Announced at the vendor’s flagship Refresh event, the updated platform includes the following three fresh capabilities:

• Vertical AI Agents
• Freshdesk Command Center
• Freddy AI Insights

Together, the three tools are designed to enable CX teams to lower response times, boost resolution rates, and gain real-time visibility into the issues slowing growth and efficiency.

The updated solutions are partly in response to Freshworks’ Cost of Complexity Report, which outlined ‘uncustomizable workflows’ and ‘too many tools to toggle between’ as two of the biggest software-related challenges currently impacting customer service agents.

These findings speak to the wider issues of over-complication and solution fatigue that have been prominent in recent times, and can prevent agents from truly maximizing the benefits of AI.

This point was raised by Srini Raghavan, Chief Product Officer of Freshworks, when discussing his company’s latest releases.

“CX leaders want to scale instant, empathetic service without sacrificing quality or time. Yet fragmented systems, outdated tools, and redundant processes waste hours of their teams’ time,” he said.

“Freshworks is breaking that cycle of complexity by uniting how teams work and helping them reclaim hours of lost productivity, enabling teams to meet customer needs with greater speed, and giving leaders an easy way to uncover growth drivers and detractors proactively.”

So, let’s take a closer look at whether the revamped capabilities can deliver on Raghavan’s promise.

Vertical AI Agents

Freshworks has introduced new Vertical AI Agents for eCommerce, fintech, travel, and logistics within the Freddy AI Agent Studio, a workspace for building, testing, and monitoring AI agents.

The agents come with more than 50 prebuilt workflows, reducing the setup effort typically required when deploying industry-specific automation.

Designed to handle tasks as well as respond to inquiries, they integrate with systems such as FedEx, Shopify, and Stripe.

Users can also create custom agentic workflows, enabling the agents to deliver end-to-end resolutions aligned with sector-specific processes.

The latest move from Freshworks is another example of a major customer service and experience vendor choosing to move into the industry-specific agent arena.

Indeed, at the beginning of the year, Salesforce released Agentforce for Retail, a skills library for industry-specific AI agents. This was followed by the launch of Agentforce for Public Sector and Agentforce for Manufacturing back in August.

Talkdesk is another vendor that has targeted specific verticals in the past, havign released AI agents for Healthcare and Finance earlier this year.

In doing so, all of these vendors are looking to differentiate themselves in a crowded space and leverage AI to make their tools more effective.

Freshdesk Command Center

The enhanced Freshdesk Command Center consolidates multiple customer service channels – email, chat, WhatsApp, and social media – into a single workspace, reducing the need for agents to switch between applications.

It combines AI assistance with process automation to streamline operations, helping teams retrieve relevant customer data and respond more efficiently.

AI capabilities within the platform also provide real-time insights, including conversation sentiment, SLA deadlines, and access to customer information such as purchase history, subscription details, FedEx tracking updates, Stripe payments, and Shopify product data.

In addition, agents are able to access Freddy AI Copilot, the platform’s AI assistant, from directly within the command center.

They can use the copilot to summarize email threads, suggest responses, and recommend actions.

Single-click operations can trigger end-to-end processes, including refunds, replacement orders, and activity logging, enabling faster resolution of customer requests without leaving the command center.

Freddy AI Insights

Freddy AI Insights offers real-time visibility into support operations, helping leaders monitor performance trends and detect anomalies before they affect the customer experience.

The platform provides alerts for spikes in support volume, SLA breaches, and workflow bottlenecks, alongside built-in root cause analysis that highlights why changes occur.

Visual dashboards present performance shifts clearly, enabling teams to identify critical patterns, assess which groups are impacted, and take timely action.

Designed as a continuous analytics tool, Freddy AI Insights also translates operational data into actionable intelligence to support proactive decision-making.

Breaking the Cycle of Complexity

While each of the three capabilities addresses different aspects of the customer service and experience tech sector, the overall trend is clearly to make these tools more user friendly.

With the incredible advances that AI has brought to the customer service and experience sector in recent times, some vendors can sometimes be guilty of being blinded by their own shiny new toys.

