CX Today

How can CX leaders buy AI responsibly without exposing their business, customers, or data to unnecessary risk?

In this CX Today roundtable, Nicole Willing speaks with Kristina Holt, Managing Associate at Foot Anstey, Mary Ann Miller, Fraud & Cybercrime Executive Advisor and VP of Client Experience at Prove, and Michael Machado, CISO at RingCentral, about what responsible AI vendor due diligence should look like in customer experience.

The discussion explores why AI procurement can no longer rely on standard vendor checklists, how businesses should assess data sensitivity, where liability sits under complex processing chains, and why security, legal, privacy, and operational teams need to work together before AI tools go live.
The panel also discusses shadow AI, autonomous agents, data leakage, GDPR exposure, sub-processor transparency, and the shared responsibility model between vendors and customers.

The message for CX and contact center leaders is clear: AI due diligence is about buying responsibility as much as it is about buying functionality.

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

Customer expectations are rising, but many service teams still rely on voice as an isolated channel and manual processes to move work forward. In this interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Jonathan Kershaw, Director of Product Management at Vonage, about how live voice can bring real-time voice transcription and context directly into ServiceNow to trigger workflows during the call, not after it.

Kershaw explains where the pain shows up most clearly: agents toggling between up to nine systems, inconsistent case notes, delayed case creation, and AI outcomes that fall short because they are missing the most important customer context. He shares practical scenarios, from IT outages to payment and fraud-related calls, showing how native voice in ServiceNow can support intent-based routing, mid-call escalations, warm handoffs powered by AI summaries, and faster wrap-up with automated dispositions.

The conversation also covers what to automate first, how to prove ROI using credible baselines, and which KPIs tend to move earliest, including average handle time, after-call work, data quality, and reductions in follow-up contacts. The core message is straightforward: treat AI like any other business tool. Start with measurable operational gains, then scale.

How customer feedback has quietly become the most powerful trust signal in the age of AI search 

CX Today's Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Alicia Skubick, Chief Customer Officer at Trustpilot, to unpack the platform's latest research. 

With AI now shaping how consumers discover and evaluate brands before they ever land on a website, the rules of visibility have changed. This is the conversation that makes the business case for trust in real, measurable terms. 

Trustpilot's latest 'What AI Says About You' report analyzed over 800,000 AI responses, and the findings are hard to ignore. Brands without a Trustpilot profile appear in just 1% of AI-generated answers. Those that actively collect and respond to reviews? 75.3%. Alicia breaks down what that means for CX teams on the ground. 

AI behaves like a cautious consumer – it checks ratings, reads review distributions, and flags missing profiles as red flags, just like your most sceptical customer would 

Responding beats collecting – brands that respond to reviews (not just gather them) see citation rates jump from 53% to 75%. Generic replies don't cut it; specificity is what AI crawlers reward 

The NPS question – Alicia makes the case that open-platform review systems are replacing NPS for many businesses, delivering the same real-time insight with the added bonus of AI visibility 

Speed to value is real – setting up a profile and inviting customers can shift visibility from near-zero to 53% in weeks, not months, with AI-driven customers worth 4.4x more on average 

Whether you're a CX leader mapping new customer journeys or an ops manager stretched thin, this one's worth your 15 minutes.

Forethought’s Antoine Nasr discusses how outcome-based AI is reshaping the way enterprises measure the true value of customer service automation 

In this CX Today discussion, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Antoine Nasr, Head of AI at Forethought, recently acquired by Zendesk. The pair discuss Forethought’s agentic AI push to tackle one of the most uncomfortable conversations in the CX space right now: is the ROI you're reporting on your AI investment actually telling you anything useful? 

Twelve months of AI euphoria in the enterprise is giving way to a harder question: was it worth it? Antoine Nasr makes the case that most organizations are measuring the wrong things, and explains what Forethought is doing differently: 

Deflection is a broken metric: A deflected ticket tells you nothing about whether the customer's issue was actually resolved. Forethought's outcome-based pricing model only charges when the AI agent genuinely resolves a conversation, and shows admins exactly why each one was classified the way it was. 

The $1B ROI figure? Already outdated: Antoine is candid that Forethought's headline customer ROI number has already been surpassed, and walks through the framework for calculating both the hard dollar savings and the softer but real gains in CSAT, brand value, and churn reduction. 

AI as a single entry point: User expectations have shifted. Customers no longer want to navigate your org structure, they want one interface that routes intelligently across support, commerce, sales, and beyond. Forethought's RevTech integrations are built around that reality. 

Self-improving agents are here: Forethought's Discover product automatically identifies support topic gaps, builds agents to handle them, and improves after every interaction, closing the loop between performance data and agent behavior.

What happens when your customer journey map looks great on a slide, but falls apart the moment a customer repeats themselves, switches channels, or escalates?

In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson sits down with Ali Karim, VP of Solutions at Datamark, to unpack how CX leaders can move from static journey mapping to dynamic customer journeys built around real-world behavior. Ali frames dynamic journeys as real-time correction loops that react to what customers do, not what you wish they would do.

The conversation also gets practical about contact center AI. Ali shares a crawl-walk-run approach to adoption, where AI earns trust in Tier 1 self-service first, while agents stay focused on higher-complexity Tier 2 and Tier 3 interactions. He explains why tech stack consolidation is often driven by tech debt and usability, not just cost, and why the sweet spot for most teams is three to five tools before adoption drops and workarounds take over.

