From the Internet to artificial intelligence: what changes between people and organizations
The Centro Nacional de Consultoría (CNC) has observed Colombians' relationship with the Internet practically since it first arrived in the country. That history, combined with more than thirty years studying service, experience and loyalty, allows us to understand not only what is changing, but why it is changing.
When the Internet was just beginning to appear
In 1999, only 1.8% of people reported having used the Internet the previous day. It is hard to imagine that world today. The Internet was not yet an everyday channel for shopping, making financial transactions, dealing with the government, working, studying or entertainment. Smartphones, apps and social media as we know them today did not exist either, nor, of course, artificial intelligence available to millions of people.
But the Centro Nacional de Consultoría was already observing that change. It did so through the Estudio General de Medios (EGM, General Media Study), a continuous, single-source study that made it possible to understand people's relationship with different media and, at the same time, observe their consumption patterns for goods, products and services.
This characteristic is especially important. We did not observe the Internet in isolation. We could observe it within people's lives. And that allowed us to follow an extraordinary transformation.
We watched the Internet grow. But, above all, we watched people change. Over the years, the Internet stopped being exceptional. The timeline of our measurements shows that evolution: from the incipient presence recorded in the late nineties to a scenario, in 2016, in which 87% of people had used the Internet the previous day. But the truly interesting change was not only in the number of people connected. It was in what they began to do once they were connected.
The way people got informed changed. The way they communicated. The way they entertained themselves. How they searched for products. How they compared. How they bought. How they dealt with banks. How they interacted with companies and public institutions. And with each of those changes, expectations about service also began to transform.
The history of the Internet in Colombia is, to a large extent, the history of a transformation in the relationship between people and organizations.
Two stories were unfolding at the same time
While we observed how people progressively incorporated technology into their lives, at the Centro Nacional de Consultoría we were developing another line of knowledge.
For more than twenty years we have technically evaluated the service and relationships of companies and organizations with their customers, citizens and other stakeholders.
We have observed how satisfaction, trust and loyalty are built.
How expectations change. How new channels emerge. How a failure affects a relationship. How organizations win back (or fail to win back) a customer after a bad experience. And how technology gradually entered each of those processes.
For a long time these could seem like two different fields of knowledge: people's relationship with technology and people's relationship with organizations. Today we know they are inseparable.
From measuring access to understanding appropriation
In 2016 we took an additional step and created the Digital Appropriation Study. By then it was no longer enough to know who had Internet access or who had used it. The question had changed. We needed to understand: How capable are people, really, of turning technology into value for their lives?
We then began to study in greater depth the uses, capabilities, behaviors and barriers associated with technology. And that knowledge also led us to develop the concept of the Digital Frontier: understanding which activities people carry out exclusively in the physical world, which they do entirely online and, especially, which ones they carry out by combining both worlds.
Today our data show that 38% of the activities studied in Colombia are carried out exclusively online, compared with 39% in Chile. However, the gap widens when we look at the combination of traditional and digital channels: 27% in Colombia versus 33% in Chile. This coexistence of both worlds is one of the central findings running through this series.
A snapshot shows where we are. History helps explain why. This, I believe, is one of the most valuable capabilities the CNC can offer today.
We can measure a customer's current experience.
We can evaluate UX and detect friction.
We can use CX to identify a critical moment in the journey.
We can measure satisfaction, trust and loyalty.
We can establish a person's digital capabilities and understand their Digital Frontier.
But we can also place those results within a transformation trajectory we have observed for decades.
And that changes the interpretation. Because today's behaviors did not appear overnight. They are the result of years of learning. Of technologies adopted and abandoned. Of good and bad experiences. Of expectations that kept rising. Of relationships that went from exclusively in-person to telephone, digital and, finally, omnichannel.
Measuring tells us what is happening. History helps us understand why it is happening.
History becomes an advantage for the future
This becomes even more important with artificial intelligence. Today we may be facing a transformation as profound as the one we began to observe with the Internet.
Once again, new capabilities are emerging. Once again, channels will change. Once again, people will learn new ways of doing things. And once again, their expectations of organizations will change. But this time we are not starting from scratch.
We have more than two decades of evidence on how people adopt new technologies and how those technologies end up reshaping their relationships with companies, institutions and governments.
