We all want to know what the future holds, but in a discipline as fast moving as CX, even a crystal ball would be little use. The last 12 months have seen unprecedented change thanks to a new generation of tools for enterprises and a revolutionary change in how consumers find and interact with organizations.
When CX Network conducted its annual research into the state of CX for 2026, we attempted to capture what these emerging developments meant for the role of the practitioner. We found that in some cases, the old rules no longer apply: customers don't place as much emphasis on speed and discoverability is now a battleground for bots.
In other cases, the rulebook has been rewritten: loyalty, which at a glance looks to be the first victim of The AI Era, is now built on clear and explicit value exchanges that are anchored in data security, transparency, relevance, governance, authenticity, a deep and demonstrable respect for customer privacy.
To analyze what these results mean for those who work at the coal face, CX Network put the results to a panel of practitioners, consultants and business leaders. To understand what's on the horizon, the panel was also asked what they believe will change for CX to 2030.
This article explores 10 key outlooks in detail and explains what they will mean for both customers and organizations over the next three years.
1. Truly predictive, anticipatory CX will be the standard
Mark Levy, author of The Psychology of CX 101, says that as CX shifts closer towards AI-powered services that identify customer needs in real time, it will be possible to resolve many issues before a customer even asks. He also says this will allow for stronger experience connections across channels, products, and partners.
According to Sue Duris, principal consultant at M4 Communications, this development will "push CX into the strategic mainstream by 2030". She explains: "We're moving from reactive customer service to anticipatory experience design."
2. Customer interaction will be the exception
Under this model, Nao Anthony, the senior manager of operational excellence for Australia's CommBank believes customer interactions with organizations will be minimized to "exceptions and customization". The rest will be fully digitalized, "with predictive technology removing the need for excessive selection".
However, the big shift he sees on the horizon is "exponential changes in how organizations operate within a customer ecosystem". He explains: "This will drive significant shifts in CX, especially in how customers interact with organizations."
Joshua Curtis, customer care center manager for Super Retail Group, has a similar outlook. He says CX will shift from managing contacts to preventing them altogether. AI will handle simplicity, while humans handle complexity and trust, and experience will be shaped "more by operational performance than channels".
3. The focus will be end-to-end orchestration
Echoing Anthony's outlook, Babul Balakrishnan, senior vice president of customer experience at Thunes, also believes the future is predictive and light-touch. "CX will be judged on effort removed, clarity provided, and trust maintained before things go wrong," he says.
As such, Balakrishnan believes CX will transition from managing individual interactions toward orchestrating end-to-end experiences that will increasingly run on intelligence, "powered by clean structured data and teams who know what to do with the insights".
"Customers won't just expect fast resolution; they'll expect problems not to happen in the first place, systems that recognize intent, context, and risk early, and quietly resolve issues before the customer feels the need to ask," he elaborates.
In this environment, where customer touch points are minimized and orchestrated, Balakrishnan says the idea of "good" service will be redefined and CX leaders will act as "experience architects and trust stewards". He adds: "As automation and AI scale, questions of fairness, explainability, accessibility, and data integrity will move from the sidelines to the center of CX strategy."
4. Brands will figure out how to utilize AR/VR in the journey
As brands acquire the capabilities to shift from broad segmentation to delivering real time, context aware experiences tailored to individual customers, Ekaterina Mamonova, global head of broker proposition for Liberty Specialty Markets, says CX will become "hyper-personalized at scale".
Bolstering personalization, augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) could finally have a place in the channel mix.
Long expected to power digital experiences, AR and VR have had a slow start, but Mamonova sees a future where seamless phygital journeys incorporate these technologies as well as digital twins and in store 3D customization, "creating a fluid, channel agnostic customer journey" online and off.
5. Commoditization will be widespread, business values will be the competitive differentiator
Anthony says the commoditization of "a significant number of existing products and services", such as financial services products, logistics, and basic healthcare is highly likely in the mid-term.
"This will come with AI-based simplification, challenging the service and product differentiation that was traditionally used to leverage brand loyalty, and creating less distinctive difference between competitors," he explains. Speed to market will be the basic requirements for business survival.
As a result, brands will differentiate not on price but on values, ideally their delivery of trust-driven and sustainable CX. Mamonova says: "Data privacy, ethical AI practices and sustainability commitments will become central drivers of customer trust, advocacy and long term loyalty," she says.
Curtis agrees, predicting a continuation of the customer demand for data privacy and security that the 2026 research uncovered.
As consumers become more adept with using AI assistants for product research, these new points of competitive differentiation will heighten in importance. AI assistants can be prompted to find sellers that align with specific – and verified – requirements, such as strong data protection policies, sustainability credentials, or ethical AI practices, making it easier for consumers to cut through marketing claims.
