How practitioners are spending their CX budgets in 2026

Experiments are costly, billing structures are designed to add up fast, and business goals have a habit of being vague (revenue growth, anybody?). These are just some of the factors making it difficult to know where, how, and when to invest in CX. 

When CX Network conducted its annual research into the state of CX in 2026, we asked practitioners in our network to tell us how much they have to spend on CX management solutions, which areas they plan to allocate those funds to, how spending on key areas could increase or decrease, and how their budget has changed year on year. 

Based on the results of that research – which is published in full in CX Horizons: The state of CX in 2026 – this article rounds up our findings to give you an overview of where your peers are (and are not) investing in CX this year, and why a long-term investment outlook must consider skills, as well as tools. 

How much are CX practitioners spending in 2026? 

We know CX practitioners are often expected to make a little money go a long way – and this did not change in 2026, but there are signs practitioners have more to spend than in previous years. 

As demonstrated by the graphic below, the largest share of respondents reported having less than US$100,000 to spend on CX management solutions this year, but the size of this cohort has declined since 2024.

Since 2022, there has been a clear migration to the mid-size budget brackets ($250,000 to $1 million), while the number of practitioners reporting larger budgets ($1 million and more) has also steadily increased year-on-year. 

Whether this means a notable volume of CX budgets are increasing remains to be seen, but a similar pattern was evident when we asked practitioners how their budgets have changed year-on-year. Among respondents, 39 percent said they expected their 2026 budget to be higher than the previous year, while 13 percent said they expected it to be lower, and 32 percent expected it to be the same.

Regarding the swing from small to mid-sized budgets and the increase in larger CX budgets, these results could indicate several shifts in the market; from more expensive tools to a stronger investment appetite and bigger ambitions, or simply a greater recognition that investing in CX can benefit the whole business. 

Top areas for CX investment in 2026

In line with the top CX trends, the top areas for investment this year emerged as agentic AI and AI agents (29 percent, see Figure 10), followed by automation of CX and service functions (22 percent), and business continuity (18 percent), which re-entered the top 10 in 2025 for the first time since the Covid-19 pandemic.

Contact center solutions and voice of customer (VoC) tools did not make the top 10 most selected responses this year, despite ranking in eighth and tenth place respectively in 2025. 

When compared to how practitioners answered this question in 2025, there are three new entries in the top 10: agentic AI/ AI agents are now the top spending priority, while the cloud migration that enables AI applications has entered the top 10 and the accessibility and inclusivity of contact channels also made the list. 

Year-on-year, AI/ML for business operations has dropped from second most selected investment priority to eighth, and conversational AI chatbots and virtual assistants dropped from fourth to seventh. 

Spending on AI and digital CX set to rise

In addition to asking about their top three areas for investment, we also asked practitioners how their spending across 13 critical CX categories is likely to change in 2026. 

Here, it became clear that spending on AI is set to rise across the board, while areas such as CXM platforms, complaint resolution, and contact center solutions will see spending stagnate year-on-year. Here are some key takeaways: 

• 46 percent of respondents said they expect their spending on generative AI to increase this year (compared with eight percent who expect it to decrease).
• 40 percent said they expect spending agentic AI and AI agents to increase (11 percent expect a decrease).
• 32 percent said they expect spending on AI regulatory compliance to increase (nine percent expect a decrease).
• 39 percent expect to spend more on other AI projects for CX and service (11 percent expect a decrease). 

Another area on track to see a spending boost is digital CX. Despite no longer making the list of top 10 tends, as many as 41 percent of practitioners said they expect spending on digital CX to increase in 2026. 

Areas where investments are unlikely to increase include: 

• Team recruitment/ retention, with 40 percent of practitioners saying they expect spending to remain the same as last year.
• Complaint resolution, which saw 39 percent commit to invest the same as last year.
• CXM platforms, in which 38 percent of practitioners plan to invest the same as last year. 
• As many as 33 percent of respondents said they expect their spending on contact center solutions to be the same this year as last. 

Demonstrating ROI is a barrier to investment 

Practitioners reported many barriers to investment, among them finding budget, integration with existing tools, complicated internal sign-off process and economic conditions in local/regional market. 

Demonstrating ROI was also a top five response and, elsewhere in the survey, 52 percent of practitioners told us the pressure to prove ROI is increasing, while 36 percent reported that it has stayed the same, and only three percent said it has decreased.  

On how to overcome the ROI challenge Montserrat Padierna, customer knowledge and experience lead for Walmart Canada, says: "ROI becomes clearer when intelligence does not stop at analysis, it closes the loop." 

According to Padierna, closing the loop requires two disciplines: 

1. Insights must translate into action: "When friction points are tied to measurable outcomes, like, churn reduction, cost-to-serve improvement, recovery effectiveness or revenue protection the financial impact becomes visible," Padierna says. "Experience degradation can be framed as economic risk, and experience improvement as margin protection," she adds. 
2. The business must continuously tune and govern the system: AI outputs are only as strong as the context behind them. "This is where experienced practitioners play a critical role," Padierna says. "Leaders with tenure and cross-functional understanding ensure prompts are refined, outputs are interpreted correctly and guardrails remain intact."

Padierna adds: "AI absolutely strengthens measurement and attribution. But technology alone does not solve ROI. Integration, governance and human judgment convert intelligence into commercial value. ROI is ultimately about demonstrating that the organization can learn, adapt and improve continuously, not just analyze more efficiently."

Long-term investment must cover tech and skills

Spending to meet the needs of today is one thing, investing in preparation for what could come next is quite another.  

On how practitioners should allocate their budget, Babul Balakrishnan, senior vice president of customer experience for Thunes, says investments in automation should be prioritized, not because it's a top trend, but because "scale has finally caught up with us". 

"Automation is my top investment priority. Not because it's a popular topic, but because scale has finally caught up with us," he says.

"Manual workarounds, top agents, and 'we'll fix it later' processes or methodologies no longer survive volume, complexity, or customer expectations. Automation isn't and shouldn't be about replacing humans; it's about removing friction so humans can show up where judgment and empathy actually matter."

Then there's data, analytics, and decision intelligence. He says: "The shift here is subtle but important: we don't need more dashboards, we need better decisions in the moment, guidance that helps agents, systems, and leaders know what to do next, not just what went wrong last week." Data governance and structure must also feature in the plan. "Without clean, trusted, well-connected data, every AI or automation ambition eventually stalls," he says.  

However, Balakrishnan adds that most investment plans are missing on critical consideration: AI and automation will fail without equal investment in skills, adoption, and operating model redesign. "This is the silent gap in many CX budgets. Tools move faster than organizations. Change management is critical," he explains. 

To find out more about how practitioners are investing in CX – including their top barriers to investment – download CX Horizons: The state of CX in 2026

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