CX Today

Rob Wilkinson sits down with Amazon Connect Customer leaders, Tony Shen and Jeremy Puent, to unpack what slows real deployments down, where things go wrong, and why the biggest risk is not the mistake itself but failing to spot it in time.

They explain why ambiguous documentation creates inconsistent outcomes, why bad experiences drive disloyalty faster than good experiences build loyalty, and what “visibility” really means when an AI agent makes decisions you need to defend. The discussion gets practical on non negotiables like guardrails, transparency, customer consent for critical actions, and clear escalation paths to humans. You will also hear why containment and deflection can undermine CX, and what metrics and operating habits matter more as AI becomes a production channel.

Check out Amazon Connect Customer here.

Blair Pleasant breaks down what this landmark contract really means for the CCaaS market, the hyperscaler threat, and why an eight-year contract is both bold and logical 

Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Blair Pleasant, President and Principal Analyst at COMMfusion, to dissect one of the biggest CCaaS deals ever announced. 

With HMRC committing to a $670M, eight-year contract via Capgemini and NiCE, Blair cuts through the headline noise to explain what this deal reveals about enterprise procurement, vendor staying power, and whether the likes of AWS and Salesforce can ever truly compete at this level. 

The HMRC megadeal has sent shockwaves through the CCaaS industry, but what does it actually tell us about the state of the market? Blair Pleasant brings over 30 years of analyst experience to unpack the real story behind the numbers. 

Two-horse race or open field? Blair argues NiCE and Genesys dominated this deal due to specific procurement requirements around revenue thresholds and systems integration capability – but insists there's still room for others like Five9, Content Guru, and Sprinklr at enterprise level. 

Why hyperscalers aren't landing deals like this... yet. Microsoft and Salesforce lack the CCaaS-specific expertise, track record, and dedicated revenue that HMRC demanded. AWS, however, is the one to watch. 

The Capgemini factor. NiCE was the CCaaS engine, but Capgemini won the contract, and Blair is clear that the SI relationship, especially given Capgemini's existing ties to HMRC and UK government work, was critical to securing it. 

Eight years is 80 years in this industry. Blair explains why the contract length signals HMRC's desire for stability over agility – and why NiCE's acquisition of Cognigy positions them to grow with that commitment.

Picking the wrong AI vendor today could set your contact center back for years.

That’s the core message from Rhys Harris, Product Director of AI at Content Guru, who joined CX Today to break down why flexibility needs to be baked into every AI decision — not bolted on later.

The conversation covers a lot of ground. Harris draws a direct parallel between the mistakes organizations made during the cloud migration era and the trap many are sleepwalking into now. Over-reliance on a single provider, opaque consumption pricing, and contracts that couldn’t accommodate change all created what he calls “cloud regret.” The same dynamics are already playing out in AI.

On the question of what actually separates a genuinely multi-vendor strategy from one that’s just multi-vendor on paper, Harris is blunt: compliance and governance assurance, swappable AI models that can adapt to different languages and use cases, and vendor-agnostic orchestration. Organizations that treat these as checkbox features rather than real requirements will feel it.

He also pushes back on the rush to deploy. Forbes data already shows 25% of tech leaders have invested in AI too quickly, and Harris argues the root cause is almost always the same.

The bottom line: what works today won’t necessarily work tomorrow, and the vendors worth betting on are the ones who can move with you. 

Salesforce’s Agentforce Contact Center launch has split analyst opinion, and this CX Today debate gets straight to why. Host Rob Wilkinson is joined by Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research and Dave Michels of TalkingPointz to unpack what Agentforce actually is, what problem it is trying to solve, and what it could break.

Kerravala frames Agentforce as a serious attempt to reduce “fragmentation hell” by converging CRM, customer interactions, and AI into a single platform layer, so agents stop being the “integration point” between disconnected tools. Michels pushes back hard, arguing the launch is a pivot driven by pressure on CRM’s long-standing model and relevance, especially as generative AI changes how businesses capture and use customer conversation data.

Across the discussion, they dig into the operational impact on contact center leaders and frontline teams, including context switching, data quality, and what becomes the real “source of truth” when AI can surface answers directly from live conversations. The result is a grounded look at the stakes for customer service organizations weighing consolidation, reliability, and speed-to-value as AI moves from feature to foundation.

