CX Today

 Salesforce’s launch of the Agentforce Contact Center has reignited a familiar debate in customer experience: should enterprises consolidate around one major platform, or keep the flexibility to pick best fit tools.

In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson sits down with Baker Johnson, Chief Business Officer at UJET, to unpack what he calls the integration trap. They explore why many organizations feel “stuck” in CRM ecosystems, how switching costs and interdependent integrations slow down change, and why agents often become the human integration layer across four to 10 disconnected systems.

Baker also challenges common assumptions about “context” in AI driven customer service, arguing that real value comes from real time journey context, not just historical CRM records. The conversation closes with practical advice for CX leaders building AI strategies: focus on the customer experience first, and treat AI as a forcing function to simplify operational complexity, not a cure all. 

 AI is everywhere in customer experience, but CX leaders are under pressure to prove it is moving the needle. In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Brad Birnbaum, CEO and Co-Founder of Kustomer, about the shift from measuring AI by deflection rates and activity to measuring it by outcomes that matter to the business.

Birnbaum explains why the right metrics depend on the company, from revenue uplift in retail to upsell and expansion in B2B SaaS, and why traditional CX measures like CSAT and handle time still matter but cannot be the full story. The conversation also digs into AI governance, observability, and trust, including how teams can evaluate non-deterministic models and reduce risk as automation expands.

Finally, Birnbaum shares practical guidance for rolling out CX AI without chaos, including why consolidating fragmented tools and starting small beats trying to boil the ocean. He also outlines where human-in-the-loop remains essential and why the goal should be turning humans from creators into reviewers. 

The Principal Analyst at ZK Research breaks down whether Zoom's 'system of action' pivot is the real deal or just clever repositioning


In this CX Today discussion, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research.

Zeus recently published a deep-dive on Zoom's strategic transformation, and the findings are more surprising than most in the industry expect. If you work in CX, contact center, or IT, and you still think of Zoom as a meetings tool, this conversation will change that.


Zoom has quietly built something most of the industry hasn't clocked yet. Zeus Kerravala joins CX Today to unpack what he calls the shift from “collaboration to completion” – and why it could fundamentally change how CX leaders think about their tech stack.

Further along than you think: Zeus argues Zoom is closer to its system-of-action vision than most realize, with Zoomtopia later this year likely to be a major milestone – though true end-to-end completion is still a couple of years out.

🔴 CX is where it gets real: From Chelsea FC to Caliber Collision, real customers are already using Zoom to eliminate cold calls, automate case logging, and unify the full customer journey – contact center included.

🔴 Conversation over CRM: Zoom is betting that conversational data is more valuable than what lives in a CRM, and Zeus thinks they might even build their own CRM within the next two to three years.

🔴 The biggest challenge isn't product: Zeus is clear, Zoom's hardest problem right now is getting people to understand what they've actually built. Proof points and customer outcomes will be the unlock.



Visit cxtoday.com for more coverage on Zoom and the contact center market

Read Zeus Kerravala's full blog at SiliconAngle.com

Follow ZK Research for ongoing analysis as Zoomtopia approaches

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

CX Today’s Rhys Fisher sits down with Rupert Adair, Director of Product Management at Enghouse Interactive.

The cloud migration era has run its course, but for many enterprises, it hasn't delivered the CX transformation promised.

With Flexera's 2025 data showing over 20% of workloads being moved back from public cloud to on-prem environments, the conversation has shifted. It's no longer about whether you're in the cloud; it's about whether your architecture is built to win.

Rupert Adair explains what that looks like in practice.

Cloud got the industry moving. But moving fast in the wrong direction is still the wrong direction. Adair makes the case that the next competitive edge in CX is architectural thinking, not cloud adoption.

