Capital One is promoting a "customer-back engineering" approach to reimagine banking processes with agentic AI, arguing this flips the usual technology-first playbook and produces outsized results 1.
McKinsey research cited by the company shows organisations capture less than one-third of the value expected from digital investments — a shortfall Capital One attributes to starting with technology instead of customer needs 1.
Customer-back engineering starts with customer challenges, needs and expectations and works backward to build the technology and systems that deliver the intended experience; Capital One says the reverse—bolting apps onto capabilities—creates fragmented solutions and poor customer journeys 1.
"When you get your engineers closer to customers, you get a lot more sideways innovation," says Ashish Agrawal, managing vice president of business cards and payments tech at Capital One, arguing engineers bring different perspectives that multiply solutions beyond product or sales teams 1.
To institutionalise that proximity, Capital One has set a goal for every engineer in Agrawal’s organisation to run multiple customer touchpoints each year — digital empathy sessions, embedded customer‑support rotations, engineering ride‑alongs with sales and support, and hackathons focused on real customer problems 1.
Agrawal says the biggest barrier in large companies is engineers’ lack of direct customer access; bringing them closer to users helps them exploit the data that feeds AI and accelerates application of AI‑informed techniques to solve customer problems 1.
Capital One frames this approach as necessary because AI has shortened product lifecycles: engineers who understand customers and control the data can move faster to translate AI capabilities into customer value rather than incremental feature upgrades 1.
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