9 ways CX will change in 2027

The first in our three-part outlook series, practitioners for Oura, Uber, RYA and Visa share their outlooks for CX

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Melanie Mingas
10/06/2026

Close-up of a hand writing in a notebook with checkboxes, highlighting productivity and organization.

It's safe to say artificial intelligence (AI) dominated CX in 2026. Organizations advanced their service suites with conversational AI and voice capabilities and business functions were augmented with agentic systems. On the consumer side, AI assistants started to proliferate the mainstream, thanks to a steady stream of developments from Google, Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta.

However, 2027 will not automatically follow the same track. Human consumers want technology to do more for them, but they are increasingly wary of how their data is used, and many are seeking out human connection again. Machine customers are demanding clearer – and better – processes and systems and judging all brands on their public records for CX excellence.

As 2027 arrives, CX Network speaks to eight practitioners who work for and with some of the world's leading brands to find out what practitioners must do to leverage these developments to their advantage.

This article explains:

1. Insights will go granular, but also scale across entire customer bases
2. If unified CX is the goal, go back to basics with 360° customer profiles
3. A CRM revolution is also needed as CX moves closer to proactive relationships
4. The AI backlash is here: Human customers will seek out and prioritize human connection
5. CX should use tech to connect business outcomes and deliver real-world CX
6. When AI is necessary, customers need visible control
7. Don't panic: The AI pendulum swing is part of achieving maturity
8. Machine customers will change the journey – but humans must not be forgotten
9. Your tech stack needs "unglamorous infrastructure work" to succeed in an agentic economy
TL;DR: What the future holds for CX

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1. Insights will go granular, but also scale across entire customer bases

Earlier in 2026, Oura unveiled its Total Customer Experience Score (TCX); granular observability designed for the AI era.

TCX is a framework built using large language models (LLMs), which utilizes AI analytics to conduct a deep evaluation and analysis of almost every member interaction across every channel. It goes deeper and broader than existing analysis and unlike synthetic data, which is often touted as the future of customer listening, it's rooted in behavior recorded from real customers.

John Moses, VP of member experience for Oura, says: "In 2027, AI observability is going to become as important as the automation itself. We need to be able to see if interactions are actually good. CX measurement is going to move from sampling to full population analysis, and that's what we're proposing with TCX."

Ekaterina Mironova, CX program manager for Uber, also sees a change on the horizon for insights, with the function becoming "much more continuous and multimodal".

She explains: "Surveys will increasingly sit alongside support conversations, behavioral and product data, search behavior and other unstructured signals. The harder problem will become less about collecting more information and more about determining which signals actually deserve attention."

This shift will push CX professionals toward more strategic work, she says. For example, framing the right questions, challenging weak evidence, understanding context and influencing decisions across the organization.

2. If unified CX is the goal, go back to basics with 360° customer profiles

Many are chasing unified CX as a way to structure organizational effort around customer outcomes and break down the silos that have long produced disjointed journeys, even where teams appear to work together.

Gerben Busch, fractional marketing director and digital CMO for Busch Briar & Backwood, says that for the organizations wanting to truly achieve unified CX in 2027, the first step should be to go back to basics.

"AI won't save your CX," says Busch. "First things first. And for that, you essentially don't need AI. Build a 360-degree customer data platform (CDP) to steer the journey from A to Z. That's the foundation for a dashboard framework that gives you deep insight at every stage of the customer journey, so you know exactly which levers to pull, and prove what it delivers. And, align your operating model with the strategy you've chosen."

3. A CRM revolution is also needed as CX moves closer to proactive relationships

According to Moses, 2027 will also see the start of a new chapter for the customer relationship management platform (CRM). "I've been in CRM for a long time and it's old and stale. I see big things changing," he tells CX Network.

Moses continues: "One change we're looking at is how to give a membership rep the interface they need to do their job instead of the CRM system that Salesforce or Zendesk gave me, and how do we configure it for different roles?"

He says better customer memory and deeper context around previous actions and customer history are just some of what is required. However, this change is only one step toward a future that Moses believes will be defined by proactive service and care.

In 2026, CX Network asked a cohort of leading practitioners how they believe CX will develop to 2030 – and a significant number agreed that the future lies in anticipatory CX, where customer contact becomes the exception.

According to Moses, that could become reality a little sooner than 2030.

