CX Today

Eight of the biggest assumptions about AI and customer experience — tested, challenged, and corrected by two of the industry's most experienced voices

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?
 
In this CX Today reality check, Nicole Willing sits down with Jeff Blair, Chief Growth Officer, and Cortney Jonas Burnos, VP of AI and Digital at Transcom, 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.

California's new AI executive order is forcing a conversation every enterprise needs to have – but what does it actually mean for customer experience?  

In this episode of CX Today, Francesca Roche sits down with Alex Levin, CEO of Regal, to explore how organizations can build meaningful AI safety measures without waiting for regulators to mandate them. From system-level guardrails to agent-specific compliance by industry, Alex shares how Regal has been tackling this challenge for nearly six years — long before legislation caught up. 

The conversation digs into the growing problem of state-by-state AI regulation and why Alex believes a fragmented patchwork approach is slowing innovation and putting unnecessary strain on businesses operating at scale. With the EU AI Act adding another layer of complexity, we examine how enterprises can design internal governance structures that hold up across jurisdictions – and why some markets, like France and Italy, are seeing companies opt out of AI altogether as a result of overly restrictive rules. 

Alex also lays out three core principles he believes the industry must rally around if federal leadership doesn't emerge: always identify AI as AI, apply existing consumer protection rules like TCPA equally to automated interactions, and keep individual customer data out of LLM training pipelines. It's a candid, practical conversation about where AI governance stands today – and what it will take to build customer trust at scale.

Pedro Andrade discusses why most AI deployments fail, why your KPIs are lying to you, and how the Talkdesk CXA Operations Center changes the game 

Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Pedro Andrade, VP of AI at Talkdesk, to dig into one of the most pressing challenges facing contact center leaders today: deploying AI at scale without flying blind. 

With AI agents now handling real customer interactions, the stakes have never been higher – and as Pedro makes clear, the gap between expectation and reality is wider than most vendors want to admit. 

AI is everywhere in the contact center, but visibility, governance, and accountability are lagging dangerously behind. Pedro Andrade pulls no punches in this conversation, breaking down exactly why so many AI projects underdeliver and what it takes to fix that. 

🔴 The black box problem: Pedro explains why deploying AI without real-time observability is like "driving at high speed, blindfolded" – and how Talkdesk's

Retail teams are moving beyond scripted chatbots and into agentic AI systems that can understand context, take action using tools, and coordinate across functions.

In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing is joined by Gilbert Gooijers, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer at CM.com, to explain what retail leaders often misunderstand about agentic AI, why multi-agent setups beat a single do-it-all bot, and how the right channel choice, from WhatsApp to RCS and voice, shapes customer experience across generations. Gooijers also shares real-world examples, including event-scale customer service and guided purchase journeys, before highlighting the biggest emerging risk: security.

The message to retailers is clear: treat cybersecurity as the starting point, not an afterthought, as AI agents become more capable and more connected.

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

Three CX leaders get brutally honest about why infrastructure resilience has become the boardroom problem nobody is prepared for. 

In this CX Today Roundtable discussion, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher is joined by Ty Givens (Founder and CEO of the CX Collective), Rhona Bradshaw (CX Consultant), and Mike Wehrs (COO, TieTechnology) to tackle one of the most underestimated risks in enterprise CX: infrastructure resilience. 

Most organizations assume their stack is resilient. Most are wrong. From shared cloud dependencies that make redundancy an illusion, to AI agents that quietly multiply failures before anyone notices, the gap between what leaders think they've built and what they've actually built has never been more consequential – or more expensive. 

77% of CX leaders faced a major outage in the last two years. For over 90% of enterprises, one hour of downtime costs $300,000 or more. Yet resilience is still treated as an IT afterthought. This roundtable changes that conversation. 

🔴 The five nines myth: Rhona Bradshaw explains why traditional uptime metrics act as a “smoke screen” – and why intermittent failures, not full outages, are causing the most customer damage right now 
🔴 Where stacks actually break: Mike Wehrs shares real-world examples of how unqualified hands touching IT infrastructure and ignored data quality issues bring contact centers down – often from the inside 
🔴 Redundancy that isn't: Ty Givens unpacks why organizations discover their systems have no real redundancy only when everything fails simultaneously – and why ownership silos are the root cause 
🔴 AI making it worse: All three guests align on a uncomfortable truth – throwing agentic AI onto sub-adequate infrastructure and dirty data doesn't accelerate your CX, it accelerates your failures 

If your resilience strategy still lives in an out-of-date playbook on a shelf, this is essential viewing.

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

Retail customer satisfaction climbed to 94.6 percent in Q1 2026, but the headline figure only tells part of the story. In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche speaks with Tim Waterton, Chief Revenue Officer at HappyOrNot, about what is really driving improvements in retail CX and where performance still breaks down.

Waterton explains why retailers are getting better at managing tough operational environments, how real-time microfeedback is changing decision-making on the shop floor, and why consistency matters more than averages. The discussion explores why CX is strongest in the morning and weakest in evenings and weekends, how staffing experience and store layout shape outcomes, and what retailers can do to improve price perception without cutting margins.

The conversation also looks at checkout innovation, from rapid lane management to the rise of slow lanes, and what proactive planning retailers need as traffic increases in Q2.

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

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

As customer support teams move from first-gen genAI co-pilots to autonomous agents, the real risk is assuming AI will “automate everything” without changing how support actually works. In this CX Today interview, Vishal Sharma, CTO at SearchUnify, explains why most enterprises still aren’t ready for fully autonomous support and what needs to happen first. Sharma breaks down the operational shift from “find” to “assist” to “act,” and why workflows and the underlying support stack must be rebuilt for machines, not just humans. Sharma also walks through the guardrails that matter most, from grounding responses with retrieval and citations to privacy checks, toxicity controls, and escalation paths when the agent should say “I don’t know.” 
Sharma also shares what it takes to deploy multi-agent orchestration without chaos, including clear agent roles, shared memory, and a master orchestrator.

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.

How do retailers deliver a consistent customer experience when shoppers move fluidly between online research and in-store decision-making? In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche speaks with Daniel Todaro, CEO of Gekko Group, about the widening gap between digital information and shop-floor execution.

Todaro argues the biggest disconnect is knowledge, including what customers can learn online versus what they can get from a trained advisor in store. He also explains why constant discounting can damage brand equity, how tech-first environments like digital mirrors and retail media can lift engagement while alienating some groups, and what “agentic AI” could unlock when physical and digital journeys finally match.

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