It doesn’t matter how impressive a vendor’s new feature is; if it isn’t easily accessible and navigable, agents will offer resistance.

As more and more frontline agents struggle with tool fatigue, vendors must prioritize usability.

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) 2025 underscores how swiftly the market has shifted from digital engagement to intelligent orchestration, with AI agents, automation frameworks, and composable platforms defining the new service stack.

While last year’s report reflected stability, 2025 marks a decisive pivot.

A fresh evaluation model, new scoring criteria, and a heavier focus on agentic AI have redrawn the map.

However, despite the changes, Salesforce was still comfortably the top of the pack, with Microsoft, ServiceNow, and Zendesk some of the major names trying to chase it down.

The Definition of CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC)

But before we get into the rankings, what exactly is a CRM CEC?

Gartner defines it as a unified, AI-augmented suite that delivers both customer interaction and service process orchestration.

In essence, these systems are no longer just case management hubs; they are engagement engines, tying together data, workflows, and outcomes across front, middle, and back-office environments.

While case management, digital engagement, and knowledge management remain mandatory features, “automation of engagements” and “real-time continuous intelligence” have also become table stakes.

That means agentic AI, contextual orchestration, and low-code extensibility are now baseline expectations rather than differentiators.

Here’s how Gartner rates the field for 2025.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center 2025: Leaders

This year’s Leaders are:

• Salesforce
• Microsoft
• ServiceNow
• Zendesk
• Oracle

Salesforce

Still the benchmark for enterprise CRM, Salesforce continues to consolidate its position as the most complete AI-enabled service platform.

Service Cloud now unifies data, AI, and automation through Agentforce Service Agents and Service Rep Assistant, bridging front-line and back-office operations.

Gartner also outlined the vendor’s industry-specific strategy, with 14 tailored products and an ecosystem that spans hyperscalers and GSIs.

Microsoft

Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 Customer Service keeps building momentum with a deepening AI strategy and an expanding footprint across the enterprise.

Gartner believes that the arrival of Dynamics 365 Contact Center signals a clear intent: unify CRM, CCaaS, and agentic AI under one roof.

Gartner also praised Microsoft’s extensible Power Platform, which underpins its modular design and low-code agility.

ServiceNow

ServiceNow’s Agentic Workflows and GenAI-powered agent assist position it as the go-to choice for enterprises seeking cross-departmental automation.

Gartner also highlighted the company’s unified platform and partner ecosystem, which together deliver low TCO and strong deployment consistency.

ServiceNow’s blend of ITSM pedigree and AI-driven orchestration continues to blur the line between IT and CX – and that’s where Gartner believes the market is heading.

Zendesk

The launch of Zendesk’s Resolution Platform has helped move the vendor up from a Visionary in 2024 to a true Leader in 2025.

The solution integrates copilot tools, real-time QA, and voice-bot intelligence, all within a single agent workspace.

Gartner also credited the company’s integrated WEM suite and its ability to execute globally across retail, tech, and service sectors.

Oracle

Oracle’s Fusion Service rounds out this year’s Leaders with a clear differentiator: embedded AI without extra licensing costs.

In addition, its AI Agent Studio was praised for its ability to enable users to build and manage custom agents inside the governed Fusion framework, complementing its rich enterprise data model.

The report also highlighted Oracle’s end-to-end enterprise integration – spanning ERP, supply chain, and HCM – and a vast partner network.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center 2025: Challengers

This year’s Challengers are:

• SAP

SAP

SAP’s AI-first vision, anchored in its Business AI strategy, helped catapult it from a Niche Player in last year’s report to the sole Challenger this time around.

Joule, SAP’s copilot, drives contextual recommendations across the service journey, while Resolution Room brings collaborative case solving to life.

Native ERP integration remains SAP’s trump card, tying front- and back-office data into a single service flow.

Yet, Gartner noted that SAP’s expansion remains focused on its ERP base, and advanced knowledge management still requires external tools.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center 2025: Visionaries

This year’s Visionaries are:

• Pegasystems

Pegasystems

Unfortunately, while Zendesk managed to move up, Pega dropped down from a Leader in 2024 to a Visionary in 2025.

