CX Today

In this CX Today interview, Technology Journalist Nicole Willing speaks with Amit Namjoshi, Executive Director of Technology Consulting at TTEC Digital, about why the EU AI Act should matter to customer experience and contact center leaders, not just legal and compliance teams.Namjoshi explains why CX leaders are becoming the “stewards of AI” in customer-facing operations, how hidden AI can appear in tools such as agent assist, call summaries, sentiment analysis, quality management and workforce management, and why organizations need to start with a clear AI inventory.The conversation also explores what buyers should look for when assessing responsible AI use, including governance, transparency, accountability, human oversight, and ongoing monitoring. Amit shares why AI governance should become part of the operational rhythm of the business, from procurement and change control to quality assurance and the AI governance board.Watch the full interview to learn how CX leaders can reduce risk, build trust, and make AI a safe and useful enabler across the contact center.

Are your customers getting joined-up conversations, or are they starting from scratch every time they contact your business?In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Karen Krivaa, Chief Marketing Officer at MMDSmart, about why so many businesses are still struggling to turn omnichannel ambition into real execution.Krivaa explains why fragmented systems, disconnected customer data, and poorly integrated messaging tools are holding organizations back. Findings from MMDSmart’s survey of more than 300 marketing and operations leaders emphasize the gap between the 99 percent of leaders who see omnichannel communication as a strategic priority and the 43 percent of organizations that have expanded beyond basic email and SMS.The conversation explores why customer context is becoming one of the most valuable assets in modern customer communications, how channels like WhatsApp and RCS can move businesses from basic messaging to richer conversations, and why success should be measured through business growth, return on investment, and customer experience, not just delivery rates.Watch the full interview to learn how CX leaders can close the omnichannel gap, reduce customer friction, and build more connected, context-driven communications.

In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Sean Jackson, Lead AI Architect at Sprinklr, about how AI-generated answers are changing customer discovery, brand comparison, and buyer decision-making.Sean explains why the customer journey is increasingly moving inside AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, where buyers can research, compare, and shortlist brands before a sales or marketing team sees any signal. For CX and marketing leaders, that creates a new visibility challenge: traditional traffic reports may not show where influence is really happening.The conversation explores the difference between traditional search engine optimization and AI visibility, the “prompt gap” between keywords and real customer questions, and why reviews, social care, community discussions, and customer conversations now play a bigger role in how AI describes a brand.Sean also shares a practical first step for leaders: run a visibility audit to understand how AI tools represent your brand, which competitors appear in the answers, and where CX issues may be shaping the narrative.

In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Richard Manthorpe, Director of Product Management at Content Guru, about the changing role of customer data, customer relationship management (CRM) and orchestration in AI-enabled CX.As vendors increasingly talk about agentic experiences, AI-native platforms, systems of action, and systems of decision, Manthorpe explains why CX leaders need to look beyond the terminology and focus on outcomes. He discusses why CRM remains valuable as a system of record, but why customer data platforms (CDPs) are becoming critical for connecting context, intent and customer history across the wider enterprise tech stack.The conversation explores how a CDP can help organizations understand not just what a customer has said, but what their behavior, journey, and data signals mean. Manthorpe also shares practical examples of how connected data can support proactive service, reduce friction, and improve self-service experiences.Watch the full interview to learn how CX leaders can use CDPs to build a more connected, governed, and AI-ready customer experience strategy.

In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Kristin King, Chief Customer Officer at UJET, and Tena Curic, Senior Customer Success Manager at UJET, about what they learned by spending time directly inside customer contact centers.Rather than relying only on dashboards, reports, or quarterly business reviews, the UJET team sat with agents and supervisors to understand how AI is actually affecting day-to-day service. They discuss why agents want AI to remove repetitive work, how poor automation can create extra friction, and why the best customer experiences still depend on context, empathy, and human judgment.The conversation also explores why CX leaders should avoid confusing speed with progress, how to build AI strategies around clear outcomes, and why true vendor partnerships require being present with customers on the contact center floor.Watch the full interview to learn how CX teams can use AI to improve efficiency without weakening service quality, agent confidence, or customer trust.

Enterprise CX leaders face a difficult question: which AI strategies will deliver measurable customer and operational value, and which are simply buying time?In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher speaks with Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, about how the customer experience AI market is beginning to separate into offensive and defensive camps. The conversation starts with Avaya, whose cautious approach to AI raises a bigger market question: can legacy vendors keep pace as competitors move faster on automation, agentic AI, and new commercial models?Kerravala argues that several vendors are now playing offense. NICE, he says, has made a significant move by acquiring Cognigy and strengthening the connection between workforce management, contact center as a service (CCaaS), and conversational AI. Talkdesk is taking a different route, positioning Customer Experience Automation (CXA) as the next phase beyond traditional CCaaS. Zoom is leaning into simplicity and user familiarity, while Amazon Connect continues to challenge established pricing models with consumption-based economics.The discussion also covers RingCentral’s practical AI push for smaller businesses, Webex’s focus on security and enterprise-grade compliance, and Salesforce’s growing ambitions in the contact center market. Kerravala notes that Salesforce’s ability to combine customer relationship management (CRM), voice data, and AI agents could be powerful, but only if it proves the technology can move beyond earlier AI setbacks.Governance emerges as one of the interview’s most important themes. As AI agents begin to work across platforms and communicate with other agents, enterprise buyers will need stronger guardrails, auditability, and trust. Kerravala suggests that legal and compliance risk will become a major factor in vendor selection.For buyers, the takeaway is clear, CX AI platforms need to deliver transparent pricing, open interoperability, and autonomous resolution, such as rebooking a flight, issuing a refund, or updating a policy.Kerravala also offers direct advice to Avaya customers: demand firm AI delivery milestones, assess whether the roadmap matches business needs, and build contractual options that protect the organization if promises are not met.

