Feature
The Gist
- AI moves from promise to performance. By 2026, organizations stop experimenting at the edges and start fixing the foundations that determine whether AI actually improves customer experience.
- CX becomes how companies operate, not how they report. Experience outcomes increasingly reflect leadership decisions, organizational design, and execution discipline—not journey maps or tools.
- Trust and cohesion replace novelty as differentiators. As personalization accelerates, the advantage goes to brands that make fewer, clearer decisions and deliver them consistently.
Predictions about the future of customer experience often focus on what’s new. But as CMSWire Advisory members look toward 2026, their outlook centers on something more fundamental: what finally has to change inside organizations for all that innovation to matter.
Insights from members of the CMSWire Advisory Board point to a year where AI maturity, agentic systems, personalization and new commerce channels collide with leadership realities. The winners won’t be defined by who adopts the most technology, but by who aligns people, process and accountability around the experience they promise customers.
Table of Contents
- AI Hype Gives Way to Operational Reality
- Agentic AI Starts Completing Tasks
- ChatGPT Becomes a Commerce Environment
- CX Emerges as Executive Strategy
- CX Stops Being a Function
- AI Exposes Weaknesses Before Fixing Them
- Personalization Outruns Organizational Readiness
- CX Leadership Becomes a Trust Role
AI Hype Gives Way to Operational Reality
Marbue Brown, founder of the of The Customer Obsession Advantage, sees 2026 as the moment when organizations finally reconcile ambition with execution.
Customers today still encounter AI-powered tools that feel shallow or brittle because early deployments skipped critical groundwork. Knowledge bases weren’t audited, copilots weren’t customized, and AI was layered onto broken processes. The result has been skepticism that automation can truly handle routine interactions without degrading trust.
Brown expects that to change as companies absorb those lessons. With cleaner data, better governance and AI designed around real environments, deployments take a meaningful leap forward—allowing routine work to shift to automation while complex issues move quickly to humans.
"In 2026," Brown says, "with these lessons learned under their belts companies’ AI deployments will make a quantum leap in effectiveness and impact."
Related Article: Just Chatbots? What AI in Customer Experience Really Looks Like
Agentic AI Starts Completing Tasks
Beyond better self-service, Brown points to the rise of true agentic AI—systems that don’t just assist but act.
"True agentic AI agents will become more prevalent, i.e., agents that accomplish tasks on behalf of customers or customer service associates," he says.
In 2026, agentic AI increasingly handles straightforward returns and refunds, manages refundable travel arrangements, schedules routine medical appointments and supports limited financial transactions within predefined guardrails. The significance isn’t just efficiency—it’s accountability. These systems must now be designed, governed and trusted to complete outcomes, not just offer suggestions.
ChatGPT Becomes a Commerce Environment
Brown also predicts a shift in where customer interactions happen. As major brands integrate commerce and payments directly into ChatGPT, the platform evolves from an information interface into a transactional one.
That change forces organizations to rethink ownership of customer experience. When transactions occur inside platforms companies don’t control, traditional support, escalation and measurement models no longer apply. In 2026, CX teams must design for ecosystems—not just owned channels.
Related Article: OpenAI's ChatGPT Instant Checkout: The Dawn of Conversational Commerce CX
CX Emerges as Executive Strategy
For Jeannie Walters, founder and chief experience investigator of Experience Investigators, the most important shift is cultural, not technical.
She hopes 2026 marks the end of treating CX as a support function or reporting layer. Faster marketing and cheaper communications haven’t made brands more distinctive. Instead, leaders are being forced to connect experience directly to growth efficiency, trust and long-term customer loyalty.
The organizations that perform best stop reacting to CX metrics and start using experience as a strategic operating model. That requires marketing, operations and CX to work together intentionally—designing experiences that serve both customer needs and business goals.
This will allow organizations to "intentionally design and deliver experiences that drive real business results. To do that well, they have to define what success looks like for both their customers and their organizational goals — then design toward both of those outcomes."
CX Stops Being a Function
Phil Burrows, customer experience and marketing consultant and former Verizon executive, believes that by 2026, customer experience is no longer something organizations “own” as a department.
Instead, CX becomes a byproduct of how the company is structured. AI enables real-time personalization and decisioning, but legacy approval flows, funding models and ownership structures can’t keep pace. Burrows expects CX leaders to be pushed into redesigning decision rights and accountability—or risk watching CX investments stall regardless of tooling.
"Most organizations still treat CX as a layer on top of marketing, digital, or service. That breaks next year," he says. "Customer experience will increasingly be a byproduct of how the company is organized, not a team or platform."
Related Article: The CX Leader of 2026 Isn't Who You Think
AI Exposes Weaknesses Before Fixing Them
Burrows also cautions against assuming AI automatically improves experience. AI accelerates whatever it touches. In strong organizations, it amplifies relevance, speed and consistency. In weak ones, it magnifies confusion and mistrust.
In 2026, many CX failures blamed on AI are really failures of clarity, governance and orchestration. The technology isn’t broken—the system it’s embedded in is.
"Next year," Burrows says, "we’ll see more CX failures blamed on AI that are actually failures of clarity, governance and orchestration."
Personalization Outruns Organizational Readiness
Consumers now benchmark experiences against the best they’ve encountered anywhere, not just within a category. AI allows teams to personalize at scale, but most organizations can’t decide, align or govern fast enough to keep those experiences coherent.
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As a result, CX leaders shift focus away from “more personalization” and toward fewer, better decisions—executed consistently across channels.
"I believe CX leaders will shift focus from 'more personalization' to fewer, better decisions executed consistently," Burrows says.
CX Leadership Becomes a Trust Role
Across these predictions, leadership emerges as the differentiator.
Design and journey mapping still matter, but they won’t define success in 2026. The most effective CX leaders act as translators between business, technology and human needs—trusted voices who sit close to strategy and operations.
As AI levels access to capability, people and leadership become the constraint. Organizations that bring clarity to complexity, align teams around shared outcomes and execute with confidence will outperform those that continue chasing tools instead of coherence.