Despite this, Gartner still highlighted the company’s workflow-centric AI and low-code agility as anchors for a CEC built for scale in highly regulated industries.

Gartner also praised its end-to-end orchestration capabilities, connecting customer journeys to operational workflows — something many competitors are only now attempting.

However, Pega’s opaque pricing and enterprise-only focus limit its broader appeal. Migrating to its new Constellation design system also requires significant change management.

Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center 2025: Niche Players

This year’s Niche Players are:

• eGain
• Freshworks
• Zoho
• Creatio

eGain

Like Pega before it, this year also saw eGain trending in the wrong direction.

Yet, there’s still plenty of positives to take from another Magic Quadrant appearance.

Gartner praised the vendor’s AI Knowledge Hub, which has been expanded with GenAI for summarization and content orchestration.

Unfortunately, eGain’s limited partner reach and delivery consistency issues pushed it into the Niche camp.

Freshworks

The report outlined Freshworks’ Freddy AI Copilot, which now offers real-time coaching and next-best-action guidance. The platform has also grown to cover marketing, sales, and service.

Gartner cites deployment agility and unified CX design as wins, but notes execution risk in balancing SMB and midmarket ambitions, along with concerns around add-on AI costs.

Zoho

Gartner believes that Zoho remains one of the strongest value options in the CRM field. The vendor’s Zoho Desk feature delivers essential case management at a fraction of the cost, supported by a proprietary cloud infrastructure and vast partner network.

Gartner spotlights its affordable TCO and data-privacy control, but flags limited innovation pace and weaker automation depth.

Creatio

The final entrant in the 2025 report is Creatio, with its Service Creatio platform credited for bringing no-code composability to the CEC stage.

Its new AI Command Center was also highlighted for its ability to unify AI agents for proactive service optimization.

However, Gartner did question the company’s AI consumption pricing and limited reach in emerging markets.

Key Takeaways: A Market Redrawn by Agentic AI

The Gartner Magic Quadrant for CRM Customer Engagement Center 2025 reflects a fundamental shift: CECs are no longer just about “case to resolution”; they’re becoming AI-driven orchestration platforms that operate across the enterprise.

Salesforce, Microsoft, and ServiceNow dominate thanks to unified data models and composable AI layers.

Oracle strengthens its AI-embedded value proposition, and Zendesk doubles down on agent experience.

Meanwhile, SAP’s ERP-centric AI vision and Pega’s automation depth remind us that the enterprise backbone still matters.

For buyers, the takeaway is clear: the next wave of customer engagement platforms won’t just manage service interactions; they’ll think, act, and adapt in real time across the customer journey.

Discover more CX Today rundowns of other Gartner Magic Quadrant reports below:

• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud ERP for Product-Centric Enterprises 2025
• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) 2025
• Gartner Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI Platforms 2025

Take Microsoft’s Q1 2026 earnings call, for example, beneath the numbers, the tech giant revealed how its AI strategy is trying to redefine customer experience.

From conversational retail journeys to intelligent collaboration, Microsoft Chairman and CEO Satya Nadella’s comments painted a picture of AI as the new connective layer between work, service, and engagement.

Below are the four key takeaways from Microsoft’s customer experience AI strategy.

Microsoft AI Customer Experience: 4 Key Insights

1. Copilot Becomes the Interface for Work

Perhaps the most striking comment from Nadella came early in the call, when he stated:

“Copilot is becoming the UI for the agentic AI experience. We have integrated chat and agentic workflows into everyday tools like Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams.”

That line says a lot about Microsoft’s direction. It is clear that the vendor no longer views Copilot as just a helper; instead, it’s becoming the way people use Microsoft 365.

Nadella revealed that “tens of millions of users” are already engaging with Copilot chat, with usage “growing 50% quarter over quarter.”

For CX and contact center teams, that matters.

If AI chat is becoming the default interface for everyday work, customer-facing workflows are bound to follow.

