Who will win the AI race? Household name giants or smaller challengers? Or will it be brand new companies who represent the entire paradigm shift that AI itself is? As AI outpaces most companies' ability to stay ahead, the idea of who will cross the finish line first becomes more obscured.

Greg Stephens, Director of Customer Support, Experience, and Operations for Xbox and Surface at Microsoft, has a clear view of the disruption ahead from his vantage point at a massive company that both embodies legacy Big Tech, but is also spearheading the next wave of AI innovation. He predicts the next true customer experience innovators won't be the companies that adapt to AI, but the ones built entirely around it.

Holy cow: "I think where you will probably see the best end-to-end AI experiences are through those that are born in AI; that same sort of equivalent to 'born in the cloud' companies," Stephens says. "They will not have stood up sites and centers; they will have designed from the ground up. I could see the shining example coming forward in the next two years from a VC-backed, well-funded startup that designs that as a point of difference, where you just see this and think, 'Holy cow, everything is just different.'"

The legacy trap: But building from the ground up isn't as simple as it sounds. The biggest challenge for established players, Stephens notes, is their own history. "It's the legacy, large companies that have the money to really go big on this, but then they face the challenge of integration within all of the legacy systems," he explains. Presumably, those starting from scratch would have an easier time designing AI-first, "Yet, for the smaller ones right now it's more challenging to do this in a more serious way because of the economics," Stephens adds.