"We're going to move toward proactive care. We have to do this at Oura, but [in the context of the wider CX space] the data, the information and the AI allows us to say, 'look, we don't need to wait for them to contact us. We can do this now'," he explains.

4. The AI backlash is here: Human customers will seek out and prioritize human connection

As the founding partner of creative agency Episode Four and its consumer insights spin off RYA, Mark Himmelsbach is at the forefront of customer understanding.
Reflecting on what he has learned over a decade of building a customer insights engine comprising more than six billion data points, Himmelsbach says that in 2027, consumers will demand experiences that aren't tech-first or data-driven.

"People are really starting to doubt the ubiquity and all-encompassing nature of AI and data," he tells CX Network. "We're already starting to see the skepticism and people will first off want to know where and for what their data is being used, in terms of customer experiences, we are going to see a lot of people wanting to go back to real world stuff or get away from screens. Next year will be about moving past what their data can enable."

This shift is not entirely surprising. In early 2026, CX Network's research into the state of CX saw consumer privacy enter the top 10 CX trends for the first time, while the customers' awareness of how AI works and uses their data emerged as the leading customer behavior influencing the work of practitioners.

Far from undermining what CX and service have tried to achieve in recent years, Himmelsbach says this pendulum swing will create a new opportunity for brands to find "a really interesting place to play".

5. CX should use tech to connect business outcomes and deliver real-world CX

On that note, Jeannie Walters, CEO of Experience Investigators and author of Experience is Everything, says that while 2026 "seemed like the year to speed up with AI", 2027 will see organizations slow down and take stock.

"Investments in technology and tools must connect to business outcomes, support the people using them, and help customers in the real world," Walters says. "With AI agents and other developments, winning strategies must have a strong foundation of goals, scope, and perhaps most importantly, human oversight and judgment."

Walters notes that AI now summarizes feedback, builds journey maps, and even generates "synthetic" customer personas you can interview.

"These tools save time, and they belong in every CX toolkit. But leaders face a growing temptation to swap the messy, emotional reality of customers for a tidy dataset," she says. "The organizations that navigate this well will use AI to aggregate, accelerate, AND validate everything against real customer voices. They will listen to call recordings, read reviews, observe customers in their actual journeys, and talk with the frontline employees who hear the unfiltered truth every day."

Similarly, Gregorio Uglioni, partner at Forward, says giving team members more tech is counterproductive if they aren't also empowered to deliver resolutions. "That gap is what I expect to define customer experience in 2027. AI will stop being an advantage and start being a mirror," Uglioni explains.

"For a decade the promise was that better technology would win the customer. But AI is spreading across the whole journey, from marketing to sales to service, reaching everyone at once. When every competitor can predict and personalize equally well, that is no longer an advantage. It is the baseline," Uglioni adds.
"What separates companies is not the model they buy, but whether their operating model turns what the AI sees into something that changes for the customer: whether the signal reaches someone who can act, and whether that person is allowed to."

6. When AI is necessary, customers need visible control

When CX does take the high-tech road, it should do so with consent, visibility and accountability built into the experience.

According to Michael Nevski, former director of global insights for Visa's Business and Economic Insights team, trust infrastructure – not capability – will become the "competitive battleground" next year.

After a year of growing consumer AI adoption and negative press coverage, Nevski says the organizations that do well in 2027 will be the ones that "make control visible" with reviewable agent actions, clear spending limits, an obvious stop function, reversible transactions and human quality assurance.

"Consumers want technology to do more for them, but they do not want to become powerless observers," he explains.

This trend touches everything, from corporate AI agent use cases to agentic commerce. Customers want accountability before adoption accelerates further.

"Right now, consumers have no stable mental model of who is responsible when an agent errs. They distribute blame across the agent provider, the merchant, the underlying AI company, the payment network, sometimes themselves. That ambiguity is tolerable in a pilot and fatal at scale. Someone has to own dispute resolution, reimbursement and error correction. This is not only a regulatory question, it is a customer experience question and a legitimacy question," he continues.

This isn't the kind of adoption split CX is accustomed to: it isn't a case of Gen Z leads the way and Boomers follow. Nevski says: "The deciding factor looks less like age and more like whether the experience offers understandable value and credible protection. Plan for that, and you will be ready earlier than your competitors."

7. Don't panic: The AI pendulum swing is part of achieving maturity

While some may worry their AI investments could now damage customer relationships, Mironova says it's all part of the shift from AI adoption to AI maturity, as organizations will start to question if AI is improving customer outcomes and business performance, or "simply moving cost and friction somewhere else".

