Customer Experience in 2025: CX Lessons on AI, Automation, and Strategy for 2026

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What Emerged in 2025

Across these conversations, the industry showed signs of recalibration. Leaders spent less time debating what was possible and more time focusing on what could be sustained operationally.

Collaboration emerged as a requirement rather than an aspiration as CX work expanded across product, IT, operations, and service design. AI outcomes were shaped less by scale and more by clarity of purpose, ownership, and sequencing. Many leaders also described a shift toward assistance before automation, recognizing that enabling people and workflows created stronger adoption and fewer downstream issues.

At the same time, buyer sophistication increased, service design remained foundational, and leaders began questioning performative empathy and legacy CX metrics that no longer reflect trust or business impact.

How It’s Shaping 2026

Customer experience is becoming more selective.

The year ahead favors judgment over experimentation and clarity over volume. AI will remain central, though its value will be determined by how well it fits into service design, governance, and human workflows. Progress will come from resisting the urge to move faster than organizational foundations allow.

Key Takeaways

• CX work shifted from experimentation to sustainability. Leaders focused less on what was possible and more on what could be operationalized across teams and systems.
• AI value depended on clarity, not scale. Outcomes were shaped by purpose and ownership long before deployment began.
• Assistance outperformed automation as a starting point. Enabling people and improving workflows created stronger adoption and fewer downstream issues.
• Service design remained foundational. Technology amplified results when it fit a coherent service model and exposed gaps when it did not.

Special Thanks to Our Participants