The tools are ready. The implementations usually aren't.
Spotlight CX is a boutique practice built around one person, one client at a time — closing the gap between what AI support can do and what it actually does for your company.
Mark Wallace
Principal Automation Architect & Owner · Spotlight CX
Who I am
I'm Mark Wallace — Principal Automation Architect and the owner of Spotlight CX. I've spent the last ~3 years at Forethought working hands-on with clients across SaaS, ecommerce, finance, and healthcare, building and rescuing AI support agents on every major help-desk platform.
At Forethought I started and led the AI Value Architect team — a group focused on quick, high-impact engagements for at-risk clients and messy or destructive agent setups. The job was to rebuild them so they actually kept pace with the tooling and followed real agent-building best practices. In under four months I personally ran 30+ engagements, which is where most of my pattern library comes from.
My philosophy
The models and tools available today are extraordinarily powerful, and they're getting better every quarter. The bottleneck is no longer capability — it's whether anyone actually builds something that produces outcomes worth the spend.
Most companies default to knowledge-based answers — essentially a smarter search bar. That's fine, but the real reduction in support volume comes from going after the tickets that actually make up the bulk of the queue. That requires a structured pathway that not only resolves the ticket, but does it in a way that feels good to the customer. Those builds are harder. They require real experience using and optimizing these models toward specific outcomes.
Every vendor has a good product. What they don't have is enough people who are genuinely proficient at this — and the good people they do have are usually carrying 20 clients each. They can't go deep enough on your specific context, your brand voice, or how you actually want to treat your customers. I can.
How I work
One company at a time. That focus is the whole point — it's how we capture the months of deflection value that normally get burned on setup-related blockers, half-trained teams, and the 30-minute Zoom handoffs that don't stick.
I also build for the long tail. Agents that don't generate more maintenance overhead than they save. And when the build is done, I do the targeted training your team actually needs to own it — not a generic enablement deck. The result is a clean handoff and an automation footprint that keeps paying off after I'm gone.
5+
Years in AI support
30+
Engagements (last 4 mo.)
All major
Help-desk platforms
~3 yrs
Forethought tenure
Why Spotlight CX exists
The value AI support promises is real — it's right there. The gap is the process of learning, implementing, and operationalizing it inside a specific company. Spotlight CX is the layer your AI vendor doesn't sell you: deeply technical, accountable to deflection, and focused on getting you to the outcome the tools have always been capable of.