As 2026 rolls around the corner, a new wave of customer experience predictions is coming in, with experts and analysts from across the CX industry keen to forecast their 2026 expectations.
One of the first out of the gate was Forrester. Indeed, the research firm outlinined its vision for 2026 long before most people had even dusted off their Christmas decorations.
In conversation with CX Today, Maxie Schmidt, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, provided some invaluable insights on how and why Forrester landed on its latest batch of predictions, as well as some of her own personal views on the current state of the CX space.
Below are Schmidt’s top six predictions for 2026:
Unpacking Forrester’s 2026 Customer Experience Predictions
1. The CX Team Crisis: Disbandment and Restructuring
CX teams are facing unprecedented organizational pressure, with consistent restructuring, disbandment, and acquisitions, this ‘survival’ move feels like the new norm in the industry.
And with CX leaders feeling pressure from AI hype as well as balancing costs to ensure ROI, this could likely lead to dissolution and restructuring across many major organizations, as Schmidt explains:
“We’re seeing big organisations who’ve had a CX team either rejigger it like they rename it to something else, or they dissolve them, or they take some people in the team and put them in other parts of the organisation.”
She refers to this AI response as the ‘Panini Effect’, with AI hype and cost pressure squeezing the CX industry, organizations are forced to rethink company values in order to keep their heads above water.
“Customer experience getting squeezed because this AI hype where all organisations put all that [investment]. And at the same time, huge cost pressure like so these two forces really squish customer experience teams, they’re now scrambling for resources. They’re scrambling for retention.”
2. The Metrics Death Spiral
CX teams are undermining their own value by becoming measurement factories instead of strategic problem-solvers.
By prioritizing dashboards and metrics over real strategic direction, CX leaders are receiving results they don’t actually need, reducing the perceived value of these teams.
Despite this, CX teams still provide leaders with these metric results to deliver what is expected of them.
“Whether that is actually the right thing to do or not, but they are reporting more and more metrics. They’re trying to get more data… more numbers is better.”
And with only half-answer results, this prompts many leaders to continue asking for further data-based results, unaware of what they actually need.
“They’re accepting the problem as given… The CX leaders hear from their leaders, ‘We need more metrics. We need more data. We need more real time data to make better decisions.’
“They take this at face value and present real time data – leaders are really asking where do I need to go and why?”
This outlook on CX teams endangers their existence when automation comes into play, with AI now providing leaders with automated reports, this further reduces the overall value of these teams within an organization, risking obsolescence.
“The more these AI tools come into the [picture]… It summarises all the verbatims it creates the dashboards. What do I need you for? Right? Because you’ve not added value because you’ve just so optimised for presenting all these numbers.”
3. Journey Mapping’s Dramatic Decline (2/3 Drop Predicted)
Another of Forrester’s predictions argues that journey mapping will see a decline in use, with its value having been diluted from overuse and poor application.
Once the go-to CX tool for every problem, business leaders have now taken little to no interest in journey mapping, arguing that in comparison to newer tools, now provides far too limited outcomes.
Furthermore, with reduced interest encourages reduced willingness to learn the tool, this can lead to teams starting with the map instead of the problem, creating end to end journeys without defining a clear question.
“This had become the go to tool for CX people that ever a business person met a CX person that CX person would invariably within 10 minutes say ‘first, let’s map all the journeys’, at this point, people are so tired of hearing ‘Let’s map all the journeys’ and that is also the wrong starting point.”
Schmidt also argues CX leaders are choosing to reject these familiar processes that have not delivered desirable results in the past, rather than rejecting customer insights themselves.
“A client asked me, ‘Maxie, I can’t get internal buy in to do a journey map. How do I get people to buy in?’ You know what? When I say journey map, people roll their eyes.”
Schmidt further offers a dentist analogy to this recurring issue of leaders expecting to hear how the tools work rather than expecting outcomes from CX professionals, often leading to feelings of insecurity or misaligned priorities.
“Imagine you’re going to a dentist and the dentist were like ‘so let me first explain to you all about the different tools I have here and this is the thing and this is the other thing and this is the little mirror and isn’t this all amazing?’ …You’d expect them to do their job. And the same thing for [CX].
“Stop talking about journey maps. Ask what is your problem? What are you trying to solve?”
Furthermore, journey maps can reduce operational relevance if the tool is being isolated from other groups who already have their own roadmaps and targets.
“Often the team that has a journey map is like separate from the rest and the rest isn’t actually waiting for their inputs… There’s this journey mapping silo that they’ve created over time.”
Furthermore, Schmidt predicts the term “journey” will have lost all meaning through inconsistent use across the industry.
This comes from inconsistent use, with teams utilizing journey for various uses, this weakens its overall meaning, with teams assuming journey means the same across an organization.
This results in misalignments in decisions as assumptions are not shared between teams, with slower meetings and vague outcomes.
“Right now if you say the word journey it means nothing at all. It means a life cycle, the end to end journey… or it might mean some kind of product, the mortgage journey.
“It’s often also inside out because companies think about all the interactions they’re having with the customer as opposed to thinking about the steps that a customer takes.”
This results in elevated team confusion, causing new label adoptions such as ‘value streams’ or ‘customer processes’ to avoid further turmoil and restore credibility.
“People now… we’re talking about value streams. We’re talking about customer processes. CX becomes customer excellence… These little different rebrands.”
However, this name change does not necessarily solve this issue: terms will repeat failures if the underlying concept remains unclear.
“Even if we rebrand the term journey to something else, we need to make sure that at that point we understand that it really is all the steps a customer takes, whether they’re with us or with others.”
4. AI Self-Service: The Overconfidence Crisis
Schmidt predicts that AI self service initiatives will fail from misplaced confidence and limited understanding during adoption.
Organizations are rushing to deploy AI solutions without proper understanding, with cost pressures driving faster adoptions and fundamental misconceptions still remain with the technology.
“In these AI decision makers, 8 out of 10 say that generative AI is good for complex mathematical problems. Which is of course wrong 100% wrong.”
This causes overestimations on generative AI’s ability to handle complex reason and logic, leading to poor use case selection.
“I’m under pressure and I really don’t know what else to do here. Here AI seems to be working. Let’s just go for that.
“For the longest time [customer service has] been kind of this cost centre and instead of changing your mentality to think about how could I make it a profit centre, which we’ve been talking about for 20 years.”
5. The Fundamental Misalignment: Measurement vs. Customer Obsession
This prediction argues that organizations are confusing measurement with customer obsession, claiming to be customer-centric but remain fundamentally measurement-obsessed.
“These are not customer obsessed companies. These are measurement obsessed companies that also have the CX team to do some reporting.”
When companies heavily invest in metrics, dashboards, and reports, CX teams are expect to produce internal scores, trends, and benchmarks rather than focusing on customer outcomes.
This creates unrealistic expectations of the current customer focus, highlighting a widespread structural problem, where customer team success is valued by internal measurement systems, not real customer changes.
These organizations are instead optimizing for what can be reported, rather than what the customers actually need.
“They work for inside the customer 100%, but they don’t understand what the boardroom actually needs because actually the boardroom probably would prefer them to work for customers. But they don’t know how to express that.”
The Bottom Line
Forrester concludes that CX is in a death spiral, where teams prove value through metrics that AI can replicate, use tools that business leaders are tired of, and serve measurement obsessions rather than customer needs.
The path forward requires stopping tool-first thinking, understanding actual business problems, and shifting from reporting to strategic problem-solving before AI makes the current approach completely redundant.
To hear more CX Trends and Predictions for 2026, check out CX Today’s 12 Trends of Christmas Series.
