Service Design

Traditional service design still matters — but it now operates in a world where AI systems interpret, summarise, and deliver parts of the service experience.

Three shifts define the agentic era:

1. AI shapes buyer understanding before they reach you

Buyers increasingly see AI-generated summaries — not your pages — first.
That means your service surfaces must be structured, machine-readable, and unambiguous.

2. Journeys involve human–AI collaboration

Services now include four encounters: human→human, human→AI, AI→human, and AI→AI.
Designing these interactions determines trust, clarity, and escalation behaviour.

3. Knowledge must be structured for AI interpretation

AI agents need structured knowledge — entities, relationships, and context — not just documents.
This is the foundation of both service performance and AI visibility.

These shifts are why Graph’s work focuses on knowledge, structure, and journeys that perform in AI-mediated environments.

Knowledge agent serving 5,000 employees

Fortune 500 technology company

A 1.9 PB knowledge estate made search and dashboards unusable.
Structuring knowledge for AI interpretation transformed the experience: natural conversation replaced search, adoption hit 100%, and roll-out completed in 83 days.

View case study

Technical advisory agent with safe escalation

Victrex

Engineers need precision. A misinterpreted query damages trust.
We designed intent detection and escalation logic that ensures AI handles what it can — and hands off cleanly when it can’t.

Learn more

Voice-first AI newsreader

Financial publisher

How news is spoken matters.
We developed a voice persona, pacing model, and content adaptation logic for a prototype AI newsreader.

Service design is the discipline of shaping how services work — across people, processes, systems, and interactions.

In the AI era, the scope expands:

• AI agents are now service actors, not add-ons
• journeys include AI-mediated touchpoints
• knowledge must be structured for AI interpretation
• clarity, trust, and escalation become machine-readable behaviours

Organisations must design how both humans and AI agents contribute to service delivery — and how the system maintains trust across all interaction types.

This is not about replacing traditional methods.
It's about aligning them with the realities of AI-driven service performance.

AI systems affect two critical surfaces:

1. What buyers see through AI-generated summaries

Your services must be represented clearly, consistently, and accurately.

2. How the service behaves when AI agents interact with it

Intent detection, escalation logic, and knowledge structure define the experience.

This is where service design meets AI visibility — the ability for AI systems to understand, represent, and correctly interpret your services.

If you want to understand how your current service surfaces perform in AI mode, explore our work in AI visibility.

How AI sees your services

• Industrial & manufacturing — advisory agents, technical content, knowledge-heavy workflows
• Financial services — regulated environments, high-risk decisions
• Media — voice-first content, intelligent delivery
• Technology — enterprise knowledge systems and employee experience
• Healthcare — safety-critical handoff logic
• Public sector — citizen services and digital operations

Service design isn’t becoming less important — it’s being reshaped by AI.

If you want to understand how AI currently interprets your service surfaces, start with our work on AI-driven visibility and structured journeys.

How AI is changing B2B services