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.