Support leaders are under pressure to improve customer experience, coach agents, manage technology, and keep operations moving. Yet quality assurance often becomes another task on an already overloaded list. In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher speaks with Ty Given, Founder and CEO at CX Collective, about why Quality as a Service could offer a more practical route for teams that need better QA insight without more admin.Given explains that running a support team can feel like running a small business. Leaders must move between people, process, and technology, often while trying to evaluate only a small sample of customer interactions. AI tools can help analyze conversations, but she argues they still struggle with nuance. That means a human must review context, identify coaching opportunities, and decide what really matters.That is where CX Collective’s Quality as a Service model comes in. Rather than asking teams to buy, learn, implement, and manage another QA platform, the company builds the quality program around the customer’s needs and delivers curated results. The goal is to give support leaders useful insight faster, while reducing the burden of administration.Given says the model is especially valuable for teams with five to 20 agents. These teams are often growing quickly, but they may lack the time, budget, or internal QA expertise to run a full quality program. CX Collective supports them with monthly calibration sessions, human-led review, agent dispute workflows, and coaching notes that help both leaders and agents take action.The interview also explores the relationship between QA and customer satisfaction scores. Given notes that agents can follow the right process and still receive poor CSAT when a customer dislikes a company policy. By adding quality scores into tickets, CX Collective aims to give leaders a more balanced view of performance.While many vendors are focused on AI reviewing 100 percent of interactions, Given believes human judgment remains essential. For her, Quality as a Service is about giving support leaders the equivalent of a QA team that does the heavy lifting, so they can focus on decisions, coaching, and improvement.

 In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher sits down with Ty Givens, Founder and CEO of CX Collective, and Simel Kara, CX Account Director for Digital Experience and Transformation at Effect Digital, to dig into why end-to-end journey visibility remains out of reach for most organizations — and why reaching for AI as the solution is likely making things worse.Simel frames the core issue around what he calls a missing "conductor" — organizations tend to have reasonable visibility within individual channels, but no shared memory connecting them. The handoffs are where everything unravels.Ty puts it in starker operational terms. Customers bouncing between a bot, a new channel, and a live agent are retelling their story every single time — because the underlying systems simply aren't integrated. And piling AI on top of that doesn't help."If you don't have any of those things, what's going to happen is that those issues are actually going to be amplified because AI doesn't fix that."Both speakers land on the same closing advice: stop buying tools and start fixing the foundations. Assign clear ownership for AI oversight, document what success actually looks like, and treat journey analytics as a live operational discipline rather than a reporting exercise.As Ty puts it, someone needs to get off the dance floor and oversee the whole room. Right now, in most organizations, nobody is. 

In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Muj Choudhury, CEO of RocketPhone.ai and former Salesforce Director, about the uncomfortable questions surrounding enterprise AI. As organizations race to deploy AI agents, Choudhury argues that bigger investments and flashier product names do not automatically produce better customer experiences. This is a candid conversation about data, workflow design, agent coaching, risk, and how to find AI use cases that improve service rather than simply chasing automation. AI may be everywhere in CX, but Choudhury says the industry needs to get far more honest about where it delivers value and where it creates new problems. Drawing on his Salesforce background and his work at RocketPhone.ai, Choudhury joins CX Today’s Rhys Fisher to unpack why enterprise AI success depends on more than an LLM, a chatbot, or an ambitious product launch. Why Salesforce’s acquisition-heavy history and changing AI strategy create a difficult integration challenge, especially as smaller, less encumbered competitors move quickly. Why customer data, including voice and contact center conversations, is the essential foundation for relevant AI experiences. A real-world field-service example showing how AI can help engineers arrive with the right part, reduce wasted visits, and improve the customer outcome. Why AI should support human coaching and risk management, not replace experienced managers or introduce unsafe, non-compliant service interactions. Choudhury’s message is clear: start with people and broken processes, then apply AI where it produces a measurable result. Watch the full interview, then assess your own AI roadmap: Is it solving a specific customer problem, using trustworthy data, and keeping human accountability where it matters?For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

Rob Wilkinson speaks with Rodney Hassard, Head of Product, Applications Group at Vonage, about how intelligent workspaces are reshaping the agent experience. Rodney explains why customer relationship management (CRM) fragmentation is becoming a major barrier for service teams, especially as organizations adopt more AI tools across the contact center.He explores how agents often become “human middleware,” switching between multiple CRMs, copying and pasting data, and trying to piece together customer context in real time. That friction affects confidence, consistency, handle time, first contact resolution, and customer trust.Rodney also discusses how the Vonage Intelligent Workspace creates a browser-based layer between engagement channels and CRM environments, connecting natively to 13 CRM platforms and giving agents a single pane of glass. He shares why real-time context is essential for AI to deliver accurate, useful recommendations, and why leaders should start with a workflow audit before investing in more technology.Watch the full interview to learn how CX leaders can reduce agent friction, improve AI outcomes, and create a more connected service experience.

 The HubSpot data enrichment controversy generated plenty of heat. Alexi Hatch, CMO of Acoustic, is more interested in the light.Speaking with CX Today's Rhys Fisher, Hatch reframes the episode not as a one-company scandal but as a symptom of a wider industry habit she calls "signal debt" — the over-reliance on borrowed, static enrichment data that tells you what a contact's job title was last quarter but nothing about what they actually want today."Piling on more enrichment and external data feels like deeper customer understanding, but it's just an illusion of intelligence," Hatch says. "The antidote to signal debt isn't borrowing more consumer signals, it's having the in-house capabilities to analyze better ones."The conversation covers where brands typically go wrong, with Hatch pointing to declining open rates and flat engagement as the clearest early signs that a CRM built on static data is running out of road. She also draws a hard line on consent — opt-in, she argues, is black and white, and brands that rely on "fuzzy" opt-ins are storing up a trust problem that no amount of enrichment will fix.The discussion then shifts to the activation gap: collecting behavioral data is one challenge, but acting on it fast enough to be relevant is another. If the insight and action layers of your tech stack can't talk to each other in real time, the window closes before the message lands.For CX and marketing leaders trying to make sense of where the industry goes from here, it's a grounded and practically useful conversation. 

