Recent years have seen CX become essential to business operations as organizations realize that a happy customer is the key to financial success, staff retention and a stronger market share.
Driven by the pull of new technology just as much as the push of changing customer demands, this shift has brought every job function and department into the CX game from IT, tech and product, to sales and marketing.
So now, the million-dollar-question is, what does this mean for CX in 2026?
In the first of our 2026 CX trends series, we look at which CX developments are most likely to shape the next year and what it means for CX leaders and their organizations.
AI will revolutionize how consumers buy
Having transformed service and support, artificial intelligence (AI) is also revolutionizing retail experiences.
The stage for this trend was set three years ago when ChatGPT launched and LLMs went mainstream. Since then, we’ve brought you the inside track on how powerful and customizable language models can enable customers to create their own digital assistants, AKA machine customers, to complete service-related life admin tasks.
Now we’re seeing this and several related trends converge to bring a series of new use cases for customers to use AI in their buying journeys.
The last year saw a number of big brands unveil new AI tools to support customers earlier in the sales cycle, including Ralph Lauren’s Ask Ralph shopping assistant and Heidi, the wanderlust bot introduced by Swiss Airlines. We then heard how generative AI technologies were driving a spike in web traffic to retail websites.
While major, these developments all met customer needs within a brand’s online ecosystem, however, the second half of 2025 saw a new development with the potential to be market changing; ChatGPT's Instant Checkout.
Keen to retain engagement on its own platform, ChatGPT now allows consumers to search for a product across the web, receive recommendations on the options that best meet their specified needs then – where compatibility allows – purchase it within ChatGPT. This is a stark change to using the proprietary AI assistants so many brands, from retailers to banks and airlines, have developed for their own websites.
Wherever they start their journey, consumers will see more customer-facing AI in 2026 personalizing their journeys and showing them products, experiences and itineraries that match their needs.
Human agents will still own service
While online consumers are likely to embrace and demand AI assistance during their buying journeys, in service, the human touch will remain the north star.
According to a report from Gartner, by 2028 not a single Fortune 500 company will have fully eliminated human agents from their service operations. Instead, the future of customer service is hybrid. Like many before them, Gartner expects AI will handle only routine tasks, while people focus on complex, sensitive or growth-oriented interactions.
While this may not seem earth shattering in and of itself, consider the major brands that have vocally committed to AI and automation in recent years then u-turned a short time later.
In 2024, we heard how Klarna was preparing for its IPO by shifting to a leaner operating model. At the time, the fintech made headlines around the world when it disclosed its AI chatbot could perform the work of 700 human employees; co-founder and CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski said he hadn’t hired a new human worker in a year. Less than a year after that statement, Klarna was re-hiring human workers and, via a post on X, Siemiatkowski vowed Klarna would become “the best at offering a human to speak to!!!”
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Cyber security will become more important
Quantas, Marks and Spencer, Harrods, The Coop, Renault, American First Finance and Jaguar Land Rover are just some of the organizations to be hit by massive cyber attacks in 2025, which compromised the security of customer data to varying degrees and in the case of Jaguar Land Rover shut down production.
In fact, according to IT Governance UK, there were 49 record cyber security incidents around the world in September 2025 alone.
Prompted by these events, in 2026 customers are expected to demand even more around trust and transparency in how their data are collected and used. At a time when customers are being asked to part with data for something as simple as a discount on milk, brands will have to make hard commitments to their customers to earn their trust and justify sweeping data collection.
Doing so will pay off: research from Qualtrics found 86 percent of customers are willing to share more personal data if organizations are more transparent and clearer about usage.
Customer budgets are still under pressure
The cost of food and utilities continues to squeeze consumer budgets, meaning that not only do customers have less to spend on discretionary items, but they’re often hunting for a bargain when it comes to the basics.
In the highly competitive grocery market, ecommerce giant Amazon is now leveraging its market dominance to cut the prices of everyday items for consumers in the US. It sells meat, fresh produce, snacks, dairy and more mostly for less than USD$5 per item under its new Amazon Grocery brand.
But discounts are not the same as sustainable loyalty built on a solid CX proposition.
This realization has seen a number of brands – in grocery and beyond – launch loyalty apps, with the focus on rewarding behavior and adding value, rather than reducing prices. When it comes to value, CX is an established driving force for value perception; many organizations are the preferred choice in their market because they offer an experience that trumps the lowest price alternative.
On many everyday goods price hikes are inevitable, but hiking prices without a visible justification or tangible improvements to the experience or product will test loyalty in a way that even Disney has struggled overcome.
The contact center of 2026
Although we have already established that human agents still have a role in customer service journeys, the future of the contact center is still being re-shaped by AI. As we recently heard from Ebrahim Hyder, vice president of customer care for Michael Kors, early and effective adoption of agent-facing AI has improved fraud detection, handle time and email response consistency for the global fashion brand.
It is this human-AI collaboration that will drive the role and efficacy of the contact center in 2026. In making this switch however, it is imperative that contact center leaders shift their mindset to ensure that they measure success based on outcomes rather than time spent on calls.
The global contact center market has achieved significant growth over recent years, increasing from values of $29.7 billion in 2020 to a projected $113.8 billion by 2027. As such, the future of contact centers looks promising, with technological advancements like AI and machine learning enhancing efficiency and personalized experiences, and more organizations offering clear career pathways for their agents.
As consumer expectations evolve, contact centers will be seen by more organizations as essential hubs for service delivery. This is not entirely driven by the quality of service they offer, but the growing recognition of the value they can bring to the wider organization through data and the preservation of brand standards and perceptions.
One of the key trends shaping the global contact center market is the customer demand for seamless, personalized interactions across a variety of channels, including voice, email, chat, social media and messaging platforms. CX Network will cover this in depth during All Access: Future of CX, 2-3 December, 2025.
Quick links
- From Taco Bell to DeepSeek: 4 ways AI is disrupting CX
- How EE prioritizes contact centers through education and feedback loops
- The ethical AI guide for customer experience