CX in 2026: Looking Back on 2025 and Envisioning What’s Next

As the new year rolls around, many look upon it with curiosity. What will a new year bring? What innovations and advancements will we see? Of course, few could have predicted that, just a few years ago, generative AI would take the world by storm and bring us to where we are today.

But in this new age of AI, it's clear that it has had (and will continue to have) an impact on our daily lives. And for CX leaders, the next year will be nothing short of revolutionary. To define what CX in 2026 will look like, I recently sat down with Sheila McGee-Smith, Founder & Principal Analyst of McGee-Smith Analytics, for our seventh consecutive year of predictions. But before we dive into what's coming this year, we reflected on how our 2025 predictions fared.

2025 Predictions: How'd We Do?

✔ There Will Be Exponential Growth in AI Innovation

Once the stuff of science fiction, generative AI and autonomous AI agents are now part of our everyday and innovation is constant. Especially in CX, AI agents working and collaborating with each other — known as agentic AI — have taken off as the new frontier for innovation. As I said in the webinar, we're not just using the term agentic; Five9 is building this into our platform where the technology can think, reason, and adapt, allowing companies to proactively manage, support, and really deliver better expectations from customers.

✔ AI Will Deliver Business Outcomes in CX

AI is now ubiquitous and used throughout organizations — in every department, not just the contact center — in many different ways. For instance, AI agents are assisting both human agents and other AI agents. We're seeing less replacement and more augmentation, where it's less time-consuming for human agents to do their after-call work; it's easier to find the right answers during a call, and so much more. And all of this is providing real business value. In fact, according to the Five9 2025 Business Leaders Customer Experience Report, 78% of CX leaders said that AI is delivering on its promise, and 96% are using AI for human agent assistance.

✔ Contact Centers Will Become the Primary Source for Unbiased Customer Feedback

Once upon a time, we did random surveys to gather feedback, but the unfortunate truth is that we only captured 3-5% of actual sentiment. But as Sheila said, “Now we have the actual transcripts: the voice of the customer. What happened during the call? How did their happiness or unhappiness vary during the course of the call? Was the call successful? Not successful? We can use the transcripts to give us an answer to that for every single call. And so, we really have an extremely clean voice of the customer data now.”

~ Companies Will Recognize the Need to Integrate Their Unique Data or Knowledge Into Generative AI Apps Across the Business

Early last year, many CX leaders recognized that their customer data wasn't in a great spot. Data hygiene is always a continual struggle, and many organizations are still in the midst of changing their approach to data. For most companies, while they certainly recognized the need for data integration, they're working on getting that all-important clean data while simultaneously figuring out where to start with AI.

✔ CCaaS Decisions Are Now CX Platform Decisions

If 2025 showed us anything, it's that connected, highly personalized experiences really matter to customers, and point solutions just can't keep up. As a CX leader, you can't afford to split the decision-making for your CCaaS company and choose point solutions. Everyone in and related to the contact center won't have a great experience, especially as we see more AI agents and human agents working together.

Our CX Predictions for 2026

Turns out, Shiela and I did pretty well with our predictions last year — not that I expected any different with Shiela's 35 years in the industry and well-deserved "Queen of the Contact Center" title. On that high note, let's dive into what we think the CX industry has in store for the coming year.

Prediction #1: Organizations Will Shift from Pilot Projects and POCs to Production-Ready AI Solutions

With any new technology, there are several different stages of adoption. You have the bravest on the bleeding edge — few as they are — constantly pushing the envelope forward. Then you have the early adopters before it moves into general acceptance, and then, finally, the latecomers.

But what companies are finding in their early adoption programs (and even some organizations dipping their toes into the general pool) is that pilots and proofs of concept take the same amount of time and energy as actually deploying something. It costs the same, requires the same level of human resources, and the effort required to test the waters and move forward is incredibly similar.

So, we predict that this year, companies will increasingly adopt a "fail fast" mentality, prioritizing the highest-value use cases, deploying them, and iterating and perfecting them as the year continues. And technology supports that. The large language models (LLMs) that many AI models use are part of what's allowing companies to move so quickly. Even if the underlying LLM that you start with isn't the right one for your use case — LLMs and AI models are often trained to handle specific use cases better than others — you can easily switch to see if another works better for your needs.

This flexibility is so important that we built in easy switching into the Five9 platform, saving our customers time and money through faster, easier iteration. In fact, we like to use the term "flywheel." Once you get that constant improvement rolling and you get the business processes and technologies in place, you can deliver so much more, far more quickly.

Prediction #2: Companies Will Begin Using New Orchestration Tools to Align Workflows with Customer Journeys

Last year, many CX vendors — Five9 and McGee-Smith Analytics included — saw orchestration as a necessity for companies moving forward. We know how important it is for organizations to really orchestrate customer journeys from start to finish, across every channel. This year, we predict companies will catch up and use the foundations we built in 2025 as the new basis for CX in 2026.