From agentic AI to brand intelligence and Firefly's trust-first model, Constellation Research's Liz Miller drops unfiltered insights from the Vegas floor.In this on-the-ground dispatch from Adobe Summit 2026, CX Today Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Liz is one of the sharpest voices in the CX and marketing technology space – and she's not here to sugarcoat anything. From the buzz around Shantanu Narayan's succession to Adobe's evolving agentic AI platform strategy, this conversation cuts through the noise and gets into what actually matters for enterprise marketers right now. Adobe Summit is buzzing... and not just about leadership transitions. Liz Miller joins Rhys Fisher to break down what's actually moving the needle for CX leaders on the ground in Vegas. 🔴 Adobe CX Enterprise reframed: It's not a new product, it's a clarified story. Liz explains how Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) has always been the foundation, and why this rebranding is about helping enterprises understand how all the pieces connect in an agentic world. 🔴 Brand Intelligence is the standout: Adobe's new solution lets marketers track how their brand appears across LLMs and AI search, not just the traditional web. As agent-to-agent engagement becomes real, knowing how your agents get found is mission-critical. 🔴 Firefly's trust-first architecture: Adobe didn't bolt on safety after the fact. Liz walks through why Content Authenticity and invisible watermarking aren't lip service; they're structural, and they matter deeply for enterprise brand security. 🔴 The radiologist moment: Jensen Huang's story from the keynote – AI can now read 100% of CT scans, yet demand for radiologists is rising – perfectly captures why Adobe's decade-long AI investment is a strategy, not a slogan.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

Eight of the biggest assumptions about AI and customer experience — tested, challenged, and corrected by two of the industry's most experienced voicesEverywhere you turn, the conversation about AI and customer experience sounds the same. AI will replace the contact center. Customers don't want to talk to humans anymore. Automation will fix everything. But how much of that is actually true — and how much of it is costing brands real customers, real revenue, and real trust? In this CX Today reality check, Nicole Willing sits down with Jeff Blair, Chief Growth Officer, and Cortney Jonas Burnos, VP of AI and Digital at Transcom, to put the industry's boldest AI and CX assumptions under the microscope. Eight hot takes. Two experts with decades of frontline CX and AI experience between them. Zero tolerance for hype.What emerges isn't a defence of AI or a rejection of it. It's something more useful: a clear-eyed, evidence-backed challenge to the assumptions quietly shaping — and in some cases, quietly damaging — CX strategy in 2026. You'll find out why 78% of customers now attempt self-service first — and why self-service is simultaneously ranked the least effective channel for resolving issues. You'll hear why the brands seeing the biggest returns from AI are actually spending more on customer experience, not less. And you'll understand why the biggest barrier to AI transformation isn't technology at all. The conversation covers the moments that matter most — when digital tools fail, when customers escalate, when a bot loop turns a manageable issue into a brand reputation problem. It challenges the idea that outsourcing means losing control. It reframes what great agents actually do in an AI-powered environment. And it draws a straight line between poor automation decisions and the customer churn that follows. If your 2026 CX strategy is built on any of these assumptions, this is the conversation you need to have before your next budget decision. The real question, as Jeff Blair puts it, isn't whether AI will replace the contact center. It's whether organisations are ready to rethink how customer experience actually operates in an AI-powered world. The hot takes are provocative. The hard truths are harder to ignore.

Three CX leaders get brutally honest about why infrastructure resilience has become the boardroom problem nobody is prepared for. In this CX Today Roundtable discussion, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher is joined by Ty Givens (Founder and CEO of the CX Collective), Rhona Bradshaw (CX Consultant), and Mike Wehrs (COO, TieTechnology) to tackle one of the most underestimated risks in enterprise CX: infrastructure resilience. Most organizations assume their stack is resilient. Most are wrong. From shared cloud dependencies that make redundancy an illusion, to AI agents that quietly multiply failures before anyone notices, the gap between what leaders think they've built and what they've actually built has never been more consequential – or more expensive. 77% of CX leaders faced a major outage in the last two years. For over 90% of enterprises, one hour of downtime costs $300,000 or more. Yet resilience is still treated as an IT afterthought. This roundtable changes that conversation. 🔴 The five nines myth: Rhona Bradshaw explains why traditional uptime metrics act as a “smoke screen” – and why intermittent failures, not full outages, are causing the most customer damage right now 🔴 Where stacks actually break: Mike Wehrs shares real-world examples of how unqualified hands touching IT infrastructure and ignored data quality issues bring contact centers down – often from the inside 🔴 Redundancy that isn't: Ty Givens unpacks why organizations discover their systems have no real redundancy only when everything fails simultaneously – and why ownership silos are the root cause 🔴 AI making it worse: All three guests align on a uncomfortable truth – throwing agentic AI onto sub-adequate infrastructure and dirty data doesn't accelerate your CX, it accelerates your failures If your resilience strategy still lives in an out-of-date playbook on a shelf, this is essential viewing.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

