AI agents have become a topical focus during CX discussions. Now, with their popularity soaring across industries, one might wonder what’s next for agentic AI.
These agents are being used in different, new, and exciting ways by different companies to advance their customer experience.
These providers put forward the following participants for this month’s roundtable:
- Jonathan Barouch, VP & GM of Zendesk for Contact Center
- Kevin McNulty, Senior Director of Product Marketing at Talkdesk
- Adam Spearing, VP of AI GTM EMEA at ServiceNow
- Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP and GM at Webex Customer Experience
- Mike Szilagyi, GM of Product Management at Genesys
Below, these industry experts discuss the latest industry trends, predictions, and more.
AI Agents for Customer Support: The Trends
AI Agents in Action
Barouch: We are moving from the “smart IVR” era to AI Agents that understand intent, execute procedures within a controlled framework, and can escalate you to a human when needed.
This is a world of human and bot collaboration that heralds the end of the touchtone IVR. We see this as a fundamentally different phase for the contact center where AI Agents can consume internal knowledge or even AI generated knowledge based on the wealth of data within your customer service tickets.
This is the proactive, intelligent and integrated resolution based approach to AI.
Multi-Agent Orchestration
McNulty: AI agents are advancing from handling single tasks to working together through multi-agent orchestration.
They can now share context, divide responsibilities, and coordinate across systems to solve more complex customer issues end to end.
This level of interoperability is a major step forward—it allows AI agents to operate more like teams than tools.
Within the broader movement toward Customer Experience Automation, these agents are learning from outcomes and from each other, becoming faster, more accurate, and more adaptive with every interaction.
AI Is The New User Interface
Spearing: A defining trend is that AI is becoming the new UI for customer support.
Instead of navigating complex menus or portals, users can now engage naturally with AI agents through text, voice, or images to get instant, personalized help.
ServiceNow’s “AI Experience” embodies this shift, turning conversational, intuitive AI interfaces into the front door of enterprise service.
By understanding intent and context, AI becomes the seamless layer between people and workflows, making support faster, smarter, and more human.
Single To Multi-Agent System
Muthukrishnan: The most significant trend is the rapid evolution from simple, single-purpose AI agents to sophisticated multi-agent systems capable of orchestrating complex customer journeys.
Previously, AI agents focused on handling straightforward tasks, but now we’re seeing the commercial adoption of AI agents that not only fulfill actions but also make real-time decisions—such as choosing the best next step for a customer based on context, business rules, or predictive analytics.
These agents can dynamically coordinate across multiple backend systems, access context, and seamlessly transfer between specialized sub-agents, all within a single customer conversation.
This enables a unified, “one conversation” experience where boundaries between sales, support, and service are blurred.
As these multi-agent orchestration and decision-making capabilities mature, we’re moving from experimentation to real-world deployments, unlocking more intuitive and human-like interactions, and setting the stage for the next generation of customer experience.
Fully AI-Driven Customer Experiences
Szilagyi: AI in the customer experience will soon be fully agentic as AI agents gain the awareness to understand context and act on it.
They’re learning to reason through complex interactions, coordinate across channels and carry forward the customer’s intent from one moment to the next.
This evolution marks the rise of skill-based, semi-autonomous systems that can deliver personalized, empathetic experiences with speed and consistency.
It will transform how service teams operate and how customers feel seen.
AI Agents for Customer Support: The Predictions
A New Contact Center Era
Barouch: AI Agents will fundamentally change how Contact Centers are operated.
Everything from reporting and analytics (what does AHT or Agent Occupancy even mean in a world of AI-based service?) all the way through to staffing rules will be thrown out the window.
The role of the human contact center agent will become more complex, picking up higher order work and where individual contributors morph into AI supervisors and coaches.
This change won’t happen over night but we expect contact leaders will adapt their hiring and team structuring strategies in 2026.
Proactive Customer Support
McNulty: AI agents are about to completely change what customer support looks like.
We’ll move from reacting to issues to a world where agents anticipate needs, team up in real time, and solve problems before customers even reach out.
These agents will reason, collaborate, and adapt—pulling in the right data and actions from across systems to deliver real outcomes, not just answers.
As Customer Experience Automation takes hold, support will feel less like a process and more like a living network that gets smarter, faster, and more intuitive with every interaction
Multi-Functional AI Assistance
Spearing: By the end of this decade, AI agents will evolve from digital helpers into autonomous colleagues, operating across every function, anticipating needs, and resolving issues before customers even ask.
