HealthEquity’s Mike Gathright on building remarkable customer experiences

For years, customer experience leaders have been working toward the same goal: make service more connected, more personalized, and less reactive. AI is creating an opportunity to go much further.

In the first episode of The Agentic Wave, host and Parloa CMO Latané Conant talks with Mike Gathright, Chief Customer Officer at HealthEquity, about how his team is using AI to create experiences that anticipate customer needs while preserving the human interactions that matter most.

One thread is woven through the entire conversation: The future of customer service isn’t AI versus humans. It’s finding the right role for each.

Move from reactive service to proactive experiences

For the last decade, much of customer experience has focused on omnichannel: connecting fragmented touchpoints so customers can move more easily between them. Mike sees AI opening up a bigger opportunity.

Instead of waiting for customers to encounter a problem and reach out, companies can begin anticipating what they need and acting before something goes wrong. 

Mike frames that shift through the questions he asks himself: “How do I actually predict things before they go wrong? How do I become more anticipatory, and how do I just actually make life easier for you as the customer?”

That changes the ambition for customer service. The goal is no longer simply to resolve an issue efficiently across every channel. It’s to understand customers well enough to deliver a more proactive experience.

For HealthEquity, whose members are navigating the intersection of healthcare and financial wellness, that opportunity is especially important. Mike's customers are often calling during moments that are already stressful, and that means the experience has to do more than work. It has to create trust, confidence, and peace of mind.

Start with the experience, not the AI

One of Mike’s biggest lessons from implementing AI is deceptively simple: Don’t let the technology become the starting point.

When HealthEquity first started working with Parloa, the teams looked closely at friction in experiences, such as replacing or managing an HSA card. Along the way, Mike says the Parloa team sometimes had to remind his team to step back from the technology and refocus on the experience they were trying to create. Even as someone who has spent his career in CX, Mike found himself falling into the trap of thinking about AI as the solution before clearly defining the problem.

That thinking becomes even more important when existing processes are involved. Mike’s advice: don’t put AI on top of a broken process. Go upstream first. Map the experience, understand the moments that matter, and fix what isn’t working. Otherwise, you risk using a powerful new technology to do the wrong thing faster.

AI for scale, humans for significance

As AI takes on more customer interactions, one concern inevitably follows: What happens to the human agents? Mike offers a different way to look at it: AI for scale, humans for significance.

Customers often want fast answers and simple actions, and AI can increasingly handle those transactional needs. But when the situation becomes complicated, emotional, or high stakes, customers may need something different: empathy, judgment, confidence, and another person who understands what they’re going through.

HealthEquity is already seeing that division of labor begin to emerge. As AI handles more transactional work, human teammates are able to spend more time on meaningful conversations.

Mike says teammates are also reporting that the technology is making their jobs easier and allowing them to spend more time doing the work they want to do. The opportunity to automate service is also an opportunity to rethink where human attention creates the most value.

The best agent builders may already be on your frontline

That shift also creates new possibilities for the people who understand customers best. Mike believes the skills required to build effective AI agents are weighted more heavily toward understanding the customer experience than toward deep technical expertise.

Frontline teammates already know where customers struggle. They see the broken handoffs, awkward processes, and organizational silos firsthand. As AI tools become easier to use, that experience can become a powerful foundation for designing and improving agents.

Smoke or Fire: Does service experience really drive loyalty?

Mike’s verdict: Fire!

HealthEquity has started connecting its customer-experience data with business measures like revenue and lifetime value. In one analysis, the company found that people who experienced a problem were less likely to contribute to their HSA than those who didn’t. 

The broader lesson for CX leaders is to find the data inside their own organizations and connect customer satisfaction signals with the revenue and lifetime-value measures that the rest of the business already understands. That evidence can help customer experience earn greater influence and give leaders a clearer picture of where to invest.

Don’t sit on the sidelines

Mike’s final advice for leaders considering AI is straightforward: Start.

That doesn’t mean deploying AI everywhere at once. It can mean starting with customer data, identifying friction, testing an idea, running a pilot, and learning where the technology can improve the experience.

AI is no longer a question of whether it will matter. It’s a question of how organizations choose to use it and whether they use it to create experiences customers actually value. For Mike, that means combining AI’s ability to operate at scale with the empathy and expertise of human teams.

Watch the full episode of The Agentic Wave to hear how HealthEquity is using AI to move from reactive service to proactive customer experiences.