Blair Pleasant breaks down what this landmark contract really means for the CCaaS market, the hyperscaler threat, and why an eight-year contract is both bold and logical Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Blair Pleasant, President and Principal Analyst at COMMfusion, to dissect one of the biggest CCaaS deals ever announced. With HMRC committing to a $670M, eight-year contract via Capgemini and NiCE, Blair cuts through the headline noise to explain what this deal reveals about enterprise procurement, vendor staying power, and whether the likes of AWS and Salesforce can ever truly compete at this level. The HMRC megadeal has sent shockwaves through the CCaaS industry, but what does it actually tell us about the state of the market? Blair Pleasant brings over 30 years of analyst experience to unpack the real story behind the numbers. Two-horse race or open field? Blair argues NiCE and Genesys dominated this deal due to specific procurement requirements around revenue thresholds and systems integration capability – but insists there's still room for others like Five9, Content Guru, and Sprinklr at enterprise level. Why hyperscalers aren't landing deals like this... yet. Microsoft and Salesforce lack the CCaaS-specific expertise, track record, and dedicated revenue that HMRC demanded. AWS, however, is the one to watch. The Capgemini factor. NiCE was the CCaaS engine, but Capgemini won the contract, and Blair is clear that the SI relationship, especially given Capgemini's existing ties to HMRC and UK government work, was critical to securing it. Eight years is 80 years in this industry. Blair explains why the contract length signals HMRC's desire for stability over agility – and why NiCE's acquisition of Cognigy positions them to grow with that commitment.

From Excel spreadsheets and NPS below zero to a 4.7 Trustpilot rating, Openreach and NiCE pull back the curtain on one of the UK's most ambitious AI deployments. Introduction Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Chris Herbert, Director of Customer Service at Openreach; Eifion Lloyd, Senior Manager of Customer Enablement and Strategy at Openreach; and Giles Bryan, General Manager of Proactive AI at NiCE. With 25 million homes in scope and 700 communications providers depending on Openreach's infrastructure, this was a national transformation. If you want to understand what proactive AI actually looks like when the stakes are real, this is the conversation to watch. Main Description Openreach manages the UK's largest broadband network, but before NiCE came in, customer communications were fragmented, inconsistent, and largely out of Openreach's hands – owned instead by hundreds of individual comms providers. NPS sat below zero. Engineers were turning up to empty homes. Something had to change. In this case study interview, the teams behind the deployment break down exactly how they got from there to here: Starting scrappy and scaling fast: the early proof of concept ran on daily Excel uploads, crashed occasionally, and was far from elegant. But it proved the value, and that was the point. The proactive shift: why waiting for customers to call is already a failure, and how Openreach rebuilt its engagement model around reaching out first via SMS, email, and voice. Inclusivity by design: how NiCE's platform handles landline-only customers without a separate spec, separate team, or separate configuration. A number that didn't make the press release: a generative AI chatbot trialed before Christmas cut install cancellations by 22%.

Why connected journeys remain broken in 2026, and what it actually takes to fix them. CX Today's Rhys Fisher is joined by Adrian Swinscoe (Punk CX), Jeannie Walters (Experience Investigators), and Robert Bradshaw (WiserOwl) to tackle one of CX's most persistent frustrations: the gap between the promise of orchestrated customer journeys and the fragmented reality most customers still live with. The technology is often ready; the organizations aren't. This roundtable cuts through the noise on why journey orchestration keeps failing, and what leaders need to do differently. Data misalignment is the root cause. CX metrics and actual cost structures rarely line up, making it nearly impossible to accurately value or fix broken journey stages. AI amplifies what's already there. Layer it onto a fragmented journey and you accelerate the damage, not the fix. Ownership is the elephant in the room. Until financial accountability is tied to journey performance, CX loses the internal prioritization battle — even when every team's KPIs are green. Brilliant basics beat big promises. Consistency and reliability build the trust foundation that makes orchestration actually stick. Map a real customer journey with your data team — find where friction lives. 👉 Visit cxtoday.com for more on CX strategy, AI, and journey orchestration.

California's new AI executive order is forcing a conversation every enterprise needs to have – but what does it actually mean for customer experience?  In this episode of CX Today, Francesca Roche sits down with Alex Levin, CEO of Regal, to explore how organizations can build meaningful AI safety measures without waiting for regulators to mandate them. From system-level guardrails to agent-specific compliance by industry, Alex shares how Regal has been tackling this challenge for nearly six years — long before legislation caught up. The conversation digs into the growing problem of state-by-state AI regulation and why Alex believes a fragmented patchwork approach is slowing innovation and putting unnecessary strain on businesses operating at scale. With the EU AI Act adding another layer of complexity, we examine how enterprises can design internal governance structures that hold up across jurisdictions – and why some markets, like France and Italy, are seeing companies opt out of AI altogether as a result of overly restrictive rules. Alex also lays out three core principles he believes the industry must rally around if federal leadership doesn't emerge: always identify AI as AI, apply existing consumer protection rules like TCPA equally to automated interactions, and keep individual customer data out of LLM training pipelines. It's a candid, practical conversation about where AI governance stands today – and what it will take to build customer trust at scale.

Pedro Andrade discusses why most AI deployments fail, why your KPIs are lying to you, and how the Talkdesk CXA Operations Center changes the game Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Pedro Andrade, VP of AI at Talkdesk, to dig into one of the most pressing challenges facing contact center leaders today: deploying AI at scale without flying blind. With AI agents now handling real customer interactions, the stakes have never been higher – and as Pedro makes clear, the gap between expectation and reality is wider than most vendors want to admit. AI is everywhere in the contact center, but visibility, governance, and accountability are lagging dangerously behind. Pedro Andrade pulls no punches in this conversation, breaking down exactly why so many AI projects underdeliver and what it takes to fix that. 🔴 The black box problem: Pedro explains why deploying AI without real-time observability is like "driving at high speed, blindfolded" – and how Talkdesk's