ServiceNow sees a future where AI is the control tower for enterprise service, orchestrating people, data, and workflows seamlessly.
These agents won’t just respond; they’ll run support operations, guided by natural language and voice, integrating every system of record.
As enterprise AI matures, customer service will shift from reactive resolution to proactive value creation, where AI delivers outcomes instantly, and humans focus on empathy, innovation, and growth.
Personable Customer Experiences
Muthukrishnan: In 2026, AI agents will fundamentally transform customer support by enabling brands to deliver truly human-like seamless, personalized experiences.
I predict the distinction between support, sales, and service interactions will increasingly disappear from the customer’s perspective.
With AI acting as the orchestrator, customers will engage in a single, fluid conversation with the brand, where their needs are anticipated, context is preserved, and resolution is immediate.
Human agents will focus exclusively on complex or emotionally nuanced cases, empowered by AI-driven insights and automation.
This shift will turn contact centers into “experience centers”, making customer support a strategic driver of loyalty and growth.
Predictive, Agentic Support
Szilagyi: We’re entering a phase where customer support will move from response to anticipation.
Semi-autonomous and autonomous AI agents will be able to recognize friction before it escalates and take action to resolve it.
They will schedule follow-ups, adjust processes and offer proactive solutions.
This agentic evolution will enable organizations to be always on, always aware and always improving.
Humans can then focus on the interactions where empathy and creativity drive the most value.
AI Agents for Customer Support: The Providers
Zendesk
Barouch: Zendesk acts as a trusted partner; not just a vendor.
With security and safety at the core of our proposition we focus on customer resolution as the metric and even charge customers based on resolutions.
All of our AI Agent use cases are practical and in the market today; they don’t require complex bolt-ons or heavy integrations.
Customers get fast time to value from a company with strong market adoption (with nearly 20,000 customers already using Zendesk AI).
Talkdesk
McNulty: Talkdesk is built for this moment.
Our Customer Experience Automation platform—Talkdesk CXA—is designed to power the next generation of AI agents for customer support.
At its core is the Talkdesk Data Cloud, which unifies structured and unstructured data—including the incredibly rich conversational data most companies struggle to use.
As organizations look to build data lakes that AI agents can access and learn from, we make that easy, governed, and real-time.
CXA then brings that intelligence to life through multi-agent orchestration, allowing AI agents to collaborate across channels and systems to deliver fast, contextual resolutions.
Combined with our history in CCaaS and deep industry expertise, Talkdesk helps companies move beyond simple chatbots to fully operational ecosystems where data, AI, and human insight work together to create smarter, more proactive customer experiences.
ServiceNow
Spearing: ServiceNow is uniquely positioned to deliver AI agents for customer support because our platform unifies data, workflows and automation into one trusted environment.
Our latest “Zurich” release emphasises agentic AI built into the platform, giving customers scalable, governed, enterprise-grade agents from day one.
We combine pre-built AI agents for common use cases with a low-code studio to customize, and built-in governance (AI Control Tower) so you can deploy quickly with confidence
Cisco
Muthukrishnan: Cisco stands out as an ideal partner for AI-driven customer support due to our commitment to open, interoperable platforms and responsible AI innovation.
We design our solutions to adapt to any customer’s needs, whether on-premises, hybrid, or cloud.
This ensures security, data sovereignty, and compliance are never compromised.
Webex Contact Center leverages advanced AI to deliver measurable results, such as significant reductions in call abandonment rates and faster resolutions.
What differentiates Cisco is our holistic approach: we blend cutting-edge AI, deep integration capabilities, and a foundation of security and trust, enabling organizations to modernize customer experience at scale while maintaining flexibility and control.
We also build on Cisco’s advanced AI capabilities across our entire collaboration portfolio, allowing us to innovate rapidly and tailor solutions specifically for evolving CX needs.
Genesys
Szilagyi: Delivering agentic AI responsibly requires a platform that unites intelligence, orchestration and governance.
The Genesys Cloud platform will empower AI agents to operate with autonomy and accountability guided by built-in guardrails and full visibility into how decisions are made.
It’s how we help businesses move confidently into the agentic era while keeping human connection and trust at the center of every experience