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

Ty Givens, Rhona Bradshaw, and Mike Wehrs join CX Today's Rhys Fisher to examine why most contact centers are less resilient than their uptime metrics suggest – and why agentic AI is about to make that a lot harder to paper over.

For years, five nines has been the number that kept boardrooms comfortable. It looked clean on a performance dashboard and gave technology leaders a ready answer when executives asked whether the contact center could be trusted.

The problem, according to CX Consultant Rhona Bradshaw, is that it was never telling the whole story.

“It acts more like a smoke screen with regards to what's actually going on," Bradshaw says in this CX Today Roundtable.

The real damage, she argues, isn't the full outages that trigger incident reports; it's the persistent, low-grade degradation that chips away at customer trust without ever tripping a status page.

Founder and CEO of the CX Collective, Ty Givens, cuts straight to what resilience actually means on the ground.

Everything else, she argues, is a distraction.

The shared dependency problem makes it worse. Givens describes organizations rolling out new platforms only to discover their redundancy was illusory all along, with multiple vendors sitting on the same underlying infrastructure, going down together the moment anything is tested.

Mike Wehrs, COO of TieTechnology, brings the sharpest focus to where AI fits into all of this:

All three guests make the same point from different angles. AI doesn't necessarily introduce resilience problems into the contact center, but it does have the capacity to find the ones that were quietly there all along.

Everywhere you turn, the conversation about AI and customer experience sounds the same. AI will replace the contact center. Customers don't want to talk to humans anymore. Automation will fix everything. But how much of that is actually true — and how much of it is costing brands real customers, real revenue, and real trust?

Nicole Willing sits down with Cortney Jonas Burnos, VP of AI and Digital at Transcom, and Jeff Blair, Chief Growth Officer, to put the industry's boldest AI and CX assumptions under the microscope.

Eight hot takes. Two experts with decades of frontline CX and AI experience between them. Zero tolerance for hype.
What emerges isn't a defence of AI or a rejection of it. It's something more useful: a clear-eyed, evidence-backed challenge to the assumptions quietly shaping — and in some cases, quietly damaging — CX strategy in 2026.

You'll find out why 78% of customers now attempt self-service first — and why self-service is simultaneously ranked the least effective channel for resolving issues. You'll hear why the brands seeing the biggest returns from AI are actually spending more on customer experience, not less. And you'll understand why the biggest barrier to AI transformation isn't technology at all.

The conversation covers the moments that matter most — when digital tools fail, when customers escalate, when a bot loop turns a manageable issue into a brand reputation problem. It challenges the idea that outsourcing means losing control. It reframes what great agents actually do in an AI-powered environment. And it draws a straight line between poor automation decisions and the customer churn that follows.

If your 2026 CX strategy is built on any of these assumptions, this is the conversation you need to have before your next budget decision.

The real question, as Jeff Blair puts it, isn't whether AI will replace the contact center. It's whether organisations are ready to rethink how customer experience actually operates in an AI-powered world.

The hot takes are provocative. The hard truths are harder to ignore.

Stay ahead of the trends shaping customer experience — explore more insights, interviews, and analysis at CX Today.

Learn how Transcom is helping organisations design smarter, AI-powered customer experiences.

 Trust is moving from a soft signal to a hard CX KPI, and the EU AI Act will accelerate that shift. In this CX Today roundtable, Kane Simms, Nerys Corfield, Dr Scott Allendevaux, and Nick Holme explore how the legislation changes the day-to-day reality of deploying AI in customer journeys.

The panel breaks down what ‘high-risk’ can mean in practice, why organisations need a clear view of where AI is actually in use, and how documentation, transparency, and accountability will increasingly shape buying decisions. They also discuss the operational knock-on effects: tighter governance across CX, legal, and data teams, more structured testing for conversational automation, and clearer rules for when customers must be told they are interacting with a bot.

The takeaway for CX leaders is simple: compliance is not just a legal project. It’s a trust strategy. Teams that can prove control, explain decisions, and show robust oversight will protect customer confidence and reduce risk as AI becomes more embedded in frontline service. 