It will be interesting to see whether this approach ripples into service platforms, knowledge bases, and ticketing systems over the next year.

2. Guardrails Arrive for Enterprise AI

As AI systems gain popularity and take on more autonomy, governance is becoming crucial.

To help its customers keep up with rising compliance demands, earlier this month, Microsoft launched its new Agent Framework, designed to simplify the orchestration of multi-agent systems

During the call, Nadella addressed the significance of this solution:

“Our new Microsoft Agent Framework helps developers orchestrate multi-agent systems with compliance, observability, and deep integration out of the box.”

And this isn’t just theoretical; the Microsoft man claimed that professional services firm KPMG has already used it “to modernize the audit process, connecting agents to internal data with enterprise-grade governance and observability.”

For customer service operations – where trust, data handling, and accountability are paramount – such frameworks are essential.

It’s one thing to deploy a chatbot; it’s another to ensure every AI decision is explainable, auditable, and secure.

3. Teams Gets Its Own AI Sidekick

Collaboration was also a key aspect of Nadella’s address, with the Microsoft man introducing a new “Teams Mode” for Copilot.

He explained how the solution allows users to “invite colleagues into a Copilot conversation.

“Our collaborative agents, like facilitator and project manager, prep meeting agendas, take notes, capture decisions, and kick off group tasks.”

In practice, that means Teams meetings could soon run themselves – or at least the admin side of them.

While this may sound like more of a UC announcement, for CX leaders, it implies the possibility of AI-facilitated teamwork that could make service handovers, escalations, and follow-ups smoother.

4. Security and Efficiency: The Other Side of AI

Much of the discussion focused on capability, but Nadella also underscored AI’s growing impact on efficiency.

In security, for example, he discussed the importance of Microsoft’s phishing triage agent in Defender. The AI‑powered virtual agent automatically triages user‑reported phishing emails, deciding whether a submission is a legitimate phishing attempt or a false alarm

During the call, Nadella claimed that “studies show that analysts can be up to 6.5x more efficient in detecting malicious emails” when using the tool.

At a time when more and more organizations appear to be succumbing to hacks and scams, giving users an extra layer of protection and peace of mind could be a real differentiator.

Indeed, you only have to look back at the recent Google-Salesforce customer data breach, which resulted in the FBI stepping in to warn customers about phishing attacks, to see how big an issue this has become in the customer service and experience space.

Away from security, Amy Hood, Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer, highlighted continuing strength in the company’s customer and business applications portfolio:

“Dynamics 365 revenue increased 16% in constant currency with continued growth across all workloads.”

It’s a reminder that while Copilot grabs the headlines, Microsoft’s broader CX stack is still growing steadily behind it.

Financial Snapshot

Microsoft’s results underscored the momentum behind its AI ambitions:

• Revenue: $77.7 billion, up 17% year over year
• Operating Income: up 22%
• Earnings Per Share: $4.13, a 21% increase
• Microsoft Cloud Revenue: $49.1 billion, up 25%

The Takeaway

For CX leaders, Microsoft’s latest earnings call provided a glimpse at how the vendor is utilizing AI to reshape both the employee experience and the customer interface.

Microsoft’s message was clear: conversational agents, orchestration frameworks, and intelligent automation are no longer experiments; they’re fast becoming the operational layer for how modern service and engagement will be delivered.

As someone who has felt the pain of clunky handoffs and fuzzy diagnostics, I care about tools that make customer journeys clearer and kinder. Maestro is Operata’s most ambitious step yet. It expands CX Observability from a primarily Amazon Connect footprint to 50+ CCaaS, Voice AI, AI customer service, CPaaS, and CRM platforms. It introduces a unified Customer Journey Trace, a smarter CX Copilot that uses AWS Bedrock and OpenAI GPT-5.0 for natural language analysis, and an open approach for developers that includes an Insights Library and the first MCP server for CX Observability.

John Mitchem, Co-Founder & CEO at Operata: “We launched Operata to solve observability in voice and contact centres. You can’t fix what you can’t see, especially now that AI agents and human agents share the same customer journey.”

