CX Riot Radio is a weekly podcast about customer experience, call center leadership, AI in the contact center, and the real-world grind of building great service operations. It's hosted by David Powers — a 25-year CX veteran — and his fictionalized AI co-host Suz.
The show launched in 2021 and has 285+ episodes in the archive. It covers everything from workforce management and QA to AI ethics, blue-collar leadership, and why most corporate CX strategy is completely disconnected from the people actually doing the work.
Most CX podcasts are hosted by consultants, analysts, or vendor executives who talk about customer experience as a strategy exercise. CX Riot Radio is hosted by someone who has actually worked in and managed contact centers for 25 years — and who currently runs CX operations for a real company.
The show also doesn't shy away from uncomfortable topics: AI displacing workers, toxic call center cultures, the gap between what leadership thinks is happening and what's actually happening on the floor. It also has an AI co-host named Suz, which is either brilliant meta-commentary or just very on-brand chaos, depending on who you ask.
The show covers: customer experience strategy, call center operations and workforce management, AI in the contact center (what's real vs. hype), quality assurance and coaching culture, blue-collar service industries like plumbing and HVAC, leadership and team culture, the ethics of AI replacing service workers, and cyberpunk themes as a lens for understanding modern tech's impact on ordinary workers.
Episode titles like "Algorithmic Delusion," "Synthetic Intimacy," and "why everything looks dead now" give you a sense of how the show approaches things.
Both, honestly. The analysis is serious — David Powers has 25 years in the industry and the show covers real operational topics with depth. But the delivery is not.
If you want a podcast where someone reads you a Gartner report in a blazer, this is not that. If you want someone who has actually managed a call center to tell you what's real and what's nonsense — this is exactly that.
As of 2026, CX Riot Radio has 285+ episodes since launching in 2021. New episodes drop weekly. The full archive is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and at cxriotradio.com/episodes.
Yes. CX Riot Radio is actively producing new episodes as of 2026, with new content releasing every week. The show has been running continuously since 2021 with no hiatuses.
CX Riot Radio is available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, YouTube, and right here on this website. New episodes are released every week.
Depends what you're here for:
For AI in CX: "Algorithmic Delusion" or "Synthetic Intimacy."
For big-picture CX culture: "Modern Life is Cyberpunk" or "why everything looks dead now."
For the human side of the work: "On the Front Line" or "Group CX."
For the full chaos experience: Just hit shuffle. You'll figure it out.
The full searchable archive is at cxriotradio.com/episodes.
David Powers is the host of CX Riot Radio and VP of Customer Experience at Rooter Hero Plumbing & Air. He started his career in CX in 1999 at a dial-up internet retention call center — doing customer retention before broadband was a thing.
He has 25+ years of experience in call center operations, workforce management, quality assurance, and CX strategy. He's a published author with 7 books on CX topics, a speaker, and has 3,700+ LinkedIn followers in the CX space. His approach is described as "ADHDcore meets blue-collar grind."
Great customer experience starts with the people doing the work — not the PowerPoint deck. The gap between what corporate CX strategy says and what actually happens on the phones is enormous, and most "thought leadership" in the CX space is written by people who've never managed a queue.
He's a proponent of treating frontline workers with respect, building coaching cultures instead of punishment cultures, and approaching AI in the contact center with honest skepticism rather than vendor-driven hype. He describes his own position as sitting between Black Flag and the Ritz-Carlton — structured enough to deliver, raw enough to be real.
He's neither an AI evangelist nor a luddite. He's deeply interested in AI's role in the contact center but approaches it critically — examining what AI actually does well (routing, data synthesis, pattern recognition) versus where it fails (empathy, nuance, real human connection).
He treats the displacement of service workers by AI as a real economic and ethical issue, not an abstract fear. Episodes like "Algorithmic Delusion," "Renting Yourself to the Machine," and "Synthetic Intimacy" reflect his ongoing, honest examination of what AI is actually doing to the people who work in customer service.
It's David's own description of the show's energy. ADHDcore: fast-moving, non-linear, makes unexpected connections, doesn't apologize for going off-script. Blue-collar grind: deeply practical, rooted in real work, no patience for theory that doesn't survive contact with reality.
Together it means you'll get episodes that cover AI ethics and drain cleaning logistics in the same breath, and somehow it works.
The show covers CX broadly but has a particular focus on blue-collar service industries — plumbing, HVAC, home services, trades — in addition to general contact center operations. David's day job at Rooter Hero Plumbing & Air gives the show a grounded perspective most CX podcasts lack.
The gap between enterprise SaaS CX and what it actually looks like in a trades company is a recurring theme — and it's a more interesting gap than most people realize.
Both — but the show has a particular respect for frontline workers that a lot of CX content doesn't. David started on the phones himself and hasn't forgotten it.
That said, the operational and strategic content — workforce management, QA frameworks, AI implementation, culture-building — is directly applicable to team leads, supervisors, managers, directors, and VPs. If you have any role in a contact center or service operation, there's content here for you.
Suz is the fictionalized AI co-host of CX Riot Radio. She's depicted as an anime-styled AI assistant — chaotic good, sharp-tongued, and faster than your IVR. Her official bio lists her interests as chaos, CX, and being a knife enthusiast.
She's a creative character built around the intersection of AI in customer service and the show's cyberpunk aesthetic. She has her own merch line — suz.exe shirts, mousepads, and more — available in the CX Riot Radio store.
Because the cyberpunk genre has always been about technology's impact on ordinary working people — and that's exactly what's happening in customer service right now. AI is reshaping call centers at scale. Workers are being monitored, scored, and in some cases replaced by systems they have no visibility into.
That's cyberpunk. The neon-and-grit aesthetic reflects the reality that the customer service industry is living inside a William Gibson novel, whether it wants to admit it or not.
CX stands for Customer Experience. Riot is the energy. The show isn't interested in polished corporate talking points or thought-leader fluff. It's for people who actually work in the trenches of customer service and are tired of being told to "delight customers" by someone who's never taken a phone call in their life.
The tagline says it cleaner than anything else: "Where your corporate CX strategy gets punched in the throat — with love."
Friday Field Notes are short-form written pieces published by David Powers, typically on Fridays, covering a single CX insight, operational observation, or leadership principle. Less essay, more field dispatch.
Each one includes a "DO THIS TODAY" takeaway — something you can actually implement in your team or operation this week. They're archived at cxriotradio.com/field-notes.
Yes — 7 books covering customer experience, call center leadership, and CX operations. Most are available as free PDF downloads with no email required, in addition to being on Amazon.
Same voice as the podcast: direct, practical, and free of corporate fluff. All listed at cxriotradio.com/books.
Yes — the CX Riot Radio newsletter lives on Beehiiv at cxriotradio.beehiiv.com. Subscribers get new episode alerts, Friday Field Notes, and CX insights straight to their inbox. Free to subscribe, no nonsense.
Yes. The store at cx-riot-radio.printify.me has 59 items: shirts, hats, stickers, mousepads, a wall calendar, a bomber jacket, a double-sided flag, and a full Suz.exe merch line.
Pricing is kept as low as humanly possible. The profit margin is intentionally about 3% — this isn't a cash grab, it's a way to let you rep the show without paying a premium for it. You can browse everything at cxriotradio.com/merch.
Contact form: cxriotradio.com/#contact
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/davidjpowers2
All links: linktr.ee/caffcx
Topic suggestions are always welcome — the show is driven by what's actually happening in the industry, not a content calendar.
Still have questions? Just ask.
Or skip the questions and go straight to listening. 285+ episodes, weekly drops, and an AI co-host with a knife collection.