Over the past three years, CX vendors have raced to release various GenAI-fueled innovations across their specific subsets of customer experience.
For instance, many CCaaS providers now offer auto-summarizations, recommended customer responses, and intent analysis.
In delivering these solutions, the AI playing field has largely leveled out.
Yet, by averting their attention to designing custom solutions, orchestrating cross-system workflows, and gathering industry-specific data sets, vendors can once again differentiate.
Again, GenAI is the catalyst. By enabling agentic AI – where bots automate tasks without a human in the loop – brands can help automate sector-specific processes.
For instance, consider a network provider. It could leverage agentic AI to detect an outage, create a segment of customers in the affected area, and send proactive alerts to them.
That’s just one example. At Dreamforce 2024, Salesforce released 100 pre-configured industry-specific autonomous bots within its new Agentforce platform.
In 2025, that network of autonomous bots – and those of its rivals – will expand significantly.
However, perhaps most excitingly, they won’t necessarily stick to one ecosystem. For instance, a Salesforce AI Agent may jump into an adjacent technology – like Workday – to automate more cross-function processes.
Additionally, bots may collaborate to simplify complex, multi-step workflows.
As a result, CX vendors will help facilitate a push towards a more autonomous enterprise.
There, humans are not only in the loop but at the helm, spotting opportunities for AI agents, testing, deploying, and optimizing them.
In this future, collaboration platforms – like Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Zoom – could act as an operational center point, enabling oversight and control.
While that may be too far-fetched for 2025, next year will likely be when this overall vision for AI Agents enabling new sector-specific efficiencies catches fire.
Well, in some industries at least. After all, while CX vendors often claim to deliver capabilities across industries, when it comes down to it, many will only cover healthcare, financial services, and retail.
As such, it came as little surprise that CX leaders from tech providers, resellers, and agents saw these three sectors as offering the greatest business opportunities over the next 12 months.
That’s according to hot-off-the-press CX Today research and evident in the following graphic from the study, entitled: The State of CX 2024: Insights from the Customer Experience Technology Sector.
Each of these sectors shows significant potential for agentic AI. For instance, bots could automate bill payments, invoice processing, and ledger updates in finance. Meanwhile, they may quickly spot and address errors and inconsistencies – as SAP noted in its recent autonomous AI update.
Elsewhere, the lack of current perceived opportunity in other industries, such as hospitality, travel, education, and other sectors, suggests room for differentiation.
However, whichever the targeted sector, larger CX vendors should consider providing businesses with use case libraries to build their confidence in AI-agent-led experiences.
From there, they can guide them on the best-placed, sector-specific AI models to power them and support them in orchestrating their own use cases.
Taking these use cases beyond the confines of single platforms will require co-innovation from the various vendors in the CX stack.
The aforementioned Salesforce-Workday partnership offers an exciting example of what this may look like. Moreover, the Genesys-ServiceNow collaboration is a fascinating case study.
Eager for more statistics from the CX Today report? Download it here.
