Customer experience predictions from industry prognosticators

Today is Groundhog Day, and just as Punxsutawney Phil emerges to forecast the season ahead, industry analysts and enterprise leaders are stepping forward with their predictions for customer experience (CX). Shadows or not, the real question is whether organizations will finally step into the spring of artificial intelligence (AI).

As we move into 2026, the conversation around AI in CX is shifting from experimentation to execution. What began as isolated pilot programs and deployments in 2024 and 2025 is now giving way to a more mature approach for the year ahead.

The forecast is clear: the era of scattered AI deployments is ending, and a new phase defined by orchestration, trust, and meaningful scale is beginning.

Orchestration: The end of fragmentation

The promise of AI has led many enterprises down a path of proliferation, deploying multiple AI tools across the customer journey without considering how they work together. That approach is reaching its breaking point. The challenge now is not adding more AI but making existing AI work in concert.

Tim Crawford, AVOA: “I predict that enterprises will largely move away from ‘AI everywhere’ and focus on those opportunities where AI makes a significant impact to customer engagement. I also predict a consolidation of approaches and more integration rather than the piecemeal approach that many are taking today.”

Organizations are discovering that disjointed AI implementations create friction rather than value. This consolidation is not about doing less with AI but about doing more with purpose, focusing resources on opportunities that genuinely transform customer engagement rather than spreading capabilities thin across every possible step in the customer journey.

Finbarr Begley, Cavell: “The biggest CX shift in 2026 will not be away from voice, but away from waiting. Customers will tolerate slower human responses if AI preserves context and meaningfully advances resolution in the meantime. In that world, immediacy becomes optional, continuity becomes non-negotiable, and CX platforms succeed or fail on orchestration rather than responsiveness, as AI either resolves the issue outright or ensures humans enter the conversation fully informed.”

CX solutions will succeed or fail based on their ability to orchestrate seamless handoffs between AI and humans, maintaining context across channels and touchpoints.

Trust: From promises to performance

Trust in AI is not built through marketing claims or technical specifications. It emerges from consistent, reliable performance that demonstrates AI knows its capabilities and limitations. Organizations are learning that trust requires transparency about what AI can handle, clear escalation paths when it cannot, and governance frameworks that ensure responsible deployment.

Hayley Sutherland, IDC: “This will be a year of reckoning for enterprise-wide AI, as more organizations engage in strategic, holistic AI planning and use case roadmap development. As we prepare for a future where companies need to orchestrate seamless multi-agent experiences, 2026 will be critical for building a strong foundation for responsibly, successfully deploying advanced AI use cases that work together across different business areas to provide truly differentiated value.”

Organizations cannot scale AI without establishing governance frameworks, ethical guidelines, and accountability mechanisms. This requires building strong foundations, not just technical infrastructure but organizational practices that ensure AI behaves predictably and escalates appropriately.

Scale: Outcomes over outputs

The AI industry has celebrated outputs- models that generate answers, systems that automate tasks, tools that increase efficiency. But outputs without outcomes are just activity without impact. Organizations are shifting focus from what AI can do to what AI achieves, measuring success through business results rather than technical capabilities.

Liz Miller, Constellation Research: “Outcomes will knock-out outputs as customers strip away the hype over an AI model delivering AN answer and instead to assess if the cumulative impact of AI’s outputs are driving towards business outcomes in a more time and resource efficient and effective manner. Just because AI can be set up and accomplish a task does not mean that output holds real business value. Outcomes are defined by the customer and directly tie to strategic business goals.”

Just because AI can accomplish a task does not mean that task matters. Outcomes are defined by customers and tied to strategic business goals. This shift demands that organizations move beyond measuring AI adoption to measuring AI impact.

The forecast

So what does the groundhog see? Julie Ask from Julie Ask Advisory paints a vision of the balance that organizations must strike.

Julie Ask, Julie Ask Advisory: “Consumers are turning to LLM-powered applications as replacements for search, shopping, and work – and as trusted assistants for health, fitness, relationships, and financial decisions. Consumers willingly share data – sometimes out of naivety, sometimes in exchange for personalization – creating long-term context that brands use to generate personalized content, assist shopping, set prices, and automate service. Knowing how and which context to use in a scenario is a complicated endeavor for brands that risks the erosion of well-earned consumer trust.“

The organizations that will lead customer experience in 2026 are those that master the interplay between orchestration, trust, and meaningful scale. They will consolidate their AI approaches, building multi-agent experiences that maintain context across channels and touchpoints. They will earn customer trust through reliable performance and transparent governance. They will measure success not by how much AI they deploy but by the business outcomes AI delivers.

The forecast is in your hands. Will you see more weeks of AI chaos, or will you step into the spring of mature, purposeful AI that creates measurable business impact? The choice is yours.

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About the Author
Heidi Elmore is a serial technologist passionate about enterprise communications. She has launched UCaaS, CPaaS, and CCaaS products and led teams across multiple functions. When she’s not obsessing over enterprise software, she rides and shows dressage horses.