CX Grows Up in Vegas: AI Moves From Pilot to Infrastructure

The Gist

Medallia is shifting from insight generation to action orchestration. The 2026 agenda centers on democratizing analytics so frontline employees—not just analysts—can turn signals into immediate, traceable business action.
Growth is moving beyond surveys to operational AI. With contact center and conversational AI segments outpacing traditional survey growth, Medallia is doubling down on “frontline-ready AI” to meet where CX budgets are expanding.
CX platforms are being repositioned as outcome engines. Executives emphasized tying experience data directly to business impact, arguing that scaling AI requires accountability, integration and operational follow-through—not more dashboards.

LAS VEGAS — Returning to the Wynn Las Vegas Resort this week for Medallia Experience '26 gave us invites into both how the company is evolving as well as how the practice of customer experience has and will continue to evolve as AI continues to be adopted by both brands and consumers, and as the profession of CX grows in maturity.

Medallia's 2026 innovation agenda focuses on removing technical barriers. The goal is to shift from research-heavy tools to instant, democratized action for every employee — from the C-suite to the contact center. Additionally, much of the product announcements build on their "Frontline-Ready AI" designed to let business users "talk" to their data and automate complex analysis.

Medallia's Strategic Focus: New Leadership, New CX Tech Focus
Tying CX Outcomes to Business Actions and Outcomes
Continuous Improvement and Growth Beyond AI CX Pilots
Inside Medallia's Product Announcements
The Path Forward: From Surveys to Signals

Medallia's Strategic Focus: New Leadership, New CX Tech Focus

In addition to innovations and riding the tides of change that massive investments in AI as well as significant pressure to adopt AI in the enterprise, this has also been a year of introspection and realignment for Medallia, the company.

This was introduced from the beginning when Mark Bishoff, Medallia chairman and CEO, took the stage, sharing how the company took the last year to meet with customers, consider strategy and chart out a plan for growth, building on the company's strong foundation in text analytics.

Sid Banerjee, Medallia chief strategy officer, shared some market context, saying that surveys are no longer where growth is happening (10% YoY growth, where it used to be 4-5x that).

Instead, there is growth in contact center business (20-25%), and, as one might imagine, in chatbots and conversational AI (35%). Banerjee mentioned that their plan is "continuous investment" as well in their own product, particularly in frontline-ready AI tools (which have 550 active customers), and in accelerating companies' abilities to extract insights from those tools and others.

Banerjee framed their focus by saying, "We have built a capability that is one of the most robust for collecting and analyzing information across an organization."

Tying CX Outcomes to Business Actions and Outcomes

Mirroring the company's own focus on driving stronger business outcomes, Chief Product Officer Fabrice Martin clarified the product vision of "turning every interaction into a meaningful conversational experience."

This echoed another recurring theme, which was making the theoretical tangible. This included both how CX professionals make business cases internally and Medallia's case for playing a centralized role in how brands understand the signals and insights across their vast array of customer touchpoints, business units and systems of record.

Bishoff said, "Everything we are doing is about transforming experience into business outcomes." He compared the current state of people, data and platform siloed to playing "whack a mole" rather than building connected experiences.

Continuous Improvement and Growth Beyond AI CX Pilots

Another common theme throughout the event was that of the CX platform supporting customers' continuous improvement and growth. On stage on Day 1, Jason Renteria, SVP client experience executive at Bank of America, addressed the need for businesses to go beyond AI pilots and drive tangible results. "Scaling does not come from more dashboards; it comes from shared accountability," he said.

Bank of America's Erica AI conversational interface has had over 3 billion interactions since launch. Yet AI alone is not the answer. Renteria continued, "AI is not a strategy; it enables the strategy." And investments in AI are not bypassing the human employees. While BoA continues investing in Erica and AI, it is also investing in employee assistants to augment its human teams.

Inside Medallia's Product Announcements

Of course, as to be expected, there were plenty of product announcements. A few of the highlights include:

Insights Assistant

Traditional analysis takes hours of manual work and is often restricted to data analysts. Medallia's new generative AI capability allows users to ask questions in plain language (e.g., "Why is NPS dropping in the southern region?"). Some differentiators include its ability to validate hypotheses and uncover root causes in seconds while respecting organizational hierarchies and access permissions, ensuring users only get answers based on data they are authorized to see. This means that users can turn ad-hoc queries into traceable, exportable reports without leaving the platform.

Automation for Smart Topic Builder

Language continues to evolve, as well as the way that customers talk, and even how a brand may talk about its products and services. This feature includes AI that automatically identifies emerging trends and generates topics, eliminating the need for manual text analytics maintenance. This reduces the time to discover hidden issues from weeks to minutes, and unlike "black box" AI, this feature allows humans to audit and approve rules to ensure accuracy and explainability.

Global Scale and Accessibility

Native GenAI capabilities, including Intelligent Summaries, Root Cause Assist and Smart Response, now support French and German, in addition to the previously announced Spanish support. This allows global enterprises to standardize service quality across regions without requiring native-language support teams for analysis.

Medallia Experience '26: Strategic Takeaways at a Glance

How Medallia’s 2026 agenda reframes growth, AI adoption and the role of CX platforms.

Theme	What Medallia Is Saying	Market Context	Implication for CX Leaders
From Insight to Action	Frontline-ready AI democratizes analytics so employees can ask questions in plain language and generate traceable reports instantly.	Analytics tools historically required specialists, slowing time to action and limiting adoption beyond analysts.	CX programs must move from dashboard production to embedded operational workflows that trigger measurable action.
Shifting Growth Engines	Survey growth is moderating (10% YoY), while contact center (20–25%) and conversational AI (35%) segments are expanding faster.	Enterprise budgets are flowing toward operational AI, automation and real-time engagement channels.	CX teams need to align strategy with operational systems — especially contact centers and AI-powered service environments.
CX as a Business Outcome Engine	Executives emphasized transforming experience signals into business outcomes, not simply generating insight.	Boards and C-suites increasingly demand ROI proof from CX investments.	Expect stronger pressure to connect NPS, sentiment and journey metrics directly to revenue, retention and efficiency KPIs.
AI Beyond Pilots	Scaling requires shared accountability and integration — not just new dashboards or experimental deployments.	Many enterprises remain stuck in AI proof-of-concept mode without operational embedding.	AI maturity now depends on governance, workflow alignment and human augmentation strategies.
Global and Multilingual Expansion	Expanded GenAI support across languages enables standardized service quality globally.	Global brands struggle to unify analysis and service standards across regions.	Multilingual AI analytics is becoming table stakes for enterprise-scale CX orchestration.

The Path Forward: From Surveys to Signals

While the traditional survey-based approach to CX is not going to disappear, events like Medallia Experience 2026 make it clear that the profession—and brands—need to get listening, analyzing and taking action on many more signals to keep up with their competition, and their customers.

Learning Opportunities

Webinar