Ali also warns that AI will amplify weak documentation, making knowledge management, SOPs, and FAQs foundational work, not a cleanup step. Finally, he outlines the metrics that matter when you are measuring impact, including repeat contacts, customer effort, transfer rates, and escalation reduction.

Is your restaurant's POS holding back your team — and your guests? Francesca Roche speaks with Andy Grindstaff, Director of Enterprise Restaurant Product at Global Payments, about the company's AI-first Genius Handheld POS and the expanding Genius Commerce platform. Andy explains how AI-powered voice ordering is designed to quietly capture orders in the background while freeing servers to focus on hospitality, why self-service kiosks are growing as an order pathway, and how research revealing widespread ordering anxiety is shaping Global Payments' product strategy. He also makes the case for why a modern, flexible restaurant tech stack is no longer optional — it's the difference between a business that can adapt and one that can't.

Simon Leyland and Zeus Kerravala unpack what Salesforce's acquisition of Fin really means for AI customer service, CCaaS, and the vendors now in the crosshairs. 

Host Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Simon Leyland, CEO and Co-Founder of CloudInteract, and Zeus Kerravala, Founder and Principal Analyst at ZK Research, just days after Salesforce announced its $3.6 billion agreement to acquire Fin, formerly known as Intercom. 

With AI reshaping customer service at speed, and Salesforce's valuation under pressure, the stakes around this deal go well beyond the price tag. If you want to cut through the press release noise and get a real read on what this means - this is the conversation to watch. 

Salesforce has made yet another substantial acquisition, but does Fin actually fill the gaps in Agentforce, or does it add new complexity? Kerravala and Leyland pull the deal apart from two very different vantage points. 

The resolution rate reality check - Salesforce is leading with Fin's 76% end-to-end resolution rate versus Agentforce's 60%. But Leyland draws a sharp distinction between general knowledge queries and action-orientated ones - and argues the headline number likely flatters the more complex use cases businesses actually care about 

The Apex model - the underreported story - Kerravala flags Fin's proprietary small language model as one of the most underappreciated parts of the deal, arguing it could help Salesforce cut delivery costs and push resolution rates north of 90% over time - with both guests agreeing vertical SLMs are the industry's direction of travel 

CCaaS on collision course - with Salesforce now owning both the CRM data layer and a packaged AI agent, Genesys, NICE, Five9 and Amazon Connect are all in the frame. The consensus: whoever owns the data wins - and the hyperscalers aren't standing still

When Anthropic restricted access to its Claude AI models in response to US export control requirements, it wasn't just a policy story. It was a wake-up call for every enterprise that has built its security posture around a single AI provider.

In this interview, Fran Roche sits down with Shimon Tolts, co-founder and CEO of Copperhelm, to unpack what the restrictions really mean for enterprise AI resilience. They discuss how attack timelines have collapsed to under 24 hours, why 70 to 90 percent of security alerts turn out to be noise, and how the role of the CISO is being fundamentally redefined.

Shimon also explains how Copperhelm built its agentic cloud security platform from the ground up, including its context lake architecture, and why bolting AI onto legacy tools will never be enough.

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

Hakob Astabatsyan, CEO of Synthflow, unpacks the 8x8 partnership, the re-emergence of voice, and why agentic AI has quietly shifted from cost-cutter to revenue driver. 

In this discussion, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Hakob Astabatsyan, CEO of Synthflow AI, to discuss the company's newly announced strategic partnership with 8x8. 

With the global voice AI market on a trajectory to hit $54 billion by 2033 – and enterprise adoption accelerating faster than even industry insiders predicted – this is a conversation every contact centre and CX leader should be paying attention to. 

Hakob goes well beyond the partnership announcement, offering a frank take on where agentic AI really stands today and what's coming next. 

Fresh off the 8x8 partnership announcement, he digs into the bigger picture – what's actually driving the resurgence of voice AI, and why most of the industry is still thinking about it the wrong way. 

Voice AI's comeback is a technology inflection point, not a trend. Hakob explains why voice was always the hardest channel to crack, and why solving it has unlocked a genuinely omnichannel agentic AI paradigm – with adoption moving faster than anyone expected. 

Most vendors are selling containment and calling it resolution. Synthflow's agents are already running 30-minute complex conversations and executing multi-step workflows across systems of record – a significant leap beyond the deflect-and-transfer model most solutions still operate on. 

The ROI story has shifted from single-digit to double-digit territory. As AI moves from cost-saving toward revenue generation – boosting conversion rates, reducing churn, driving measurable outcomes – the business case for enterprise AI has fundamentally changed. 

Outcome-based pricing is the new bar. Hakob makes the case for why vendor alignment around shared outcomes, not just tech deployment, is what separates a successful AI rollout from a stalled one.

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

At CCW Vegas 2026, Rob Scott sits down with Jonathan 'JR' Ranger, Chief Customer Officer at CallMiner, to explore the company's latest AI innovation, 'Real-Time AI Guidance,' and what it actually means for agents, customers, and contact center leaders navigating an increasingly AI-driven world. 

JR breaks down how the technology works in practice, why hold times and transfers are no longer an acceptable fallback, and why he believes agents who embrace AI will thrive rather than disappear. He also gets candid about why so many AI deployments fall short, and what organizations need to do differently to see real results. 

If you're leading CX strategy, running a contact center, or just trying to separate the AI hype from the reality, this one's worth your time.