Why This Matters: Observability Is the New Control Plane for AI-Era CX

Modern contact centres are multi-platform and AI-augmented. Voice bots hand over to humans. Carriers, IVRs, CCaaS, CRMs, and LLMs all sit in the flow. Without end-to-end visibility, leaders are left guessing where quality drops, latency spikes, or handoff failures occur. Customers feel it first, NPS follows.

Mitchem again: “Start with your observability platform. Put the tools in place to judge whether new services reduce friction or create it. This has been true in IT for years, and it should be no different for your customers.”

The Maestro Release: Three Pillars

1) The Global Platform for CX Observability

Maestro supports 50+ platforms across CCaaS, AI Customer Service, Voice AI, CPaaS, and CRM, including Amazon Connect, Genesys Cloud, NICE CXone, Zoom, Talkdesk, 8×8, Twilio, PolyAI, LiveKit, Pipecat, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Zendesk.

A new “Verified” designation flags ready-to-use data collection and integrations, with a one to three day path to verify additional supported platforms.

Why it matters: Most enterprises are hybrid and multi-vendor. Maestro gives IT and Operations one consistent view across providers, today and tomorrow.

2) One Picture Across CX Services

Customer Journey Trace presents a single, visual flame-graph timeline for every interaction, spanning telephony, IVR, CCaaS, AI agents, and human agents. Teams get span-level metrics, logs, and context in one place.

The new CX Copilot lets users ask natural-language questions, see visual results, save prompts, and trigger next-best actions, grounded in their own Operata data.

“Leaders need the whole story, not just the symptoms. Journey Trace exposes transfer delays, AI-to-human mis-handoffs, and downstream latency, the places where customer trust quietly erodes.” — John Mitchem

Ask questions like, “Where are transfers breaking,” or “Which ISPs will impact voice next week,” and get answers rooted in operational truth.

3) Open Standards for Developers, AI, and Data Teams

Maestro aligns open data collection and pipelines to industry standards for interoperability and scale.

• Insights Library: 50+ critical, real-time CX insights, from atomic signals like low MOS or high latency to composite outcomes like abandonment, rolled into CX Risk ratings.
• Operata MCP Server: the first Model Context Protocol server for CX Observability. It lets LLMs and agentic AI query Operata insights and dashboards directly, securely, and with the right context.

Why it matters: As Voice AI and agentic workflows scale, context is everything. Structured, queryable CX context helps AI return relevant answers and actions, not guesswork.

Built for IT & Ops, and Now for Data, AI, and CX Leaders

Observability has lived in IT. Maestro broadens the impact. Operations can spot issues before they hit NPS. CX leaders can see real experience impact across journeys. Developers and Data or AI teams can integrate Operata’s signals into their own systems and copilots.

“There is no one-size-fits-all AI. Diversity of models matters, but the context you feed them matters more. Operata provides journey context across platforms so your AI can answer the two questions every leader asks: what went wrong, and how do we fix it?” — John Mitchem

AWS Roots, Broader Reach

Operata’s growth has been propelled by deep work with Amazon Web Services and the Amazon Connect ecosystem. Maestro keeps that strength and extends it across ecosystems such as Genesys, NICE, Zoom, Talkdesk, Twilio, and more.

“We became popular with vendors because we help their customers succeed. It is not only finding what is wrong, it is proving what is working, and enabling rollouts with confidence.” — John Mitchem

Availability

• Insights Library: Generally Available from 22 October 2025
• All other Maestro features: Preview for existing and new customers
• Preview access: Registration required
• Amazon Connect customers: upgrade to Operata AWS Collector for Preview

The CX Today Take

This feels like a category moment. Monitoring was a safety net. Observability is now the operating system for CX, especially as AI agents join human agents in live flows. With Maestro, Operata is staking a claim as a neutral layer of truth across a fragmented stack. If you are evaluating CCaaS, Voice AI, or Customer Service AI, instrument first. The winners will see across domains in real time, correlate what matters, and act before customers feel the pain.

The Bottom Line

In a world where AI and humans share the same journey, visibility is power. The future belongs to teams that see clearly, act quickly, and learn continuously. Are you one of them?