We also have a lesson that is particularly relevant right now: technology alone does not determine the experience. Two organizations can use similar technologies and produce completely different experiences. The difference lies in the knowledge they have about people and in their ability to turn it into context. Two bodies of knowledge that today become one.
This is the convergence we want to put at the service of organizations:
DIGITAL APPROPRIATION + DIGITAL FRONTIER
How people change when technology changes.
CX + UX + SERVICE + LOYALTY
How relationships between people and organizations are built and transformed.
+ HISTORY
The ability to understand how both have evolved together.
It is not just about accumulating information.
It is about being able to connect:
TECHNOLOGY → BEHAVIOR → EXPECTATIONS → EXPERIENCE → TRUST → LOYALTY
and observe how that cycle transforms over time.
We have observed the transformation. Now we can help navigate the next one. Organizations today face a future of ever-faster change.
Artificial intelligence, automation, new channels and new forms of interaction will once again transform what people can do and, as a result, what they expect from organizations.
No one can predict exactly what that relationship will look like ten years from now.
But there is an enormous difference between facing those changes by looking only at the latest technology and doing so with decades of knowledge about how people have responded to previous transformations.
At the Centro Nacional de Consultoría we want to turn that trajectory into tools so organizations can build better services, better experiences and stronger relationships with their customers, citizens and other stakeholders.
Because technologies change. Channels change. Expectations change. But there is something we have learned by observing this history:
The Internet transforms the relationship: milestones in technology, citizenship and experience
Year / period | Internet and technology milestone | What changes for customers and citizens | What changes in service and experience |
1990–1994 | First academic networks and the Internet arrives in Colombia. In 1990 Uniandes connects to BITNET, and in 1994 Colombia officially connects to the Internet. | For the first time, it becomes possible to interact and exchange information remotely through digital networks. | Availability and information. Service is still essentially in person and by phone; digital begins as a complementary channel. |
1995–2000 | The Web goes commercial. The Internet gradually moves beyond academia, and corporate websites and online services appear. | People discover they can look for information before engaging with an organization. | Transparency. Attending to customers is no longer enough: information about products and services becomes available before contact. |
2000–2006 | Commercial Internet, search engines, e-commerce and CRM. | Searching, comparing and completing some transactions online gradually becomes common. | Customer knowledge. If the organization stores information about me, I start to expect it to recognize me and remember our relationship. |
2007–2009 | The smartphone makes the Internet portable and permanent. The iPhone, introduced in 2007, combined phone, web browsing, email, search and maps in a pocket-sized device. | The Internet stops being mainly a place we “go into” from a computer: it starts to go everywhere with us. | Immediacy. If the Internet is always available, organizations start to be judged on speed, ease and constant availability. |
2009–2012 | Mobile messaging + the social media explosion. In 2012 Facebook surpasses 1 billion monthly active users. | People no longer just receive information: they talk, recommend, rate, complain and make their experiences public. | Reputation and voice of the customer. A bad experience no longer belongs only to the customer and the company: it can go public and be amplified. |
2013–2019 | Apps, platforms, the on-demand economy and digital services. | The phone becomes a kind of remote control for everyday life: transportation, banking, shopping, food, entertainment and paperwork. | Experience and low friction. People start comparing experiences across sectors: the ease of one app raises expectations of every other organization. |
2020–2021 | Pandemic: accelerated digitalization. Work, education, commerce, health and public services move massively to remote or hybrid models. | Millions of people take up digital activities out of necessity and discover which ones they want to keep digital and which they need to handle in person. | Omnichannel and resilience. Digital is no longer optional. The challenge becomes ensuring continuity across channels and serving people with different capabilities and circumstances. |
2022–2024 | Generative AI. ChatGPT is publicly launched on November 30, 2022, popularizing conversational interaction with AI. | A new expectation emerges: we don't just want to find information; we expect technology to understand, converse, synthesize, recommend and produce answers. | Personalization and anticipation. If an organization has data and AI, we expect it to know the context, reduce repetition and anticipate needs. |
2025–today | AI built into service, agents and human–AI coexistence. | People begin to interact interchangeably with interfaces, automations, AI and people within the same relationship. | Trust, context and recovery. Automating is no longer enough: what matters is knowing when AI should resolve, when to escalate to a person and how to preserve context throughout the journey. |
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