What’s next for customer experience? We asked 12 of the industry’s leading analysts, vendors, and practitioners to share their biggest predictions for 2026.
The answers reveal three clear themes shaping the year ahead: agentic AI maturing from pilot projects into production-ready systems, data infrastructure emerging as the real bottleneck for AI success, and personalization finally reaching the scale organizations have chased for years.
Matthias Goehler from Zendesk sees AI moving from automation to anticipation, while Zeus Kerravala at ZK Research predicts customers will start preferring virtual agents over humans for simple tasks. Kishan Chetan from Salesforce expects AI agents to go mainstream across customer experience operations.
On the data side, Liz Miller from Constellation Research warns that 2026 will be the year organizations confront the “data drought” AI has created. Tim Banting at TechTelligence predicts AI governance will become a compliance layer, not a side issue. Simon Harrison from Actionary sees companies scrambling to find a master orchestrator for conflicting AI agents.
Personalization gets its moment too. Martin Schneider at Constellation Research believes agentic AI will finally unlock mass personalization at scale, while Katrina Gosek from Oracle predicts humans will rise “above the loop” to focus on judgment rather than computational work. Iqbal Javaid from Evolved CX sees a human comeback, with consumers craving in-person experiences after years of digital fatigue.
Samantha Richardson from Twilio, Maxie Schmidt from Forrester, and Don Scheibenreif from Gartner round out the predictions with insights on storytelling, decision-making, and machine customers.
Watch the full video above to hear all 12 predictions.
