naturally questioned and the potential benefits are not materialized. Trust needs to be earned and continuously questioned/demonstrated.

4. Efficiency alone, is not Necessarily Optimal

It’s counterintuitive to argue that efficiency is a bad thing. However, there are two strong signals that indicate it’s not enough. First, it creates the risk of a race-to-the-bottom that results in the commoditization of service; in this scenario, automation stops at a cost-reduction mechanism rather than an experience-shaping lever for both customers and the frontline, making growth harder to accomplish. This is consistent with Service Council’s 2026 Service Leader’s Agenda findings, which show a 2:1 ratio of Growth:Efficiency as the primary mandate.

Second, not everybody wants the most efficient option all the time. Frontline agents take pride in their expertise. Designed friction can prevent impulsive decisions from creating greater long-tail inefficiencies (e.g., costs from avoidable dispatches, replacements, expedites or reverse logistics). Behavioral studies show that especially under unstructured settings (e.g., review of contingencies or tailored negotiations) customers tend to trust people more, and prefer a human interaction in moments of anxiety (e.g., when stuck in an elevator). Understanding the as-is and the intended experience of all personas involved (as Stephan Gelinas and the team from Ciena shared on Mainstage) is critical to creating journeys where efficiency is not a compromise, but part of the value.

5. Kindness alone, is not Caring

It’s a good thing to have a clear process, and it’s much better when all the boxes in the process are consistently checked. However, a differentiated delivery of service is one that transcends the completion of mechanical steps. One way to describe it is as the intersection of compliance, empowerment, empathy and accountability. In particular, as the perceived importance of ‘soft skills’ is rapidly increasing, it’s worth calling out that kindness without the curiosity, skills, and tools to follow through falls short of systematically caring about the customer experience. Andy Schneider, a Service Council Advisory Board member who also lent his voice on Mainstage this year, captured a fantastic example of this distinction in a recent post (https://www.linkedin.com/posts/schneiderandy_last-night-after-an-intense-week-in-chicago-share-7507167518080450560-GXLn/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop&rcm=ACoAAAHz-MsBLeInQO_JO_aV-hzCXbjDiWedlJE).

6. Quantifiably Precise, is not always Intelligence

Finally, at Service Council we always strive to incorporate ideas from outside the box that force us to look at things from a different angle or question some of the elements that we’ve grown to accept as second nature. This year, one of such voices was philosophy professor C. Thi Nguyen, author of ‘The Score’. During his dynamic and refreshingly insightful keynote, he shared the story of how cookbooks have dramatically transformed from being being of a highly descriptive nature (e.g., ‘Bake in a hot oven until it makes a nice ringing hollow sound when knocked’) to becoming algorithmic (e.g., ‘Bake for 45 minutes at 350 degrees’) [Source: adapted from Daston, L. “Rules”]. What does this mean for service leaders? Two applications stand out to me:

• Algorithmic approaches might be adequate for the novice agents under well-defined issues. However, nuanced knowledge is not always quantifiable and, in the hands of experts, might be more relevant to judge and deliver a complex service experience. This might be part of the explanation why, despite the uptick in the self-search of knowledge repositories, 54% of field service engineers still say they would ‘Call a colleague’ when they run into a service issue (Source: Service Council’s Voice of the Field Service Engineer research).
• Quantifiable metrics are necessary, but in isolation, they they can be sterile (i.e., they provide a score, but offer no intelligence into understanding and improving it), misleading (i.e., triggering incomplete or premature conclusions), or altogether damaging (i.e., driving unintended behaviors in those whose incentives are tied to the scoring system).

Food for thought: Where is the quantifiable precision being inadvertently mistaken as a precise description of the service experience that you want to create?

Join us for a webinar on Tuesday, October 6th at 12PM ET as we recap the most impactful conversations and insights from this year’s Symposium.