How to Use AI to Audit, Scale, and Train Your Team With Confidence

Your Inside Look at Exceptional Customer Experiences

“AI is a toolbox. It's not a brain.” 

- Jen McCorkle

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AI is already in your support stack. Are you leading it, or is it leading you?

This week on Live Chat, I'm joined by data and leadership expert Jen McCorkle, who brings 25+ years of experience helping teams use AI and analytics to make smarter decisions. We talk about what AI adoption actually looks like in CX: the kind that includes guardrails, pilots, QA, and real human oversight.

Jen breaks down the alphabet soup (LLMs, GPT, agentic AI), shares why sentiment tools fail agents, and explains how support leaders can start collaborating with AI without losing trust or control.

To skip the summary below and go straight to the source:

And don't forget to check out Supportman.io, the sponsor of this podcast, which connects Intercom to Slack and utilizes AI to provide agents with real-time feedback and surface issues.

The Problem: 

AI is already in your support stack, but without clear governance, it’s causing more confusion than clarity. Hallucinated answers, broken sentiment scores, and rushed rollouts are leaving agents exposed and customers frustrated. 

Most teams don’t need more tools. They need smarter adoption, better oversight, and leaders who know how to scale AI the right way.

So how do you adopt AI in a way that builds trust, improves performance, and actually works for your team?

The Solution: 

Instead of chasing the latest tools, Jen focused on what actually works. Here’s how she recommends setting AI up for long-term success.

1️⃣ Clarify AI’s role

Not all AI is the same. Jen walks through what support teams actually need to know: GPT, agentic AI, LLMs, and how to connect each one to a clear use case.

“AI is a toolbox. It's not a brain.” 

2️⃣ Target low-hanging fruit

Start small. Focus on automating tier-one tasks like FAQs, password resets, and order tracking. These quick wins free up your team’s time and deliver real ROI.

“When we implemented a chatbot, it took, I don’t know, like 70% of our conversations, which for our support team was an immediate relief of hours spent that we're putting now to more valuable stuff.”

3️⃣ Create AI babysitters

Trust takes time, and AI needs supervision. Jen recommends repurposing agent time to review logs, validate chatbot decisions, and flag anything that doesn’t make sense. These "AI babysitters" act as a human feedback loop, catching hallucinations, outdated policies, or tone-deaf responses before they reach customers.

“Think of your AI tools … as somebody who just started, they went on the job and you just gotta double check everything until you're really, very confident that it's doing it right.”

4️⃣ Be transparent

Customers can tell when they’re talking to a bot, and they don’t appreciate being treated like they won’t notice. Instead of trying to make AI sound human, be upfront about what the bot can and can’t do. Set expectations clearly and always offer a path to a real person. Pretending the bot is empathetic doesn’t build trust. Being honest does.

5️⃣ Prevent hallucinations

AI will get things wrong, confidently. Jen ran her own data visualizations through ChatGPT, and every single number it generated was incorrect. This is what hallucinations look like: false summaries, made-up percentages, and outputs that sound right but aren’t.

That’s why support leaders need to check outputs, understand how their tools are trained, and avoid blind trust. Think of your AI like a brand-new hire. Until it proves itself, you need to review everything it produces.

“We hallucinate things sometimes… sometimes AI, ChatGPTs, generative things, generate things that don't exist… I fed it into ChatGPT to see how well could it summarize the visualizations… every single data point that it saw on the chart was wrong… you can't just feed it in.”

6️⃣ Build AI literacy

Your agents don’t need to be data scientists. But they do need to understand how AI works, when to use it, and when to step in. Jen recommends training your team on the basics of LLMs, prompting, and model behavior so they’re not just clicking buttons. When agents understand the tools they’re using, they feel more confident and make better decisions.

7️⃣ Pilot before scaling

Avoid the urge to launch big. Start with one use case, like a specific call type or a single agent group. Use the pilot phase to test responses, tune the model, and gather feedback.

Final Thought: 

Leading with AI doesn’t mean handing over control. It means asking better questions, setting smarter boundaries, and bringing your team along for the ride.

In this episode, Jen Bates McCorkle showed us that successful adoption isn’t about chasing the newest tool. It’s about building systems that are transparent, well-trained, and guided by real human oversight. When support leaders take the time to implement AI thoughtfully, it doesn’t just boost efficiency, it builds trust with customers and confidence across the team.

The takeaway? You don’t need to be an AI expert. You just need to lead like one.

Catch the full conversation on Live Chat with Jen Weaver!

Keep Going:

📬 Get weekly tactical CX  tips → https://live-chat-with-jen.beehiiv.com/ 

🎙 Catch up on past episodes → https://www.buzzsprout.com/2433498 

👋 Connect with Jen → https://www.linkedin.com/in/jen-weaver/ 

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