🔴 The cloud-first playbook has real limits: data sovereignty, uptime requirements, and legacy integration mean that simply lifting workloads doesn't automatically improve customer experience. Rupert shares a real example: a European bank that completed its cloud uplift only to hit data residency issues, latency problems, and lost functionality – making things worse, not better. 
🔴 Architecture has to come before deployment: instead of asking ‘what can we move to the cloud?’, winning organizations start with ‘what experience are we trying to deliver?’ As Rupert puts it: “Cloud first asks where should this run. Design first asks what are you trying to build.” 
🔴 Hybrid is increasingly the destination, not a detour: Gartner predicts 90% of organizations will adopt hybrid cloud strategies by 2027. Rupert argues that for many enterprises, hybrid is a deliberate architectural end state that delivers both resilience and the flexibility to innovate with AI.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit CX Today.

As customer experience (CX) teams push beyond basic chatbot deployments, a new model is emerging: coordinated multi-agent AI systems that can execute end-to-end workflows across teams, tools, and policies. In this interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Raj Koneru, Founder and CEO at Kore.ai, about why this shift is happening now and what leaders should demand before they trust AI with real customer-facing execution.

Koneru argues that the last 12 months have changed the game because AI models have improved dramatically in both generation and reasoning. That progress moves automation beyond question answering and into task completion, where agents can take action across systems and processes. In regulated and complex environments, he says, a single agent is limited by context and scope. A multi-agent approach better mirrors how organizations actually operate, with specialized functions like billing, fraud checks, fulfillment, and escalation requiring orchestration.

Koneru also outlines what tends to fail in single-bot deployments: inconsistent answers, broken handoffs between bots and humans, actions taken without enough context, and heavy cleanup work for frontline teams. Risk and compliance leaders, he adds, often struggle because prompt chains offer limited traceability and control.

For CX leaders, he recommends insisting on deterministic policy enforcement, clear permission boundaries, human escalation controls, and runtime observability before going live. He emphasizes that governance should not be bolted on after deployment. It needs to be embedded into the platform and runtime so teams can reproduce, audit, and optimize outcomes.

Finally, Koneru shares the production metrics that matter: non-negotiables like failure recovery, auditability, and compliance, plus business outcomes like resolution rates, customer effort reduction, and time to resolution. He also highlights the “soft” impact of better experiences on brand loyalty and long-term value.

Is your board expecting AI ROI in six months while your contact centre needs eighteen? You're not alone — and that gap is producing some genuinely bad decisions.

In this interview, Rob Scott sits down with Gautam Vasudev, SVP of Agentforce Contact Center at Salesforce, to get into the real story behind enterprise AI deployments — why 95% of pilots fail to deliver measurable business impact, what the organisations that actually succeed do differently, and how to close the gap between board pressure and operational reality.

They cover the data readiness problem most vendors gloss over, the "triple penalty" of deploying AI on stale or badly structured data, a practical 12-month playbook for CX leaders, and why starting small isn't a hedge — it's the only argument your CFO will actually respect.

No vendor pitch. Just the honest version.

At Cisco Live 2026, Cisco pulled back the curtain on a suite of AI-native tools designed to help organizations orchestrate, secure, and manage a blended workforce of human and AI agents.

To get the inside track, CX Today’s Rhys Fisher sat down with Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP and GM of Webex CX at Cisco, for a wide-ranging conversation on what the shift to AI-native CX actually demands in practice.

Muthukrishnan is clear that the industry has moved past the experimentation phase, and that the bar for what comes next is significantly higher than most vendors are letting on:

The conversation covers a lot of ground. Muthukrishnan pushes back on the industry’s fixation with deflection and containment rates, arguing that no single metric can capture the full customer journey.

He walks through Cisco’s AI Agent 360, a framework combining custom guardrailing, runtime monitoring, and Splunk-powered observability, and makes the case that security and observability are foundational requirements for any serious agentic deployment, not optional extras bolted on afterward.

He also introduces the concept of “one experience”: the idea that regardless of channel, timing, or how many agents were involved, every customer interaction should feel like a continuation of the last.

Looking further ahead, Muthukrishnan raises a question that will resonate with anyone thinking seriously about where this technology leads. If agentic AI can cut across every organizational silo, does the enterprise as we know it still make sense?