Retail teams are moving beyond scripted chatbots and into agentic AI systems that can understand context, take action using tools, and coordinate across functions.In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing is joined by Gilbert Gooijers, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer at CM.com, to explain what retail leaders often misunderstand about agentic AI, why multi-agent setups beat a single do-it-all bot, and how the right channel choice, from WhatsApp to RCS and voice, shapes customer experience across generations. Gooijers also shares real-world examples, including event-scale customer service and guided purchase journeys, before highlighting the biggest emerging risk: security.The message to retailers is clear: treat cybersecurity as the starting point, not an afterthought, as AI agents become more capable and more connected.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

Retail customer satisfaction climbed to 94.6 percent in Q1 2026, but the headline figure only tells part of the story. In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche speaks with Tim Waterton, Chief Revenue Officer at HappyOrNot, about what is really driving improvements in retail CX and where performance still breaks down.Waterton explains why retailers are getting better at managing tough operational environments, how real-time microfeedback is changing decision-making on the shop floor, and why consistency matters more than averages. The discussion explores why CX is strongest in the morning and weakest in evenings and weekends, how staffing experience and store layout shape outcomes, and what retailers can do to improve price perception without cutting margins.The conversation also looks at checkout innovation, from rapid lane management to the rise of slow lanes, and what proactive planning retailers need as traffic increases in Q2.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

Salesforce’s Agentforce Contact Center launch has split analyst opinion, and this CX Today debate gets straight to why. Host Rob Wilkinson is joined by Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research and Dave Michels of TalkingPointz to unpack what Agentforce actually is, what problem it is trying to solve, and what it could break.Kerravala frames Agentforce as a serious attempt to reduce “fragmentation hell” by converging CRM, customer interactions, and AI into a single platform layer, so agents stop being the “integration point” between disconnected tools. Michels pushes back hard, arguing the launch is a pivot driven by pressure on CRM’s long-standing model and relevance, especially as generative AI changes how businesses capture and use customer conversation data.Across the discussion, they dig into the operational impact on contact center leaders and frontline teams, including context switching, data quality, and what becomes the real “source of truth” when AI can surface answers directly from live conversations. The result is a grounded look at the stakes for customer service organizations weighing consolidation, reliability, and speed-to-value as AI moves from feature to foundation.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

As customer support teams move from first-gen genAI co-pilots to autonomous agents, the real risk is assuming AI will “automate everything” without changing how support actually works. In this CX Today interview, Vishal Sharma, CTO at SearchUnify, explains why most enterprises still aren’t ready for fully autonomous support and what needs to happen first. Sharma breaks down the operational shift from “find” to “assist” to “act,” and why workflows and the underlying support stack must be rebuilt for machines, not just humans. Sharma also walks through the guardrails that matter most, from grounding responses with retrieval and citations to privacy checks, toxicity controls, and escalation paths when the agent should say “I don’t know.” Sharma also shares what it takes to deploy multi-agent orchestration without chaos, including clear agent roles, shared memory, and a master orchestrator.

How do retailers deliver a consistent customer experience when shoppers move fluidly between online research and in-store decision-making? In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche speaks with Daniel Todaro, CEO of Gekko Group, about the widening gap between digital information and shop-floor execution.Todaro argues the biggest disconnect is knowledge, including what customers can learn online versus what they can get from a trained advisor in store. He also explains why constant discounting can damage brand equity, how tech-first environments like digital mirrors and retail media can lift engagement while alienating some groups, and what “agentic AI” could unlock when physical and digital journeys finally match.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

AI is making cyber attacks easier to scale, more personalized, and harder to spot, and that’s showing up directly in the contact center. In this CX Today panel, Nicole Willing is joined by Miguel Fornes, Information Security Manager at Surfshark, Randy Layman, CTO at AVOXI, and Ron Zayas, CEO at Ironwall by Incogni. Together, they unpack how attackers are using agentic AI to accelerate social engineering, exploit the vast amount of personal data online, and increase account takeover attempts through higher volume and higher accuracy tactics.The discussion also explores a fast-approaching shift: genuine customers using AI agents to contact support on their behalf, blurring the line between authorised and malicious automation. The panel argues that CX leaders need to rethink authentication as a risk-based continuum, not a binary pass or fail, with “graduated” security steps that increase as actions become more sensitive. The goal is to protect customers and frontline teams without turning every interaction into an obstacle course. Packed with vivid analogies, the panel makes complex AI-driven cyber risk feel real, practical, and urgent. Watch the full video now to catch every takeaway.

As AI generated answers increasingly replace traditional search results, brands are facing a new visibility challenge. In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche speaks with Peter Sloterdyk, Chief Marketing Officer at Gist, about the launch of Gist Geo and what AI driven discovery means for modern marketing teams. The conversation explores why traditional SEO metrics are no longer enough, how brands can measure visibility inside AI answers, and why sentiment, structured content, and actionable insights are becoming critical as search evolves into a zero click experience.

AI agents are everywhere in the CX conversation, but this CX Today case study gets specific. Nicole Willing speaks with Will Jones, GTM Operations Associate at CRM vendor Attio, and Paul Adams, Chief Product Officer at Intercom, about how Attio deployed Intercom’s AI agent, Fin, as a sales development representative (SDR) to handle inbound sales engagement.Jones breaks down what drove the move, including the push to stay ahead of changing buyer expectations and the reality that static forms miss demand outside business hours. Jones shares what changed day to day after launch: always-on coverage, automated follow-ups, richer insight into what prospects actually ask for, and faster routing of qualified leads into the CRM.Adams explains why sales is a natural extension of an AI agent that started in customer support. Customers experience one journey, not separate departments, and shared memory and a single source of truth are critical to avoid the classic “repeat yourself” handoff problem.Both guests also tackle the hype question directly, arguing that AI is a bigger shift than the internet or mobile because it can do the work, while warning that success requires effort, experimentation and iteration.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