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Available within Oracle Fusion Cloud Applications, the agents are designed to help CX leaders unlock fresh revenue opportunities.

According to Oracle, the agents achieve this by allowing users to “operate faster and make better decisions.”

With the ability to enhance automation processes and analyze connected data, the solutions promise to equip CX leaders with the tools to deliver more personalized experiences and strengthen customer loyalty.

Chris Leone, EVP of Applications Development at Oracle, claims that the AI agents will “unlock new revenue opportunities with intelligent insights and agentic automation.

AI agents are transforming customer engagements from reactive, manual, and cumbersome processes into highly valuable and proactive strategies that enable organizations to scale quality experiences to win more business and keep customers happy.

The agents are powered by Oracle Cloud Infrastructure and benefit from being natively integrated within Oracle Fusion Applications.

In addition, agents can be embedded directly within an organization’s existing workflows.

It is clear that Oracle is placing a great deal of stock in its latest release, but can these role-based AI agents deliver on their promise?

Living Up to The Hype

In a conversation with CX Today, Martin Schneider, VP and Principal Analyst of Constellation Research, shared some insights on what makes an AI agent successful and whether Oracle’s offering can live up to the hype.

For Schneider, the driving force behind a strong AI agent is precision data, which he views as being integral to training agents and enabling them to execute on agentic workflows.

He believes that Oracle ticks these boxes, stating:

Oracle offers the breadth of business applications – and the integration and data management capabilities – to generate a more inclusive and accurate view of the customer in order to unlock agentic AI value.

Schneider also commended the vendor for making it more seamless for users to start working with agentic tools, due to the fact that a lot of their AI offerings come free of charge with existing Oracle license fees.

“This allows CX leaders to work with (or in some cases without) IT to start developing agentic flows that improve the customer experience with lower risk and cost,” he explained.

Role-Based AI Agents

With each of Oracle’s prebuilt, role-based AI agents offering different capabilities, the vendor outlined how certain agents are best suited for Marketing, Sales, and Service:

Marketing

For Marketers, the new AI agents are designed to deliver data-driven decisions about where to focus their efforts.

The Account Product Fit Agent applies predictive scoring and Ideal Customer Profile data to determine which accounts are most likely to buy, giving marketers a clearer view of where to allocate resources.

The Buying Group Definition Agent, on the other hand, focuses on mapping roles within the buying process, using title-based algorithms to identify which contacts influence specific product decisions.

Together, these agents reflect a broader industry move toward precision targeting and more accountable marketing strategy.

Sales

In sales, automation and intelligence are being integrated directly into everyday workflows.

The Deal Advisor Agent provides sellers with quick access to relevant guidance – such as product overviews, pricing information, and customer references – to support deal progression.

The Quote Assistant Agent streamlines the quoting process by answering proposal-related questions in real time, reducing the time required to prepare and send offers.

To drive revenue growth, the Product Recommendations Agent identifies cross-sell and upsell opportunities by analyzing customer history and quote data.

Collectively, these agents are reshaping how sales teams access information and engage with prospects, placing greater emphasis on efficiency and informed decision-making.

Service

Across service operations, AI is being deployed to improve responsiveness and consistency in customer support.

The Triage Agent analyzes incoming requests to determine issue type, severity, and sentiment, allowing teams to prioritize more effectively.

The Self-Service Agent enables customers to resolve common issues independently through guided digital workflows, reducing pressure on support staff.

To enhance case handling, the Service Request Creation Agent automatically converts customer messages – from chat, calls, or email – into actionable service requests.

For field operations, the Work Order Agent generates pre-filled work orders containing relevant details to support first-time resolution.

These developments underline a growing trend toward predictive and preventative service models, where automation supports faster and more consistent customer outcomes.

Enter Digital Experience Platforms (DXPs), solutions designed to orchestrate content, data, and interactions for maximum impact.

AI-driven personalization, headless CMS architectures, and omnichannel engagement are among the latest trends transforming the industry.

