CX Today

How can CX leaders scale AI without creating more risk than value?

That is the central question in this CX Today interview with Rebecca Wettemann, Principal at Valoir, as she joins Rob Wilkinson to unpack how enterprise thinking around AI in customer experience is changing. The conversation shows how many organizations have moved beyond early enthusiasm and are now under pressure to prove that AI can deliver measurable business outcomes without harming trust, increasing costs, or disrupting operations.

Wettemann explains that the market has shifted from fear of missing out to what she describes as fear of messing up. In practice, that means leaders are no longer satisfied with experimentation for its own sake. They want AI initiatives that improve workflows, support customers effectively, and justify the spend. According to Wettemann, one of the biggest barriers remains trust, especially when teams still associate AI with hallucinations, weak chatbot experiences, and unpredictable costs.

The interview also highlights why data integration continues to hold back progress. Wettemann argues that AI needs consistent, current, and correct data to perform well, especially in customer-facing use cases. Rather than trying to build one system that handles everything, she advises organizations to break work into smaller skills and tasks, then apply AI where the business case is clear.

Workforce design is another major theme. Wettemann notes that AI is changing the role of the human agent, with more people taking on higher-value work, supervising AI-driven interactions, and helping refine AI agents. That shift, she says, requires leaders to rethink metrics, compensation, onboarding, and support structures.

For CX leaders wondering where to begin, Wettemann’s advice is practical: experiment broadly, keep pilots small, learn what your data and workflows can support, and use those findings to build the right path into production.

In this CX Today discussion, host and Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Claudio Rodrigues, Chief Product Officer at Omilia, to cut through the AI hype and get real about why so many contact centers are underperforming despite significant investment.

If your AI deployment isn't delivering, Claudio argues the problem started long before you went live, and he's got the framework to fix it. This is a must-watch for any CX leader tired of chasing metrics that don't tell the full story.

The contact center AI gold rush has left a lot of organizations holding fool's gold. Claudio Rodrigues has seen it firsthand... and he's not mincing words.

Key discussion points:

• The root cause of AI failure: Most deployments collapse at the problem definition stage. Organizations chase “agentic AI” as a strategy rather than a solution, with no clear metric to measure success against
• Containment rate isn't enough anymore: It's still a valid metric, but Claudio makes a compelling case for shifting the language from containment to resolution – and expanding the lens to include upsell, churn reduction, and revenue growth
• Static vs. dynamic AI assets: A contact center frozen at a point in time will depreciate in value. Omilia's Self-Learning Agentic CX platform is built to continuously learn from real interactions, removing the need for armies of manual annotators

What CX leaders aren't getting but should be: Faster time-to-value, deployment-ready data pipelines, and a clear line of sight between their AI investment and company growth metrics.

Audit your current AI deployment against a clearly defined problem statement and explore whether your metrics capture resolution, upsell, and growth – not just containment.

Public sector transformation does not move on hype alone. It moves under pressure, scrutiny, and long-term delivery demands. This conversation explores what major recent wins may signal for the wider market, what themes are rising fastest, and where the most overlooked opportunities now sit.

In this interview, Rob Wilkinson sat down at NiCE World 2026 with Fiona Virture, Head of Public Sector Sales at Route 101 to discuss  the business and operational realities shaping public sector transformation, market, policy, and technology factors influencing what happens next. It is designed to bring a practical sector perspective into the campaign while keeping the discussion grounded in tangible change.

Diabolocom’s AI Product Manager Tom Azernour on why orchestration, not automation, is the real future of contact center AI

Host Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Tom Azernour, AI Product Manager at Diabolocom, to unpack why the virtual agent category is long overdue for a rethink. 

As contact centers move beyond legacy voice bots into the agentic era, Tom explains what "orchestration-first" AI actually means in practice and why the architecture decisions made today will define CX performance for years to come. 

If your virtual agent is still just deflecting calls, this is the conversation you need to watch. 

Most virtual agents deflect calls. Diabolocom's orchestrates them. Tom Azernour breaks down what separates the new generation of AI-powered virtual agents from legacy bots, and why the difference matters more than most leaders realize. 

From deflection to orchestration: Why the decision tree model is dead, and how Diabolocom's agentic approach gives virtual agents a goal and the autonomy to achieve it, connecting to CRMs, ERPs, and ticketing tools without overhauling your existing stack. 