In this CX Today interview, Carrie Brough, Director of Strategy and Ops for TTEC Digital EMEA, argues that a single CX model is fast becoming a liability.

Brough explains why AI-driven interactions need quick, decision-ready responses, while humans still need empathy, context, and brand nuance. Carrie breaks down the operational warning signs that your AI and human traffic are colliding, including repeat contacts, confused outcomes, and frontline teams being forced into a “clean-up” role.

The conversation also covers when an interaction should move from the AI lane to a human agent, and why risk, not emotion, needs to drive escalation decisions.

What does great customer experience look like when artificial intelligence is handling half the calls? For Danny Wareham, Founder and Lead Psychologist at Firgun, the answer has less to do with the technology and everything to do with how leaders treat the humans left holding the line.

In a wide-ranging conversation with CX Today, Wareham argues that too many organizations are approaching AI deployment from entirely the wrong direction. "Decision makers purchase AI tools because they feel that if they don't, their competitors are going to have some sort of lead on them," he says. The result is a wave of reactive, FOMO-driven implementations that fail to solve real operational problems, and leave frontline agents feeling like change is being done to them rather than with them.

That psychological friction, Wareham explains, is rooted in self-determination theory. When agents feel their competence is threatened, their autonomy restricted, or their role uncertain, they revert to familiar behavior, bypassing new tools, creating workarounds, or simply disengaging. The organizations that beat this pattern, he says, are the ones that swap compulsion for curiosity.

His go-to example is IKEA. When AI tools reduced the company's inbound call volume by 47 percent, the typical response would have been to cut headcount accordingly. Instead, IKEA asked why 53 percent of customers were still calling. The answer revealed an appetite for design advice. The company retrained its freed-up agents as amateur interior designers and generated an additional one billion dollars in revenue from the insight buried in their contact center data.

"Your contact centers are the source for where that rubber meets the road," Wareham says. "If your CFO's mindset is around OPEX savings, you tend to miss all of the value that's potentially there."

Wareham also introduces his Constellation leadership model, explored in depth in his book. Rather than confining people to rigid job descriptions, Constellation asks what individuals can contribute toward a shared goal, freeing teams to bring their full range of skills to complex, high-stakes situations. The model draws on military frameworks like mission command used by the British Army and the US Navy SEALs, where shared intent replaces hierarchy the moment situations become unpredictable.

"Constellation is not leaderless," Wareham clarifies. "Culture and our behaviors become the leader."

For CX leaders navigating the AI era, his message is clear: invest in understanding why your people are resisting change before trying to overcome that resistance, and start treating your contact center as a source of strategic value, not just operational cost.

Upgrading 25 million homes to full fiber broadband is a logistical feat in itself. Doing it while delivering a consistently good customer experience – across 700 communications providers, each with their own messaging – is another challenge entirely.

That was the reality facing Openreach before it deployed NiCE's proactive AI agents. Engineers were showing up to empty homes, customers were getting conflicting information depending on their provider, and the company's NPS sat below zero.

In this video interview, CX Today's Rhys Fisher sits down with Chris Herbert, Director of Customer Service at Openreach, Eifion Lloyd, Senior Manager of Customer Enablement and Strategy, and Giles Bryan, General Manager of Proactive AI at NiCE.

Together, they walk through how a proof of concept built on daily Excel uploads eventually scaled into a deployment spanning 15 million customer journeys – reducing missed appointments by a third, cutting inbound contact volumes by a similar margin, and pushing Openreach's Trustpilot score from 2.0 to 4.7 across 300,000 reviews.

The conversation covers what it took to get internal and external buy-in, how NiCE's platform handles landline-only customers without a separate configuration, and a generative AI result that didn't make the press release: a 22% reduction in install cancellations from an ask-me-anything chatbot trialed late last year.

On the lessons learned, Herbert is candid:

Check out the full interview to find out precisely how a CX vendor delivers an implementation of this scale.