Steven Van Belleghem

Steven Van Belleghem's thinking across these sources converges on one central bet: artificial intelligence is dissolving the old rules of customer experience, and the companies that win will be the ones that understand what becomes commodity and what becomes precious. His clearest formulation of this is blunt: "De core van wat dat AI doet in customer service is goede service veranderen in een commodity" ⁸. Good, frictionless service used to be a differentiator because it was scarce; he illustrates this with the photography analogy, comparing the shift to when unlimited digital photos made a single picture worthless compared to the era of the 12-exposure film roll . His conclusion is that "Good customer service will no longer be a differentiator. It is becoming hygiene" , which pushes the real competitive battleground toward something he calls "deep loyalty" — a theme significant enough that it becomes the title of his forthcoming book ⁸.

A second major thread is his framework for agentic AI, which he is careful to distinguish sharply from chatbots. "Agentic AI is een AI tool die in jouw naam acties kan uitvoeren" ⁹¹⁰ — it doesn't just talk, it acts, buys, books, and pays. He predicts this will restructure digital life within a decade: "Ik zie binnen 10 jaar de rol van apps vervangen door Agents" ⁹¹⁰, with people issuing commands to personal agents the way they would to an employee. Tied to this is his "99/1" model of human contact: 99% of interactions just need efficiency and can be automated, while the remaining 1% — complex, emotional, high-stakes — is where human presence still wins trust, meaning "de frequentie van menselijk contact... gaat enorm zakken, maar die paar momenten dat het nog menselijk is gaan enorm in belang toenemen" ⁹¹⁰. He backs this with a striking reversal in consumer sentiment: where people once rejected programmed empathy, "Vandaag zijn wij allemaal klaar, zeggen wij van: geef ons maar een vriendelijke computer boven een onvriendelijke mens" ⁹¹⁰.

Van Belleghem is consistently skeptical of hype-driven timelines, even as he insists on the scale of the transformation. "Het is niet zo moeilijk om de toekomst te voorspellen. Het is heel moeilijk om de timing ervan te voorspellen" ⁹¹⁰ is a recurring caution: technical capability has existed for automating most customer service for two years, yet adoption lags because "organizations need time and people to implement" ⁹¹⁰, and he ties adoption speed directly to whether a CEO personally uses and champions the technology ⁹¹⁰. This is paired with a real-world observation from the LLM usage data he discusses on his RADAR podcast: "companies talk only about efficiency in their AI discussion, customers mainly go for emotional use cases" — a paradox that reinforces his broader argument that organizations misjudge what customers actually want from AI.

Underneath the AI commentary sits a well-developed philosophy of customer-centric culture that predates and now intersects with his AI thinking. His "95/5 rule" holds that companies overbuild restrictive policies to guard against the unreasonable 5% of customers, punishing the reasonable 95% in the process ⁸ — captured in his observation that "Een klant verwacht geen perfectie, hè. Een klant verwacht positieve intentie" ⁸. He argues cultural change is driven overwhelmingly by leadership behavior, not policy documents, and that incremental "friction hunting" beats grand transformation projects because it's cheap, fast, and builds a compounding culture of attentiveness ⁸. He's also candid about organizational courage, or its absence: "Op het moment dat je twijfelt, twijfel je eigenlijk niet meer. Dan ontbreekt je gewoon de durf om de volgende stap te zetten" ⁸, and he plays devil's advocate deliberately to expose when an idea is being killed by risk-aversion rather than substance: "Ik ga eventjes de advocate of the devil zijn. Als iemand dat zegt, dan weet je: het is game over voor het idee" ⁸.

His view of employees is inseparable from his view of customers: "Klanten kunnen niet gelukkig zijn als medewerkers ongelukkig zijn" ⁸, and he frames the willingness to accept short-term pain for long-term trust as a leadership test — "Ben je bereid jezelf pijn te doen op de korte termijn om vertrouwen te kweken op de lange termijn? Customer first without compromise" ⁸. He extends this into concrete organizational advice: large companies need both "Michelin chefs" who run reliable process and "street food chefs" who improvise and innovate ⁸, and he warns against blanket instructions like telling staff to "say no more often," which he says installs a race to the bottom rather than building genuine judgment ⁸.

Notably, Van Belleghem frames his own career, and by extension his credibility as a forecaster, with some humility: "Als ik kijk naar mijn carrière, dat is allemaal eigenlijk een opeenstapeling van toevalligheden. Alles is toevallig gelopen. Het is niks gepland geweest" ⁸. That mix of conviction about big structural shifts and modesty about prediction and planning is characteristic of how he presents ideas throughout — confident on direction (agents replacing apps, service becoming commodity, loyalty becoming the new differentiator), cautious on exact timing and on claiming any grand personal design behind it.

The practical takeaways that recur across his output are consistent: treat AI-driven service automation as inevitable and near-term but organizationally slow: invest deliberately in the small number of human touchpoints that will carry outsized weight; hunt friction continuously rather than launching one big transformation; and diagnose your own culture by asking whether leadership's micro-decisions actually protect customers under pressure, since that, more than any stated policy, decides whether customer-centricity is real. His three 2026 books — a youth thriller, "Deep Loyalty" on customer experience and AI, and a practical culture book built substantially from new cases beyond his earlier "De Ruwe Diamant" — reflect this same throughline: translating structural shifts in AI and commoditized service into very specific, applicable guidance for how companies and their people should behave.