Spain’s customer care is reaching a breaking point, and the problem isn’t just limited to one sector, either. The country’s healthcare industry is battling soaring waiting lists, and eight in 10 people are considering switching banks, as local hospitality is strained, seeking to meet rising tourism demand amid labor shortages, particularly in hotels.
These customer care challenges are rising at a time when regulatory scrutiny is also increasing. Spain recently introduced the Customer Service Law, Ley 10/2025, which stipulates that all companies must answer 95% of customer calls within three minutes and resolve general complaints within 15 business days.
One startup is poised to help companies and institutions across Spain ensure that metric, and beyond. Kognia is bringing its pioneering cognitive AI technology to the country, revolutionizing how customer support is handled.
But cognitive AI isn’t just about stepping in because of a workforce shortage. Kognia’s solutions are designed to answer the very core issues that continue to derail customer care and support delivery across banking, healthcare, hospitality, and more. As Kognia’s co-founder and CEO, Luis Guillermo Pardo explained, “technological fragmentation and data isolation are the real culprits behind friction in the customer experience, not simply a lack of personnel.”
These are industries mired in legacy systems and data scattered across fragmented departments and systems. When a customer lodges an issue, retrieving their file information to contextualize the case is overwhelmingly complicated due to siloed data. And, adding that manually intensive and outdated procedures remain the norm, precious time and resources are wasted while the clock counts down.
“Our research shows that 40% of advisor time is lost to information-hunting,” Pardo noted. “When a complaint moves from a chatbot to a human representative, the whole conversation gets reset, usually because there’s no clear information exchange and systems are so isolated from each other.”
The result, he added, is a “confused and stressed” representative, and an even more frustrated customer, who is all the more likely to walk and not return.
Cognitive AI: the antidote to dead-end chatbots
The kneejerk response to customer care strain has been to deploy AI, but not always the right kind. Many companies across Spain’s banking, healthcare, and hospitality sectors have layered first-generation chatbots onto the same fragmented infrastructure that caused the problems to begin with.
These firms across industries are stuck with a system that can answer simple and script-ready questions, but can’t resolve anything beyond that, leaving customers repeating themselves or abandoning the process altogether.
Kognia draws a sharp distinction between this kind of reactive AI and what it calls cognitive AI, or more precisely, the agentic AI that powers its Alan Process Intelligence, the back-office arm of Kognia’s Alan Agentic System.
Where a conventional chatbot retrieves information, Alan acts on it. The system functions as what Kognia describes as a dynamic digital worker, unifying real-time data access across an organization’s existing systems, automating complex back-office tasks through secure integrations, and orchestrating a case from start to finish. Crucially, when a case needs to be escalated to a human, Alan transfers the full context of the conversation, so that both the customer and the customer care representative never have to start over.
This makes a profound difference in sectors where customer complaints can be fraught with emotions and stress, as is often the case in sectors like healthcare and financial services.
A patient might be following up on a referral that has slipped between departments. Meanwhile in a hotel, it could be a guest whose booking issue has been acknowledged three times but never actually resolved, and now they’re worried about being left stranded in a strange city. And in banking, it could be a fraud alert that has an account holder stressed about their life savings.
“The problem isn’t that companies don’t have the data to resolve these cases. The data is almost always there. The problem is accessing that data and acting on it in real time, across systems that have historically not been designed to talk to each other,” Pardo explained.
Building for Spain’s regulatory reality
The timing of Kognia’s Spanish expansion isn’t incidental. The Customer Service Law has fundamentally altered the compliance stakes for any company with customer-facing operations in the country, but the regulatory complexity doesn’t stop there.
Any AI system handling customer data in Spain also has to navigate the EU’s GDPR and the growing requirements of the EU AI Act; high-priority areas in industries like banking and healthcare, where data protection is the most critical.
Kognia’s response is to treat compliance as an architectural requirement rather than a retrofit. The Alan Agentic System is built around what the company calls a Privacy by Design and by Default approach: native GDPR alignment, rigorous data classification, end-to-end traceability of how data moves through the system, and automated anonymization and pseudonymization of sensitive personal and financial information. The infrastructure is built to encryption standards that meet external audit requirements.
Most critically for sectors operating under close regulatory scrutiny, the system is designed to be fully explainable and auditable.
“In regulated industries, it’s not enough for an AI to give a correct answer. A firm must be able to explain and audit why it gave that answer, and the data it used to make that decision,” Pardo stressed.
Kognia is breaking down the black-box effect of AI so that organizations can both defend and vouch for an AI model’s decision-making to a regulator. The system also maintains a human-in-the-loop requirement, so that any decision with significant financial or medical impact is reviewed and validated by a person before it is executed.
Addressing resistance head-on
Kognia is clear-eyed about potential resistance, however. Spain is a market where trust in technology has to be earned, and where both institutional and consumer resistance to AI is real and understandable.
On the institutional side, the hesitation is familiar: compliance risk, concern about AI hallucinations producing erroneous outputs, cybersecurity exposure, and the sheer complexity of integrating new systems with legacy infrastructure.
For consumers, the resistance stems from years of poor experiences with rigid and unhelpful chatbots that deflected issues, or doubts about what AI systems actually do with sensitive personal data.
Notably, the same survey that found eight in ten Spaniards are considering switching banks also found that 76.5% of respondents said being able to speak to a real person is non-negotiable. Cognitive AI, in this context, is not a replacement for human connection, but the infrastructure that makes human connection possible when it matters most: by handling everything that doesn’t require it.
Kognia’s adoption strategy is respectful of these concerns. Instead of attempting full-scale transformations from day one, Kognia deploys in stages, starting with low-risk, high-impact use cases, such as internal advisor support tools or automated handling of frequent queries. Importantly, measurable improvements in resolution times and satisfaction scores are closely monitored to build confidence before expanding the system.
Additionally, transparency is built into every customer-facing interaction. Users always know when they’re engaging with the Alan Agentic System, and the system is programmed to recognise the limits of what it can and should handle autonomously. When a case is sensitive, complex, or emotionally fraught and requires a human touch, Alan is designed to immediately escalate, transferring the full case context to a human agent so the handoff is a relay and not a reset.
“When organisations see tangible evidence of governance and security, and customers experience genuine 24/7 availability with real resolution instead of generic deflection, resistance turns into adoption,” Pardo said. “We’ve seen it happen in Colombia and we’re seeing it begin to happen here.”
Different markets, same lesson
Kognia has developed its technology and methodology across multiple markets, and its international presence is not only meant for navigating differing regulatory and customer demands, but understanding how to approach the shared infrastructure fragmentation challenges.
Kognia has developed its technology and methodology based on its multi-market experience to hone a product that is agile and adaptable, whether in Latin America or Europe.
Spain’s customer experience crisis is not going to be resolved by a larger hiring headcount or by a new layer of chatbots on top of systems that don’t work together. Kognia’s bet is that the organizations that come out ahead over the next few years will be the ones that address the infrastructure problem first – and that cognitive AI, built to act rather than just answer, is the most direct route to doing that.
Featured image: Curated Lifestyle by Unsplash+