She warns: "A faster automated interaction isn't necessarily a better one if the customer has to work harder to resolve anything complex."

And as more interactions become AI-mediated, Mironova agrees that trust will become a more explicit part of CX, shifting the focus from 'was this efficient?' to 'did this feel understandable, appropriate and trustworthy?'

"Ultimately, AI capability itself will increasingly become table stakes. The advantage will come from the judgment layer around it: what you choose to listen to, the questions you ask, how well you interpret the evidence, and how quickly you turn understanding into action," she explains. "The future of CX isn't human versus AI. It's about who learns to combine the two most effectively."

8. Machine customers will change the journey – but humans must not be forgotten

Bill Staikos, founder and managing partner of Be Customer Led, says 2027 will be the year LLMs become the new front door to the brand as customer use conversational interfaces to find businesses.

"This means brands will increasingly be experienced through an intermediary they do not own, where the model decides what information matters, which companies make the shortlist, and potentially which action gets taken next," Staikos says.

After spending two decades optimizing digital journeys to bring customers into a proprietary ecosystem, Staikos says this shift means a return to the drawing board.

"By the end of 2027, being understood and represented accurately by LLMs may matter almost as much as being found on Google once did. So forget about VoC. We need to invest in VoAI," he says.

James McIntyre, creator of the ACTIVATE Framework™, agrees that the most important trend on the radar is the customer journey no longer being "exclusively human".

However, this doesn't mean CX must rush to serve an entirely algorithmic customer base. Instead, it needs to recognize and simultaneously address the needs of two audiences with competing needs.

McIntyre explains: "Machines need structured, retrievable and verifiable information: accurate pricing, live availability, readable eligibility rules and loyalty status an agent can act on. Humans need judgment, recourse and empathy in moments that carry emotional and commercial weight. The risk is optimizing for one at the expense of the other."

As a consequence, McIntyre says the journey map stops being a diagram of human steps. Instead, it becomes a system that includes algorithmic touchpoints, because you cannot govern what you have not mapped.

"In 2027 the discipline is deciding where a machine should act, where a human must, and what happens at the handover between them," he explains.

McIntyre says every CX leader should be able to answer two questions:

When an AI agent evaluates your brand on a customer's behalf, is what it finds accurate, accessible and trustworthy?
When that agent hands the person back to you, is the rest of the lifecycle mapped, or does your journey design stop at the transaction?

9. Your tech stack needs "unglamorous infrastructure work" to succeed in an agentic economy

A more effective CDP is only one part of the "unglamorous infrastructure work" that Nevski says will give organizations an edge as agentic commerce continues to gain momentum.

Without this work, "the data foundation becomes the constraint," Nevski says.

"Agentic commerce requires accurate, integrated customer, product, transaction, inventory and service data in real time," he explains. "A great many organizations are still running fragmented legacy systems that cannot support a reliable [human] customer 360, let alone autonomous decision-making. The unglamorous infrastructure work will separate the companies that participate from the ones that talk about participating."

TL;DR: What the future holds for CX

There's a clear call for low-tech, human-centred CX in 2027.

The first rule is that AI alone does not equate to better CX or greater customer retention.

Customers are outcome- not tech-driven, and while organizations want to realize the efficiencies and benefits AI promises, they will not achieve these without also balancing the customers' demand for authenticity, white-glove service at scale and ultimately experiences that deliver.

That's not to say technology will stop changing CX. As Mironova highlighted, it's all part of achieving AI maturity and as Himmelsbach said, it also brings a huge opportunity to connect with human customers in new ways.

But AI isn't the silver bullet for all these developments: CRM and CDP capabilities must also be addressed and, particularly if unified CX is the goal, these foundations are imperative.

When we look to machine customers, things get even more interesting. Agentic commerce is changing CX in its own ways, as McIntyre explained. However, more tech will not automatically lead to more trust. Like Nevski said, trust infrastructure – not capability – will become the "competitive battleground" next year.

Luckily, customer insight capabilities are developing rapidly, which means keeping ahead on these trends does not have to be a guessing game.

The next year will see CX develop along two tracks, one that is human-led and focused and one that is AI-led and focused. As these tracks becoming both more distinct and more deeply intertwined, practitioners must ensure they are meeting the needs of both.