6. The human premium
Mamonova says human expertise will become a "curated, high value resource reserved for complex, emotionally charged or high stakes moments where empathy and judgement matter most".
Ebrahim Hyder, VP of customer care for Michael Kors, says CX will move towards "intelligent, emotionally aware ecosystems where AI anticipates needs, resolves routine issues autonomously, and elevates humans to moments that require empathy, emotional intelligence, and judgment."
He sees a future where agentic AI is capable of sensing emotion and knowing when to hand off to humans along with "AI‑first, human‑perfected" service models. All in all, CX "will be elevated from a support function to a strategic growth engine".
7. The roles of agents, managers and leaders will change
Behind the scenes, AI will evolve from being a helpful assistant to a trusted co-worker. This is already beginning to happen, with the 2026 CX Horizons research confirming that 32 percent of practitioners believe generative and agentic AI pave the way for digital employees to work alongside humans. As this unfolds, the professional roles of agents, managers and leaders will see drastic change.
Elaborating on his outlook for practitioners to become "experience architects and trust stewards", Balakrishnan says that as agentic systems handle routine decisions, workflow execution, and coordination across functions, humans will "focus on moments that require empathy, judgment, and accountability".
He adds: "The role of agents, managers, and CX leaders will be less about firefighting, and more about problem solving and root-cause analysis, as well as experienced stewardship."
Duris expects a convergence between EX and CX, with alignment across the board. "Today, maybe 20 percent of organizations do this well. By decade's end, I expect that figure to be 40-50 percent," she says.
8. AI use will mature
Conversational AI has come a long way in the last two years, but there's room for further innovation. Duris says that it may take a little longer than three years, but CX is "well on its way to natural, context-aware conversational AI that feels genuinely helpful rather than frustrating".
At present, AI governance is still catching up to deployment, but Duris believes that by 2030 AI use will be ubiquitous across most companies, "accompanied by stringent governance frameworks and hefty regulatory fines for violations". She adds: "Future-proofing isn't optional."
Anthony agrees, saying the transformation of CX will be determined by "organizational maturity in leveraging AI to simplify business processes, while significantly making customer engagement more intuitive".
He explains: "Leading CX practitioners will be defined by their technology skillset and intelligent AI use to meet customer demand, while staying one step ahead." Furthermore, he says market research and data will become far more precise and accessible due to AI.
9. Consumer AI use will change the enterprise
The biggest new trend to emerge in the 2026 research was the customer's use of AI assistants. This was the third most selected CX trend and the third most selected customer behavior – and it will continue to develop.
Today, the buzz is around agentic commerce, but as AI assistants are more embedded in daily life, they will act with increasing autonomy, paving the way for true machine customers.
"The machines are coming," says Duris. "We're already seeing it with platforms like Moltbook. Brands can't ignore this. Organizations must prepare and enable four interaction modes: human-human, human-machine, machine-human, and machine-machine and be ready to switch from one to another."
10. AI agents will drive more change than we realize
Much of the change practitioners anticipate will be enabled by the use of AI agents and agentic AI.
Greg Thomas, senior director of thought leadership for Genesys, says that with the advent of agentic AI, "a new era of orchestration is unfolding". He explains: "Emerging standards such as A2A (agent-to-agent) communication and Model Context Protocol (MCP) will further enable AI agents to coordinate across enterprise systems including CRM, ITSM, and ERP."
"This will allow AI agents to pursue business goals across multiple systems, further shifting CX from reactive service delivery to orchestrated experience management. Efficiency and customer affinity no longer need to be in tension. AI can deliver on efficiency metrics, while simultaneously increasing loyalty by delivering faster, more relevant interactions that require less effort from the customer."
The organizations that will lead in future will be the ones that "treat CX as an AI-powered coordination engine — designing experiences that are both frictionless and financially accountable", Gregory adds.
What does it all mean for CX?
These outlooks have a clear theme: as CX becomes anticipatory and proactive, customers will expect journeys where problems do not occur; customer interactions will be minimized to exceptions; governance, privacy and ethical AI will sit at the heart of CX strategy, rather than with legal or compliance; and leading practitioners will be defined by their technological skillset, intelligent AI use, and ability to still ensure human judgment is applied across the board.
If recent months have felt dizzying, hold on: whether driven by vector AI, agentic orchestration, AI coworkers, or machine customers, the pace of change will only accelerate, but as Duris says, "the brightest days are yet to come".
Explore the 2026 CX Horizons series
- CX Horizons: The full resuts and analysis of the state of CX in 2026
- How practitioners are spending their CX budgets in 2026
- 10 trends changing CX in 2026
- 5 things to know about the state of CX in 2026
- How to tackle 5 challenges facing CX in 2026
- How to connect with customers in the AI age