A production database deletion and 30-hour outage at Pocket OS has become a cautionary tale for any organization bringing agentic AI into critical systems.In this interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Alex Gallego, CEO of Redpanda Data, about what went wrong and why blaming the model misses the point. They unpack the enterprise basics that still get skipped: separating development from production, tightening authentication and authorization and scoping agent permissions away from dangerous root access.Gallego also explains why governing agents is harder than governing humans. Agents can be more capable, less predictable and execute at machine speed. That combination makes traditional controls feel too slow. Gallego outlines practical guardrails, the need to reduce the “search space” of tools an agent can access, and why many organizations will need proxy layers to enforce fine-grained permissions when legacy systems cannot.The conversation closes with the bigger stakes, from customer trust and regulatory exposure to the risk of catastrophic failure in human-critical systems. For CX and contact center leaders evaluating autonomous agents, the takeaway is clear: speed and automation are only valuable if governance is designed in from day one.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

CRMs and customer data platforms (CDPs) can store a mountain of customer data, but that does not automatically translate into better experiences. In this CX Today panel, Ben Robinson, Head of Technology at Fair Finance, Amory Somers Vine, Head of Customer Experience at Expereo, and John Cheney, CEO of Workbooks, discuss what it takes to move from systems of record to systems of action.The conversation digs into why many CRM programs still fall short, including heavy customisation, siloed ownership, and metric choices that prioritise internal efficiency over customer outcomes. The panel also explores how automation and generative AI can help teams act on insights faster, from proactive service monitoring and case creation to summary-driven support experiences that reduce agent effort and speed up resolution.If you are rebuilding your CRM strategy, aligning CX and IT, or figuring out where humans must stay in the loop, this is a practical, grounded discussion with clear takeaways for enterprise CX and contact center leaders.

AI agents are handling more customer conversations than ever, but what happens when automation reaches its limit?In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Craig Cotton, Global VP of Product Management at Concentrix, about one of the most important moments in the modern customer journey, the handoff from AI to a human advisor.Cotton explains why brands risk damaging customer trust when customers have to repeat information after a failed bot interaction, and why even a small failure rate can create millions of poor experiences at scale. Cotton also explores the operational gaps behind broken handoffs, from telephony and CCaaS integrations to missing AI summaries, poor queue visibility, and a lack of ongoing quality assurance.The discussion covers what a well-executed handoff should look like, why AI agents need the same onboarding, coaching, QA and brand training as human advisors, and how real-time sentiment analysis can help companies recover a negative customer experience before it becomes a loyalty problem.

Customer journeys are no longer linear, and AI alone won’t fix the friction customers feel when they need fast, empathetic support.In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Mike Clifton and Max Schwendner, Co-CEOs of Alorica, about how real-time data, emotionally aware AI, and human support are reshaping customer experience.They explore why businesses need to move beyond generic personalization, how AI can help agents understand customer sentiment in real time, and why the best CX strategies focus on outcomes rather than technology for its own sake.The conversation also covers multimodal customer journeys, data orchestration, global CX delivery, the role of human agents in complex interactions, and the importance of knowing when AI should step back and let a person take over.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

What does it take to redesign a video platform used by teams across marketing, editorial, and media operations at scale?In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche sits down with Alessandro Fumi, Product Manager at Brightcove, and Matteo Paoli, Product Designer at Brightcove, to unpack the thinking behind Prism, Brightcove’s newly redesigned platform interface.The discussion explores how feedback from more than 100 customers shaped Prism’s focus on usability, consistency, and clearer information hierarchy. Fumi and Paoli explain why interface consistency matters in large-scale video operations, how onboarding has become critical as non-technical users increasingly rely on video tools, and how accessibility and design systems influence day-to-day productivity.The conversation also looks ahead, covering Brightcove’s post-Prism roadmap, including embedded AI features, quality-of-life improvements, and ongoing design priorities that aim to support faster workflows without disrupting existing operations.

What happens when your “great” customer experience is optimised for humans, but your next customer is an AI agent? In this CX Today interview, Carrie Brough, Director of Strategy and Ops for TTEC Digital EMEA, argues that a single CX model is fast becoming a liability. Brough explains why AI-driven interactions need quick, decision-ready responses, while humans still need empathy, context, and brand nuance. Carrie breaks down the operational warning signs that your AI and human traffic are colliding, including repeat contacts, confused outcomes, and frontline teams being forced into a “clean-up” role. The conversation also covers when an interaction should move from the AI lane to a human agent, and why risk, not emotion, needs to drive escalation decisions.

Single chatbots are giving way to coordinated teams of AI agents that can execute workflows across systems, policies, and teams. In this interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Raj Koneru, Founder and CEO at Kore.ai, about why multi-agent architecture is becoming inevitable in customer experience (CX).Raj breaks down what has changed in the last 12 months as models have improved in generation and reasoning. He explains why “prompting alone is not an enterprise architecture” and why CX leaders need explicit orchestration, reusable execution patterns, and lifecycle governance if they want autonomy without chaos.The discussion also explores what goes wrong with single-bot deployments, from inconsistent answers to brittle handoffs and weak traceability, and what operational controls leaders should insist on before agents execute real tasks. Raj outlines Kore.ai’s approach to combining deterministic policy enforcement with agentic reasoning, plus the metrics that matter most in production, including observability, compliance, failure recovery, and measurable business outcomes like resolution rates and customer effort reduction.

