Cutting costs keeping customers: How CX can achieve the impossible

In a world of choice, CX has often found itself trapped in a binary scenario of mutually exclusive options: automate to improve efficiency and reduce costs, or rely on people to deliver the personalized experiences that build loyalty. 

But as Nathalie DeChellis, senior director of product marketing for Genesys explains, it's one of many false choices limiting CX. Using agentic orchestration, early movers are exploring how AI agents can reason, act and adapt across the enterprise. This isn't a point solution but a new operating model – and the change is transformational. 

During All Access: AI + Data in CX 2026, DeChellis will explain how agentic virtual agents can resolve issues faster, personalize experiences at scale and increase operational efficiency without sacrificing trust or CX quality. Crucially, she will also cover how organizations can build the necessary data foundations to scale AI beyond disconnected pilots and realize ROI.

Ahead of her day one session, DeChellis tells CX Network what organizations need to understand about agentic orchestration.

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CX Network: Your session at All Access: AI + Data in CX is called The loyalty–efficiency tradeoff that's breaking CX. Why has CX reached this breaking point?

Nathalie DeChellis: Almost every organization today is under pressure to automate and cut costs. But at the same time, loyalty, trust, and brand experience have never mattered more. And honestly, in a lot of companies, those priorities don't naturally line up.

A lot of vendors in our space are focused on channels, bots, and agents – basically just handling interactions as efficiently as possible. And sure, efficiency matters. But efficiency by itself doesn't build loyalty. Loyalty is what actually drives long-term revenue.

Historically, companies thought better experiences just meant adding more people. Now with AI, the pendulum has swung way in the other direction – automate everything, remove humans wherever possible.

But both extremes miss the point.

What happens is organizations get pushed into these false choices: high-touch or containment, personalization or automation, empathy or speed, loyalty or efficiency. And that's really what's breaking modern customer experience today.

CX Network: Your session will also cover how agentic orchestration can help eliminate this tradeoff. What do organizations need to understand about agentic orchestration?

Nathalie DeChellis: What organizations need to understand is that agentic orchestration isn't just another AI upgrade layered onto existing systems – it's a completely new CX operating model.

Most companies today still have fragmented experiences underneath the AI. The bot may sound smarter, but the journey is still disconnected. Customers move across channels, systems, and teams, and they expect all of it to feel seamless.

Agentic orchestration is the layer that coordinates AI agents, humans, workflows, and data together in real time to deliver outcomes, not just isolated interactions. Instead of hard-coded flows, businesses define the goal and guardrails, and the system dynamically determines the best path forward.

CX Network: You say this is a new CX operating model, rather than an "AI upgrade". What separates the organizations that are truly transforming from those that are simply layering AI onto existing processes?

Nathalie DeChellis: Again, we see a lot of companies layering point AI solutions onto fragmented systems. That might improve one interaction or reduce some costs, but it doesn't solve the bigger problem: the customer journey is still disconnected underneath. And ultimately, that becomes very difficult to scale.

The leaders are doing something different. They're aligning people, AI agents, workflows, data, and governance around outcomes, not just interactions. They're creating coordinated systems where AI and humans share context, memory, and responsibility across the full journey. 

The companies pulling ahead aren't asking, 'Where can we add AI?' They're asking, 'How do we redesign CX, so every interaction contributes to a seamless outcome?' And that's where the real gains come from – lower friction, stronger loyalty, and dramatically better operational efficiency at the same time. That's the difference between automation and orchestration.

Register to watch Nathalie's session at All Access: AI + Data in CX 2026

Quick links 

• Right person, right place, right time: The forces changing WFM
• Securing the contact center in the AI era: Prompt injection, consumer privacy, and data integrity
• Building brand trust in an agentic economy

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