Genesys has today released its 2026 State of CX report, revealing that overall customer patience has collapsed amid rising AI-enabled service expectations.
Today, 92% of consumers expect every organization to deliver experiences as good as the best they have ever had, and 91% agree that a company is only as good as its customer service.
With CX becoming a make-or-break loyalty driver, it’s clear that automating the journey is not enough to keep customers interested.
Janelle Binder, Senior Vice President of Customer Advocacy and Engagement at Genesys, highlighted how rising expectations are forcing organizations to rethink their customer engagement strategies, with AI playing a central role in reshaping service delivery.
“Consumers no longer compare brands to direct competitors — they compare every interaction to the best experience they’ve ever had,” she said.
“As agentic AI reshapes engagement, organizations must focus on outcomes, not just automation. Success will depend on connecting AI, human expertise and customer context to deliver faster, more personalized service.”
Service Patience Time Is Running Out
The growing gap between customer expectations and the experiences that organizations deliver is becoming significant as the world’s largest AI providers reshape perceptions of what a good service should look life.
With AI being positioned as a technology capable of personalized, conversational, and intelligent experiences, organizations that do not meet this standard are immediately met with dissatisfied customers.
Recent market moves, including Meta’s push into AI-powered creative experiences, reflect a broader industry shift toward AI becoming a natural part of how people communicate and make decisions.
For CX organizations with fragmented systems, advancing AI capabilities becomes a problem, as more than half of consumers say they would rather do anything else than contact customer service, highlighting the frustration that still exists with fragmented support.
The business impact of this is becoming more significant as CX directly influences loyalty, retention, and spending decisions, with 85% of consumers having spent less with a brand or stopped doing business with altogether because of poor experiences.
Despite many assumptions, however, customers are increasingly open to AI in customer service when it improves outcomes, as 76% say they do not care whether an AI system or a human agent resolves their issue as long as it is solved quickly and completely, while 75% believe it can improve personalization.
And in addition to these, customers now expect continuity across every interaction, as 95% of expect information to be remembered across channels, yet 48% of organizations do not automatically pass information between virtual and human agents.
These numerous disconnects causes the most frustration for most customers and organizations, as maintaining service quality with aging infrastructure is the top operational challenge for CX leaders.
This priority challenge for CX organizations is now building the connected systems, data foundations, and operating models needed to deliver those high-end experiences.
Your AI Must Actually Serve the Journey
As a result, Genesys is urging CX leaders to move beyond isolated AI deployments and focus on end-to-end experience orchestration, connecting AI across the customer journey to work alongside human expertise, customer data, and existing systems.
Today, successful AI adoption increasingly depends on maintaining the balance between efficiency and empathy, as 94% of consumers value efficiency as much as empathy, with the inability to reach a human agent remaining a top frustration.
Speaking with CX Today on the current expectations within CX, Jeannie Walters, CX Expert and Author, discussed how keeping the human impact at the center of AI decisions is key for a good experience.
“We have to sometimes take a step back and internalize that these are people’s real lives we’re impacting,” she explained.
“These are real consequences.”
For CX leaders, these results reveal that AI should support customer outcomes rather than create additional barriers between customers and service teams.
The next phase of CX transformation will depend on building the foundations that make AI effective, as the focus for leaders is shifting from automation alone toward using AI to intentionally reduce effort, improve personalization, and deliver better outcomes across the journey.