The network was never supposed to be a CX problem. For years, it wasn’t. Telecom engineers leaned on the PSTN’s built-in inefficiency as a quality guarantee, and the broader industry was happy to leave well enough alone.

That era is ending.

With the UK’s PSTN shutdown locked in for January 2027, organizations still routing contact center calls over legacy infrastructure now have a hard deadline. But as Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, makes clear in this conversation, the bigger risk isn’t missing the migration window. It’s treating it as a straight swap.

The problem is that modernizing means running voice traffic across shared, IP-based networks, exactly the kind of environment where LLM-driven bots add another 200-300 milliseconds of latency on top of existing SIP delay. When the bot feels slow, someone has to explain why.

Right now, most CX teams don’t have the tools to answer that question.

Kerravala points to Cisco ThousandEyes as one of the few observability platforms that can trace a voice interaction across local, cloud, and public internet infrastructure simultaneously, helping teams move from reactive firefighting to predictive network management. He also flags edge AI inference as a fast-moving development that could significantly cut latency for in-store and regional deployments within the next year.

The organizational piece, though, may be the hardest part. CX and IT have historically operated in separate lanes. Kerravala’s view is that the companies that get ahead of this will be the ones that stop managing unified networks through siloed teams.

 From agentic AI to brand intelligence and Firefly's trust-first model, Constellation Research's Liz Miller drops unfiltered insights from the Vegas floor.

In this on-the-ground dispatch from Adobe Summit 2026, CX Today Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Liz is one of the sharpest voices in the CX and marketing technology space – and she's not here to sugarcoat anything. 

From the buzz around Shantanu Narayan's succession to Adobe's evolving agentic AI platform strategy, this conversation cuts through the noise and gets into what actually matters for enterprise marketers right now. 

Adobe Summit is buzzing... and not just about leadership transitions. Liz Miller joins Rhys Fisher to break down what's actually moving the needle for CX leaders on the ground in Vegas. 

🔴 Adobe CX Enterprise reframed: It's not a new product, it's a clarified story. Liz explains how Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) has always been the foundation, and why this rebranding is about helping enterprises understand how all the pieces connect in an agentic world. 

🔴 Brand Intelligence is the standout: Adobe's new solution lets marketers track how their brand appears across LLMs and AI search, not just the traditional web. As agent-to-agent engagement becomes real, knowing how your agents get found is mission-critical. 

🔴 Firefly's trust-first architecture: Adobe didn't bolt on safety after the fact. Liz walks through why Content Authenticity and invisible watermarking aren't lip service; they're structural, and they matter deeply for enterprise brand security. 

🔴 The radiologist moment: Jensen Huang's story from the keynote – AI can now read 100% of CT scans, yet demand for radiologists is rising – perfectly captures why Adobe's decade-long AI investment is a strategy, not a slogan.

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

Technology Journalist, Francesca Roche, sits down with Hideki Hashimura, CRM and CX Strategist at redk.

With MIT research showing 95% of enterprise Gen AI pilots failing to deliver measurable ROI, this conversation cuts through the hype to unpack what's really going wrong – and what genuine AI maturity looks like in customer service. If your organization has launched an AI chatbot and wondered why nothing has really changed, this one's for you.

Main Description

Most enterprise Gen AI pilots don't fail because of bad technology; they fail because of everything surrounding it. Hideki Hashimura of redk shares a no-nonsense breakdown of where organizations go wrong and how to build AI-powered customer service that actually scales.

The isolation problem: Most AI deployments are siloed – a chatbot here, a translation tool there – with no contextual learning or connection to wider service processes, which kills ROI before it starts.

AI maturity is an org problem, not a tech problem: True readiness means aligning people, process, and technology together. Agents are evolving into service architects, and closing that skills gap is the most critical step leaders are currently missing.

False positives are everywhere: Deploying an AI bot that handles surface-level queries isn't transformation. If customers still can't change a flight or request a refund, the foundation underneath the bot simply isn't built.

Pilot success must be tied to business KPIs: Define your north star metrics first – NPS, resolution rates, handling time – then build the pilot around impacting those specific numbers. Speed without strategic alignment is just expensive experimentation.

Find out more about redk's AI-readiness workshops here.
For more Customer Experience tech news visit CX Today.