Cisco's VP of Webex CX discusses orchestrating AI-native contact centers, why “deflection” is the wrong metric, and what enterprise-grade really means in the age of agentic AI -In this CX Today interview, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP and GM of Webex CX at Cisco, ahead of Cisco Live. With a wave of major product announcements on the horizon, Vinod makes a compelling case that the contact center industry has reached a genuine inflection point; not just another AI upgrade cycle, but a ground-up reimagining of how humans, AI agents, and customers interact. If you're navigating AI adoption in CX, this one is worth your full attention. -The ‘AI experiment’ phase is over. Muthukrishnan argues that organizations have had enough time to tinker – and now the real work begins: making AI agents enterprise-grade, secure, and observable at scale. Here's what he unpacks: Why ‘deflection’ is the wrong word, and the wrong goal: Vinod challenges the industry's obsession with point-in-time metrics, making the case that CX is a journey, not a transaction. Real success means CSAT that's neutral or better, resolution in the shortest time, and a customer who doesn't immediately ask for a human. The trust gap in agentic AI: It's never been easier to build an AI agent... and never harder to make it safe. Vinod walks through Cisco's AI Agent 360: a framework combining custom guardrailing, red-teaming, runtime monitoring, and Splunk-powered observability to close that gap. One experience, not one agent: Cisco's new agentic context engine aims to deliver continuous, memory-rich customer conversations across every touchpoint – so it always feels like picking up where you left off. Workforce management, rebuilt: Cisco's new WEM suite is designed from the ground up for a workforce of both human and AI agents, because the 10-year-old model simply wasn't built for this.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

Only 29 percent of consumers globally trust organizations to use AI responsibly. So, what does that mean for CX leaders trying to scale AI without damaging customer relationships?In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Dr. Ben Granger, Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics, about why trust has become one of the biggest barriers to enterprise AI adoption.Granger explains why successful AI transformation depends on more than deploying new tools. It requires leaders to build trust inside the organization first, listen to customers across every channel and make AI systems transparent, explainable, and useful for employees and customers alike.The discussion explores why consumer sentiment around AI is slipping, how businesses can balance active and passive feedback and why the companies that succeed with AI will be those that treat it as a strategic transformation rather than another technology rollout.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

AI video adoption is accelerating, but many CX teams are struggling to see measurable results. In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche sits down with Brendan Cournoyer, VP of Marketing at SundaySky, to unpack why enterprise AI video initiatives often fall flat when personalization is missing. They explore why speed and scale alone do not drive engagement, how relevance changes effectiveness across the customer journey, and what CX leaders should prioritize to move from experimentation to impact. From onboarding and education to renewals and retention, the discussion highlights how personalized AI video can reduce friction, improve time to value, and create experiences that feel human at scale.

Are legacy CRM platforms ready for the agentic AI era, or are enterprises trying to force new intelligence into systems built for a different time?In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Jason Eubanks, Co-Founder and CEO of Aurasell, about why traditional CRM architectures may struggle to support autonomous agents, real-time decision-making, and truly connected customer operations.Eubanks explains why many legacy CRM systems were designed as systems of record, not systems of action. The discussion explores the risks of adding AI wrappers to older cloud architectures, the importance of unified data models, and why customer experience, sales, marketing, and customer success teams need a more connected approach.The conversation also covers the rise of agentic go-to-market operating systems, how structured and unstructured data need to work together, and the questions enterprise leaders should ask vendors before making AI and CRM strategy decisions.

The Principal Analyst at ZK Research breaks down whether Zoom's 'system of action' pivot is the real deal or just clever repositioning In this CX Today discussion, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research. Zeus recently published a deep-dive on Zoom's strategic transformation, and the findings are more surprising than most in the industry expect. If you work in CX, contact center, or IT, and you still think of Zoom as a meetings tool, this conversation will change that. Zoom has quietly built something most of the industry hasn't clocked yet. Zeus Kerravala joins CX Today to unpack what he calls the shift from “collaboration to completion” – and why it could fundamentally change how CX leaders think about their tech stack. Further along than you think: Zeus argues Zoom is closer to its system-of-action vision than most realize, with Zoomtopia later this year likely to be a major milestone – though true end-to-end completion is still a couple of years out. 🔴 CX is where it gets real: From Chelsea FC to Caliber Collision, real customers are already using Zoom to eliminate cold calls, automate case logging, and unify the full customer journey – contact center included. 🔴 Conversation over CRM: Zoom is betting that conversational data is more valuable than what lives in a CRM, and Zeus thinks they might even build their own CRM within the next two to three years. 🔴 The biggest challenge isn't product: Zeus is clear, Zoom's hardest problem right now is getting people to understand what they've actually built. Proof points and customer outcomes will be the unlock. Visit cxtoday.com for more coverage on Zoom and the contact center market Read Zeus Kerravala's full blog at SiliconAngle.com Follow ZK Research for ongoing analysis as Zoomtopia approachesFor more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

AI is everywhere in customer experience, but CX leaders are under pressure to prove it is moving the needle. In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Brad Birnbaum, CEO and Co-Founder of Kustomer, about the shift from measuring AI by deflection rates and activity to measuring it by outcomes that matter to the business.Birnbaum explains why the right metrics depend on the company, from revenue uplift in retail to upsell and expansion in B2B SaaS, and why traditional CX measures like CSAT and handle time still matter but cannot be the full story. The conversation also digs into AI governance, observability, and trust, including how teams can evaluate non-deterministic models and reduce risk as automation expands.Finally, Birnbaum shares practical guidance for rolling out CX AI without chaos, including why consolidating fragmented tools and starting small beats trying to boil the ocean. He also outlines where human-in-the-loop remains essential and why the goal should be turning humans from creators into reviewers.

