Your clean-up shift is over: Journey management just got the Skills to scale

Last week, we wrote about CX teams becoming the journey police as AI makes it possible for anyone to generate insights. Instead of freeing up the core CX team to act on those insights, that flood of contributions can leave them checking everyone else's homework. 

On Sept. 15, our CEO and Co-Founder, Jochem van der Veer, Head of Product Design, Memie Huang, and some very special customer guests, Berri Berto and Haley Gruensfelder  from NCR Voyix, showed how we're changing that by giving CX teams the tools to scale the practice without scaling policing along with it.

“AI governance is the new battlefield for UX, insights and customer experience teams, because the faster your org creates, the more your team needs to police." - Jochem van der Veer, CEO and co-founder, TheyDo

A foundation AI can actually work with

Connect enough sources and let AI generate enough building blocks, and the same insight starts reappearing in slightly different words. Filters drift. The connections a team relies on stop being trustworthy, and nobody outside CX has a reason to believe what's in there.

TheyDo now recognizes duplicate insights and surfaces them for review, so a team can merge them into a single building block in bulk without losing any properties or linked relationships. It's powered by an update to search that reads the meaning of an insight, not just its title, which is also what makes duplicate detection possible in the first place.

In the live walkthrough, Memie showed an insight about a lack of transparency after investing that had six near-duplicates across the workspace, created as multiple regional teams did the work to diagnose the same drop in customer satisfaction. Duplicate detection pulled all six together, kept every linked quote and tag, and merged them into one new insight mapped back to each of its origins.

Context anyone can consume

Cleaning up the context solves one problem. But journey management doesn't become a business practice if the only people who can make sense of that context are journey managers. That's where Docs, Collections and Pulse views earn their place: they turn a working library into something a stakeholder outside CX can actually read, and they let a journey lead filter that library down to exactly what a given team or region needs before sharing it on.

"Docs have given me a really nice stakeholder touchpoint. [My] PMs now see it and they're like, oh, what's this? I've used Docs almost as a spark, a way for people to easily get in and see [the data]." - Berri Berto, interim Executive Director of UX Design, NCR Voyix

A practice that scales: Skills

This was the hero of the release and the reason for the session's title.

Skills is how TheyDo hands much of the work of policing quality to the agent itself. An admin defines the steps, requirements, and rules once, whether that's the standard for creating a journey building block, the structure an executive report has to follow, or a recurring taxonomy cleanup, and every run follows that same standard automatically, with a human still in control of what gets approved.

In the demo, Memie fed a set of research sources to the agent and ran a Skill called Insight Creator and Audit. It clustered the quotes, created insights to the team's own standard, checked them against the library for duplicates as it went, and mapped them to the right journeys, all in one pass, with nothing committing until approved. Then, from the same vetted insights, she ran two reporting Skills to generate two Docs at once: an executive summary for leadership, and a deeper, opportunity-led version for product delivery managers. Same trusted data, two audiences, one consistent standard.

"[Skills have] freed us up to do the work that actually requires a human. So synthesis, strategy, connecting themes with a bunch of different people." - Haley Gruensfelder, Service Designer, NCR Voyix

The point isn't to remove people from the process. It's to stop using their time to repeatedly enforce standards AI can be taught to follow.

Taking context to where decisions happen

The last shift is about getting that context beyond the people working directly in TheyDo.

TheyDo MCP, now in early access with a small group of design partners, lets that same clean, structured context reach people through the tools they already use: Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot, without ever opening TheyDo.

A product owner or an exec can ask a question and get an answer sourced from your journey context, with CX still holding approval, governance, and a full audit trail behind it. The Skills a team codifies internally become the playbooks those external agents can run on.

What this is already doing

None of this is theoretical. At NCR Voyix, a UX team that has been building its journey management practice for five years, Skills has changed who can take part. Their team spent years running office hours and manually checking colleagues' work to keep the data clean. With Skills holding the standard, that manual policing has largely fallen away.

"I've had people that have been the slowest adopters ever who took years of hands-on work, and now they're like, I love this! Journey management is what I'm about.[...] "We've built this brain, and now the people are coming. Now we have the resources and tools to allow them to connect in." - Berri Berto, interim Executive Director of UX Design, NCR Voyix

Where this leaves your team

Everyone in the category is now saying journey management is a business practice. Forrester says it. Gartner says it. Our competitors say it too.

What we showed on Sept. 15 was less a claim and more a mechanism: a cleaner foundation for people and AI to work from, context the wider business can actually consume, and shared standards that don't depend on a handful of CX experts policing every contribution by hand.

And increasingly, that context can reach people through the tools they already use to work and make decisions.

"It's about giving AI a ‘harness’ for real customer experience work, end to end. You have your data coming in from your systems, you’re governing and structuring it and building that context, and then actually running AI workflows on top of it - all to aid your practice." - Jochem van der Veer, CEO and co-founder, TheyDo

Missed it live? Watch the full recording of Stop Being the Journey Police: TheyDo's September Product Update.