Why Every Organisation Needs a Head of Human & Machine Experience

By Hamilton Jones, March 2026

For twenty years, we refined how organisations design experiences for human customers. We mapped journeys, tested interfaces, measured satisfaction and built entire teams around understanding what people need. Customer experience became a discipline, then a department, then a board-level priority.

But something fundamental has changed, and most organisations haven’t caught up. Your brand now serves two audiences. One of them isn’t human.

The shift that’s already happened

Right now, 800 million people use ChatGPT every week. Over a billion queries are processed daily. Nearly half of all ChatGPT usage involves people asking questions, effectively using AI as their search engine for product research, service comparisons and purchasing decisions.

When a customer asks an AI assistant to compare health insurance options, your brand is either present in that conversation or it isn’t. When an AI agent browses your website on behalf of a user, it experiences something completely different from what a human sees. Adobe’s research shows that AI systems typically parse only page titles, navigation menus and a few text snippets, missing the product descriptions, pricing and rich content your team spent months creating.

The commercial impact is already measurable. Google search referrals to publishers dropped by a third globally in 2025. When AI Overviews appear in search results, organic click-through rates drop 61%. But brands cited inside AI answers see 35% more organic clicks and 91% more paid clicks. Visitors arriving via AI-powered search convert at 4.4 times the rate of traditional organic visitors.

Being visible to machines is directly tied to revenue.

The audience nobody owns

Gartner has tracked “machine customers” since 2015. Their research projects that CEOs expect 15 to 20 percent of revenue to come from machine-initiated transactions by 2030. They describe this as roughly twice the size and twice the speed of the arrival of e-commerce. Over half of customers surveyed say they would willingly delegate service interactions to an AI assistant acting on their behalf.

Yet most organisations still design exclusively for humans. They have CX teams, digital teams, marketing teams and technology teams, all focused on human audiences. Nobody owns the machine experience. And nobody designs for the handoff points between the two.

A person asks ChatGPT to research options. The AI summarises three providers. The human clicks through to one website and browses. They get stuck and a chatbot picks up. They decide to proceed and their AI assistant fills out the form. Later, a service issue arises and the customer’s AI contacts the provider’s AI to resolve it.

Six touchpoints, alternating between human-led and machine-led. In most organisations, the CX team owns the website. SEO owns discoverability. The chatbot team owns the AI assistant. Development owns the API layer. Nobody sees the whole thread. Nobody designs for the transitions.

This is the gap that Human and Machine Experience addresses.

Why HMX is distinct

Several adjacent disciplines are forming. SEO professionals are developing Generative Engine Optimisation for improving content in AI responses. UX designers are exploring AI experience design. Gartner’s machine customer research provides strategic framing. But each is only a piece.

HMX integrates them into a single discipline across four pillars: AI visibility and discoverability (how your brand shows up when machines ask about your category), machine journey design (mapping the experience for AI agents across the full lifecycle), experience architecture (ensuring digital properties serve both audiences), and machine trust (monitoring how AI systems represent your brand).

The critical word is “both.” HMX doesn’t replace CX. It recognises that every touchpoint sits on a human-to-machine spectrum, and that the balance shifts constantly. Someone needs to own that spectrum end to end.

Why it matters now in Australia

In Australia, 49 percent of people used generative AI in the past year, up from 38 percent the year before. But Deloitte’s research shows only 12 percent of Australian leaders report AI is transforming their business, compared to 25 percent globally. We are in an intent-to-action gap: high awareness, limited strategic capability.

The organisations that build HMX capability in this gap will compound their advantage as AI-mediated commerce becomes normal. Those that wait will play catch-up against competitors who trained the machines first.

The window is now

CX sounded niche in 2005. UX sounded niche in 2000. The organisations that hired dedicated CX leaders early didn’t just get better experiences. They got a structural advantage in how they understood and served customers.

HMX is the same bet, at the same inflection point, for the next era. The evidence is substantial, the shift is measurable, and the audience is already at the door.

The only question is whether someone in your organisation is designing the experience they have when they arrive.