Pega has announced Customer Engagement Studio, a new agentic workspace built on top of its Customer Decision Hub (CDH) platform.
The new capability promises to take marketers from brief to live, personalized campaign in minutes.
Announced at PegaWorld in Las Vegas on June 8, the release provides an insight into how Pega is treating the agentic AI implementation.
Speaking to CX Today in the aftermath of PegaWorld, Peter van der Putten, Director of the AI Lab and Lead Scientist at Pegasystems, outlined the challenges:
“People have maybe some magical thinking. You just throw an AI model at a problem and it will sort itself out.”
“And, by the way, it’s not just a model, we’ll make it an agent, we’ll give it some tools and we’ll let it chat to a hundred other agents, and all our problems will magically disappear. But that’s not going to work.”
That view aligns with a Gartner prediction cited in Pega’s official announcement, which forecasts that more than 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled due to rising costs, unclear outcomes, or inadequate risk controls.
It’s a striking number for a company launching an agentic product, but Pega is leaning into it deliberately.
Watch the full interview with Peter van der Putten here.
What Customer Engagement Studio Actually Does
To understand Customer Engagement Studio, it helps to understand what CDH was already doing.
Van der Putten explained that CDH has functioned as the analytical “left brain” of Pega’s customer engagement stack for decades, continuously reading customer signals and determining the next best action across channels.
He pointed to Wells Fargo as a flagship example:
“They’re doing 6 billion of those interactions every single month across a myriad of channels, across a myriad of propositions. And that’s delivering double digit NPS improvements.”
The challenge, van der Putten said, was never the decisioning engine; it was feeding it.
“It was actually on the marketing side, on the organizational side. How do we bring new content into the system? How do we make sure we smoothen the compliance process?”
Customer Engagement Studio is Pega’s answer to that bottleneck. It introduces a layer of coordinated agents – covering marketing strategy, creative execution, data science, performance analysis, and compliance – all orchestrated through a central conversational agent.
The result, Pega claims, is a 10x increase in the volume of content and actions that can be pushed into CDH.
Orchestration Over Capability
What separates Pega’s approach from the broader wave of agentic AI launches is its emphasis on coordination rather than raw agent capability.
Van der Putten described the architecture as the “right brain” complement to CDH’s left brain, with the conversational agent acting as the central orchestration layer:
“The conversational agent is interacting with other agents – Pega agents and non-Pega agents – that are guiding you through this process of how to translate your business objectives into actual actions that have been set up in the system.”
That process includes compliance checks, simulation runs, approval routing, and post-deployment performance monitoring. Human sign-off is built into the workflow at key stages, and governance is maintained throughout.
Rob Walker, General Manager of 1:1 Customer Engagement at Pega, framed it this way in the official announcement:
“Customer Engagement Studio gives marketing teams a turbocharged, agent-powered operating model that connects decisioning, orchestration, and governance, so every interaction is consistent, auditable, and fast.”
A Pricing Model to Match
Perhaps the boldest signal of Pega’s confidence in its approach is a shift in how it plans to charge for agentic AI.
Rather than billing on token consumption, Pega is moving toward outcome-based pricing, tying costs directly to business results.
Van der Putten pointed to the wider industry for context:
“A month ago, token maxing was a badge of honor. You were really proud that you were spending so many tokens. And then guess what? The Anthropics of the world said, okay, we’re going to charge you by token. People go like, maybe that’s not such a good idea anymore.”
For Pega, the move is less about undercutting competitors on price and more about a fundamental stance on accountability.
“We think that we can actually tie agentic AI to your workflows and to your business outcomes, but also are able to do that in a very cost-effective manner,” van der Putten said.
Customer Engagement Studio will be available later in 2026 alongside Pega Infinity 26, and will come standard with CDH on Pega Cloud.
