Problem First, AI Second: What Great CX Leaders Get Right

In this episode of The CX Equation, hosts Chantelle Casey and Mark Clydesdale are joined by Zeke Wu and Aswin Peter to discuss what it really takes to use AI for improving customer experience. Drawing on lessons from the automotive and energy domains, they share that a problem-first thinking approach beats AI hype every time. The conversation explores how trust and transparency shape AI adoption, why augmenting teams matters more than replacing them, and how small, practical use cases can scale globally, even in regulated environments. 

The key takeaway: competitive advantage comes from better decisions, not just more digital tools.

Zeke Wu is a Global CRM Program Manager at Nissan Motor Corporation, specialising in AI-powered sales and customer strategy across the automotive sector. With extensive experience spanning automotive, aviation, and consulting, Zeke leads data-driven CRM initiatives that blend predictive modeling with customer insights to enhance acquisition and lifetime value.

Aswin Peter is a Senior Product Lead – Customer Experience and Product Strategy, Energy and Utilities Industry with over a decade of global experience building customer-centric, game-changing products. Analytical and data-driven, he focuses on key metrics to solve core customer problems and deliver strategic impact. An MBA graduate of the McCombs School of Business, UT Austin, Aswin has led diverse teams across energy, utilities, payments, and customer experience. He was accepted into the Perplexity AI Business Fellowship in 2025, a program run by Perplexity AI aimed at experienced professionals looking to deepen their strategic understanding and application of AI. 

Mark Clydesdale is the Head of Strategic Consulting at Tap CXM and a customer-obsessed marketing strategist who turns messy data and competing P&Ls into clear, scalable personalisation. He’s best known for championing relevance and bringing a strategic perspective on the importance of relevance in personalisation. Having worked across sectors from telco and banking to retail and media, Mark bridges the gap between customer insight, decisioning, and real-world execution.

Chantelle Casey is the Principal Solutions Architect at Tap CXM and a marketing operations and MarTech leader who builds the plumbing that makes personalisation work at scale. She specialises in unified customer views, decisioning, and “next-best-everything” logic. Currently, her focus is on supporting clients in transforming their business to best, optimising their customer experience, improving their agility, and developing better ways of working that are insight-driven and customer-focused.

This episode is brought to you by Tap CXM.


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