The structured handoff: Why passing a raw transcript isn't enough, and how Diabolocom extracts intent, summaries, flags, and custom data fields to give the next agent, human or virtual, everything they need from the first second. 

Built for operators, not engineers: How Diabolocom designed a platform that non-technical teams can configure in minutes, without sacrificing the depth that technical users need. 

The CCaaS + telco advantage: 20+ years of end-to-end infrastructure ownership means Diabolocom optimizes its AI models and telephony stack in harmony, delivering latency that competitors wrapping third-party solutions simply can't match.

Jeannie Walters and Dr. Alyona Medelyan reveal what nearly 2,000 unfiltered airline reviews say about the chasm between brand promise and operational reality, and what CX leaders must do about it. 

In this CX Today discussion, host Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor, sits down with two leading voices in customer experience: Jeannie Walters, CX expert and author, and Dr. Alyona Medelyan, CEO of Thematic. Together, they've co-authored Experience Is The Promise, a data-driven report analyzing nearly 2,000 App Store reviews across six US airlines using Thematic's AI scoring agent. 

If you lead a CX, contact center, or service team, this one is unmissable. The findings cut through the brand-speak and get to what customers are actually experiencing at the moments that matter most. 

When things go wrong, a cancelled flight, an app that won't load, a support line nobody answers, that's the moment a brand either earns loyalty or loses it for good. This conversation, backed by real customer data, explores exactly why so many airlines are falling short at those critical touchpoints. 

Key discussion points: 
🔴 Recovery beats reliability – Delta's Empathy score outpaced the group average not because it never fails, but because its people, processes, and tools are designed for disruption moments. Jeannie unpacks what that strategic commitment actually looks like on the ground. 
🔴 The compounding failure problem – Alyona's data shows 60% of negative reviews cited inability to reach support during disruptions. When the flight fails and the service fails, the brand takes a double hit, and customers don't forget it. 
🔴 Your app is your frontline – App crashes drove 9.5% of Breeze's negative Ease score. Alyona draws a direct parallel to banking data from Asia, where app instability alone triggered switching intent in 5% of users.

Are traditional survey links dead? With response rates at historic lows, the answer might be yes.

In this episode, Rob Scott sits down with Sprinklr’s Sonal Singhal, Direct of Product, and Valarie Grant, Director of Solutions Consulting, to explore why relying on static, post-interaction forms leaves CX leaders with delayed insights, blind spots, and a fractured view of the customer experience.

When you force a customer out of their natural channel just to leave feedback, you disrupt the journey and lose the context. The solution? Conversational listening. Sonal and Valarie break down how context-aware tools allow brands to capture sentiment natively within the channel the customer is already using - reducing friction and dramatically improving the richness of the data.

If you are struggling with survey fatigue or looking for a practical way to innovate your feedback strategy this quarter, this conversation is for you. Learn how to stop asking generic questions and start listening in the moment.

Live from the floor of CCW Las Vegas, the mood has noticeably shifted. The industry is exhausted by the endless promises of AI replacing human agents and the daunting prospect of ripping out legacy systems. Leaders are facing severe system fatigue, and the mandate from the boardroom is clear: show me the ROI, and show it to me now.  

To make sense of this tension, I sat down with Matt Clare, VP of Product Marketing at UJET, for a candid conversation about where contact center technology is actually heading.  

In this exclusive interview, Matt reveals UJET's strategic pivot from a traditional CCaaS provider to a CX AI company. We explore the myth that AI is here to replace human connection—because at the end of the day, people still buy from people. Instead, the real opportunity lies in eliminating unnecessary, frustrating interactions and using AI to augment the high-value conversations that drive revenue and loyalty. 

To help leaders navigate this shift, Matt and I unpacked the specific technologies UJET is deploying to accelerate CX transformation without the traditional operational chaos. Here is a look at the core innovations we discussed: 

Maximizing Existing Investments with CX AI Accelerators 

The days of ripping out your entire legacy infrastructure are fading. Matt explains how UJET is now leading with CX AI Accelerators—intelligent layers like Virtual Agents, Agent Assist, Screenshare/Cobrowse , and Conversational Analytics that plug directly into your current setup. The goal is rapid transformation, allowing brands to maximize their existing tech investments and see time-to-value in days or weeks, not years. 