Salesforce’s launch of the Agentforce Contact Center has reignited a familiar debate in customer experience: should enterprises consolidate around one major platform, or keep the flexibility to pick best fit tools.In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson sits down with Baker Johnson, Chief Business Officer at UJET, to unpack what he calls the integration trap. They explore why many organizations feel “stuck” in CRM ecosystems, how switching costs and interdependent integrations slow down change, and why agents often become the human integration layer across four to 10 disconnected systems.Baker also challenges common assumptions about “context” in AI driven customer service, arguing that real value comes from real time journey context, not just historical CRM records. The conversation closes with practical advice for CX leaders building AI strategies: focus on the customer experience first, and treat AI as a forcing function to simplify operational complexity, not a cure all.

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.

SuccessKPI CEO Dave Rennyson on data governance, ground truth, and why excitement about AI is outrunning the ability to manage it In this CX Today discussion, host Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Dave Rennyson, CEO of SuccessKPI, to tackle one of the most pressing yet underexplored challenges in modern contact center operations: what it actually takes to build an AI-ready data foundation. As AI agents become a fixture of the contact center, Dave makes a compelling case that the real risk isn't the technology, it's the lack of governance, measurement, and rigor underneath it. If your organization is deploying AI without asking how you'll manage it, this is essential viewing. As contact centers race to deploy AI, most are skipping the hard work that makes it sustainable. Dave Rennyson, CEO of SuccessKPI, pulls no punches on what's going wrong and what leaders need to do differently. AI agents actually produce more data than human agents, including failure signals and turn-taking data that human conversations never generate. The opportunity is significant, but only if you have the architecture to capture and act on it. "Ground truth" is the step almost everyone skips. Dave breaks down what it means to establish a reliable baseline for AI performance, why it demands real scientific rigor, and what model drift looks like when you ignore it. Agentic AI is genuinely different from legacy IVR. The removal of linear flow constraints opens up a new design space, but only if organizations build the right orchestration and monitoring layers on top. Rather than declaring surveys dead, Dave argues that generative AI can now appraise every single conversation at scale, turning a historically biased metric into something far more powerful.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.

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.

Rob Scott, Publisher at CX Today, sits down with Jeremie Abou, Sales Lead at Diabolocom, on the floor of CCW Las Vegas to ask the question the industry keeps dodging: is AI actually improving customer experience, or just cutting costs?Jeremie doesn't pull punches. From automation hype to the uncomfortable gap between slick demos and live contact centre reality, this conversation gets into what vendors won't tell you — and what CX leaders need to hear.They cover the 89% of CX leaders who expect humans to stay central to support, the 17% who think their agents are actually ready for it, and why Diabolocom believes the future of CX might be more human, not less.If you're navigating AI investment decisions, workforce readiness, or just tired of the buzzwords — this one's for you.Topics covered:The AI hype problem and what it's costing CXWhy "presence" beats pure automation as a CX strategyAI theatre vs. operationally useful technologyAgent enablement and the workforce readiness gapThe "super operator" — Diabolocom's vision for the future contact centreCX Today is the leading news and analysis platform for the customer experience industry.

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

Rob Scott sits down with Pasquale DeMaio (VP, Amazon Connect), Deepak Nair (SVP, AI Transformation, Citizens Bank), and Justin Robbins (Founder and Principal Analyst, Metric Sherpa) fresh off the main stage at CCW 2026 in Las Vegas.Pasquale made a deliberate statement on stage: deflection is dead. In this debrief, the three unpack what killed it, what replaces it, and why half of all agentic AI pilots never reach production.They cover the governance conversations that have to happen before AI touches a customer, where agentic AI works in financial services and where it doesn't, and whether CX leaders are even asking the right questions when evaluating this technology.Plus: Justin delivers his verdict on three days at CCW — genuinely different, or the same story told better?The full CCW 2026 coverage is at cxtoday.com.

eannie Walters and Dr. Alyona Medelyan reveal what nearly 2,000 unfiltered airline reviews say about the chasm between brand promise and operational reality, and what CX leaders must do about it. In this CX Today discussion, host Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor, sits down with two leading voices in customer experience: Jeannie Walters, CX expert and author, and Dr. Alyona Medelyan, CEO of Thematic. Together, they've co-authored Experience Is The Promise, a data-driven report analyzing nearly 2,000 App Store reviews across six US airlines using Thematic's AI scoring agent. If you lead a CX, contact center, or service team, this one is unmissable. The findings cut through the brand-speak and get to what customers are actually experiencing at the moments that matter most. When things go wrong, a cancelled flight, an app that won't load, a support line nobody answers, that's the moment a brand either earns loyalty or loses it for good. This conversation, backed by real customer data, explores exactly why so many airlines are falling short at those critical touchpoints. Key discussion points: 🔴 Recovery beats reliability – Delta's Empathy score outpaced the group average not because it never fails, but because its people, processes, and tools are designed for disruption moments. Jeannie unpacks what that strategic commitment actually looks like on the ground. 🔴 The compounding failure problem – Alyona's data shows 60% of negative reviews cited inability to reach support during disruptions. When the flight fails and the service fails, the brand takes a double hit, and customers don't forget it. 🔴 Your app is your frontline – App crashes drove 9.5% of Breeze's negative Ease score. Alyona draws a direct parallel to banking data from Asia, where app instability alone triggered switching intent in 5% of users.For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

How do CX leaders move beyond AI hype without creating new risk for customers, agents, and the business?In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Rebecca Wettemann, Principal at Valoir, about why the conversation around AI in customer experience is becoming more practical and more urgent. They explore the shift from fear of missing out to fear of messing up, why so many teams still struggle to move beyond pilots, and what separates low-risk experimentation from costly missteps.Rebecca explains why trusted data, clear workflows, and strong business cases matter more than ever. She also shares how leading organizations are rethinking workforce roles, agent support, and governance as AI takes on more customer-facing tasks.If you are trying to turn AI ambition into measurable outcomes this quarter, this discussion offers grounded advice on where to start and what to avoid.