Part of this movement will involve using AI to automate more of the customer journey, augmenting human-AI agent collaboration. As Sheila said in the webinar, “I love the fact that we can think about somebody starting an automation, perhaps talking to an AI agent, needing to talk to a human to do something, and then perhaps going back to an agent to finish the interaction.”

For example, the Five9 Intelligent CX Platform offers advanced orchestration tools and capabilities to make customer experiences seamless across any channel and in every interaction. We help you create intelligent, automated workflows that eliminate manual processes for your agents and give customers the same experience no matter what system they use to interact with your company: ERP, CRM, CX platform, etc.

Prediction #3: There Will Be More AI Agent and Human Agent Collaboration

Of course, as we talk about autonomous workflows and AI-powered orchestration, we'd be remiss if we didn't say AI and human agents will be working more closely than ever in 2026. We've already seen a lot of the easier use cases for AI agents get adopted rather quickly: checking if something is in stock, canceling an appointment, confirming a customer's ID, etc. These well-known situations have already reduced the workload for many human agents.

What we predict will be new this year is more collaboration between agents. For instance, CX leaders are already very familiar with self-service, but AI agents bring a whole new level to it that we haven't yet realized, what we're calling “in-queue self-service.” While a customer is on hold, waiting to talk to a human, AI agents can act as a personal concierge, checking in on the customer, answering questions, and perhaps, even solving the reason for the call or other, tangential requests.

Additionally — and we touched on agentic AI earlier — AI agents assisting other AI agents will continue to increase in prevalence. In turn, agentic AI augments what humans receive from AI agents even more. Using the in-stock example, a customer could ask whether a particular product is in stock, which an AI agent can quickly confirm. But if the customer then wants to know how long it'll take to arrive, the AI assistant can now ask the logistics AI agent for the answer and return that to the customer. This, of course, is a rather simple situation, and we predict this type of agentic AI will happen on behalf of not only customers but also human agents to make processes throughout CX that much better.

Prediction #4: We'll Begin to See Consumers Deploying Personal Agents That Interact with Companies' AI Agents

Across many industries, we're seeing AI agents become the preferred way to answer requests. Rather than search on the web, some people choose to ask their favorite chatbot: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, etc. With recent standardization in how AI models talk to each other — what's known as model context protocol (MCP) — we think we'll see many more consumer AI agents working with companies' AI agents.

“We're going to a world where I say, ‘Alexa, schedule my annual physical with Dartmouth Hospital for September, right around my birthday,'and it's going to do it,” said Shiela. With MCP, AI agents can easily and autonomously handle that request: Shiela's Alexa talks to Dartmouth Hospital's AI agent and, using Shiela's Google Calendar to see her schedule, Alexa can work with the hospital's AI agent to create the appointment for her.

This level of AI automation can free up so much time not just for consumers, but for contact centers in any size company and in any industry, and we're particularly excited to see this capability take off.

Prediction #5: Data Is the New Gold in CX

No AI discussion can happen without mentioning data. Data has always been important to CX, but we've previously been limited to mostly structured data. Every CRM has certain fields for information: name, address, phone number, etc.

But the notes field is where the real gold lies. CX leaders know the value of all that unstructured data in that notes field — previous conversations, consumer preferences, etc. These little personal tidbits are how you make real connections with your customers, learn about how they use your products, and ultimately, make smarter decisions for your company.

One of the earliest use cases for AI was data analysis, which is still very true as we continue into 2026. But unlocking the value from all your unstructured data and using AI to glean insights from it must be a top priority this year. As Shiela put it, “We're finding new opportunities for things that customers want us to do that we're not doing. Product management is finding: ‘Wait, we don't even have that product. Maybe we need that feature.'”

Additionally, AI data analysis isn't limited to just historical data. The speed at which AI gathers and processes data means you can generate real-time insights for use during calls and incidents, not afterward. For instance, if you have multiple customers calling about the same issue, you can alert the right teams to fix the issue as it's happening, not a few weeks down the road (i.e., once you've manually pulled all the data). Or, depending on how deep your AI agent deployments have gone, you could even automatically create an AI agent to simply solve the problem.

Of course, this new AI-enabled future still requires organizations to have clean data and keep it clean. So while data's importance and value have never been higher, companies must prioritize the supporting data hygiene systems and processes if they're going to reap the rewards from it.

The Future Is Here

No matter what this year brings, faster, smarter CX is a top priority for many leaders. As consumers themselves get more familiar with how AI itself and how it can help organizations provide a better customer experience, we expect to see AI-powered CX — with an intelligent CX platform behind it — be a strong part of 2026.

Want to listen to the full conversation? Watch the webinar on-demand here.