Zero-Friction Analytics via Spiral by UJET 

A massive part of this rapid ROI comes from Spiral by UJET, their conversational analytics platform that turns unstructured data into actionable intelligence. Matt breaks down how Spiral is delivering what he calls "zero-friction analytics": 

• Interactive Dashboards: Instead of waiting weeks for data scientists to build complex reports, anyone in the business can use natural language prompts. You can literally ask your data, "Why did CSAT drop yesterday?" and Spiral instantly generates the dashboard and the answer. 
• Automated QM Scorecarding: Quality management at scale is finally here. Leaders can now upload their ideal scorecard and ask the AI to automatically grade interactions, build reports, and generate training modules, turning raw insights into immediate action. 

Developer-First Flexibility and Reducing Agent Load 

We also discuss the growing demand for flexibility and the rejection of vendor lock-in. Matt shares insights on UJET's BYO-AI (Bring Your Own AI) integration, highlighting their inaugural partnership with conversational AI platform Parloa as proof of their commitment to customer choice.  

Coupled with a Headless SDK—which lets brands build custom, native service experiences into their own apps while UJET powers the back-end—and a centralized Agent Assist Hub, UJET is drastically reducing the cognitive load on frontline agents. By aggregating knowledge bases and next-best-action recommendations, agents no longer have to "swivel-chair" between five or more different applications to solve a single customer issue. 

What's Next: Agentic Experience Orchestration (AXO) 

Finally, we look ahead to September's highly anticipated launch of Agentic Experience Orchestration (AXO). AXO acts as a persistent AI layer across the entire CX toolchain, using AI agents that can navigate software like a human to automate complex, multi-step workflows across disparate legacy systems. Matt explains how UJET is currently running its own internal support operations on AXO and co-developing with several of UJET’s leading customers to refine the product before General Availability—preparing to offer a solution that promises true ROI through system elimination, scaled operations and revenues, and continual improvement. 

If you are trying to figure out how to layer AI into your operations without a massive disruption, this is a conversation you cannot afford to miss. 

Watch the full video interview to discover how to accelerate your CX transformation today. 

Rob Scott sits down with Pasquale DeMaio (VP, Amazon Connect), Deepak Nair (SVP, AI Transformation, Citizens Bank), and Justin Robbins (Founder and Principal Analyst, Metric Sherpa), fresh off the main stage at CCW 2026 in Las Vegas.

Pasquale made a deliberate statement on stage: deflection is dead. In this debrief, the three unpack what killed it, what replaces it, and why half of all agentic AI pilots never reach production.

They cover the governance conversations that have to happen before AI touches a customer, where agentic AI works in financial services and where it doesn't, and whether CX leaders are even asking the right questions when evaluating this technology.

Plus: Justin delivers his verdict on three days at CCW — genuinely different, or the same story told better?

The full CCW 2026 coverage is on CX Today.

In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Jonathan Barouch, GM of Contact Center at Zendesk, about what “AI-native” and “agentic” actually mean in practice, where enterprise teams get stuck (data silos, authentication, brittle infrastructure), and how to roll out automation without betting the whole operation on day one.

The conversation also challenges a common CX metric: containment. Barouch argues leaders should measure resolution, not deflection, and shares how teams can pilot agentic workflows, run A-B tests, and build a learning loop that turns real interactions into better knowledge, self-service, and agent support.

Rob Scott, Publisher at CX Today, sits down with Jeremie Abou, Sales Lead at Diabolocom, on the floor of CCW Las Vegas to ask the question the industry keeps dodging: is AI actually improving customer experience, or just cutting costs?

Jeremie doesn't pull punches. From automation hype to the uncomfortable gap between slick demos and live contact centre reality, this conversation gets into what vendors won't tell you — and what CX leaders need to hear.

They cover the 89% of CX leaders who expect humans to stay central to support, the 17% who think their agents are actually ready for it, and why Diabolocom believes the future of CX might be more human, not less.

If you're navigating AI investment decisions, workforce readiness, or just tired of the buzzwords — this one's for you.

Topics covered:

• The AI hype problem and what it's costing CX
• Why "presence" beats pure automation as a CX strategy
• AI theatre vs. operationally useful technology
• Agent enablement and the workforce readiness gap
• The "super operator" — Diabolocom's vision for the future contact centre

CX Today is the leading news and analysis platform for the customer experience industry.