With no-code customization and AI-powered analytics enhancing agility, the future of digital experiences is more dynamic – but also more complicated – than ever.

This roundtable unpicks the latest advancements shaping DXPs and what innovations lie ahead for brands looking to stay ahead of the curve.

Our industry experts this month include:

• Kemberly Gong, VP of Product Marketing at Contentful
• Sara Faatz, Director of Technology Community Relations at Progress
• Guy Hellier, VP of Product Management at OpenText
• Mo Cherif, VP of AI & Innovation at Sitecore
• Mike MacAuley, GM of Liferay
• Tara Corey, SVP of Marketing at Optimizely
• Conor Egan, SVP of Product at Contentstack

The Biggest Trends Currently Transforming the DXP Market

Rise of GenAI

Gong: The DXP market was defined to label the struggle that every business has: creating marketing that resonates with customers.

And whether you call it a trend or a fundamental paradigm shift, there’s no doubt that Generative AI is already changing how brands create content and digital experiences.

Marketing teams struggle with content chaos – creating content, managing it, personalizing it, optimizing, and delivering it. Add in scaling across regions and languages, and it’s clear that many resource-constrained marketing teams struggle to create all the assets they need to be effective.

With Generative AI, teams can create, manage, translate, and regionalise content at low or no cost. Organizations that learn to harness the power of Generative AI will have a considerable advantage: more personalized experiences and deeper engagement with consumers will result in increased ROI.

Predictive AI

Faatz: Not surprisingly, AI is the trend transforming the DXP market in a number of ways.

First, Predictive AI is enabling marketers to identify high/medium/low segments for conversions, helping to refine audience segmentation and activate users with a high likelihood to convert via targeted messaging and campaigns.

Generative AI is changing the way content is created and classified and helping to hone content performance by increasing discoverability, reusability, and relevance. And Agentic AI has the ability to provide a hyper-personalized experience to the user, allowing them to dictate the way they interact with the digital experience.

Alone, each of these implementations of AI is evolutionary – together, they are transformative. And while the impact AI has on the DXP market is significant, equally important is the influence the technology has on end-user behavior.

Answer Engine Optimization

Hellier: Why should Chat GPT provide better answers to customer questions than your .com presence? Brands need a layered approach that maximizes customer and brand value in the major GPT platforms but also creates unique value in their owned experiences.

Web experiences cannot remain as digital brochures. AI enables enterprises to provide powerful outcomes, helping customers understand and succeed in the use of a brand’s products and services.

The digital experience is an inherent part of unified engagement management. Business users (and digital workers) require a holistic approach to managing how customers engage with a brand, especially for post-acquisition customer journeys

Unifying Siloed Systems

Cherif: As the excitement around agentic AI grew, many organizations rushed to embed this emerging technology into DXP solutions.

However, this rapid adoption led to siloed workflows and fragmented proof of concepts, consisting of disparate AI agents unable to communicate with one another.

Now, the focus has shifted to unifying these siloed systems and reintroducing humans-in-the-loop to drive efficiency, enhance workflows, and improve governance.

This trend is changing the way marketers approach AI integration for the better, moving from fragmented experimentation to structured, strategic deployment.

Agentic AI

MacAuley: The next big trend to shape the DXP market will undoubtedly be agentic AI, technology that is focused on making decisions and does not require direct human oversight.

Unlike generative AI, which requires prompting, agentic AI essentially has autonomy to make and take decisions on its own.

For DXPs like Liferay, this trend is of real interest, with many looking for ways to put this technology into practice across real-world use cases.

If the potential of agentic AI is to be realized, the DXP market must first create sites and services to allow actions to be carried out in the real world.

The next frontier is agent-to-agent communication, where agentic systems on both sides engage directly to resolve queries, execute transactions, and deliver outcomes with minimal human intervention.

Personalized Content

Corey: One of the most important shifts we’re seeing in the DXP market is a move away from generic, one-size-fits-all experiences.

Brands are realizing that sticking to safe, templated content can lead to what some call “blandification”, a loss of brand identity and customer connection.

Today’s consumers expect to be treated as individuals, and traditional rule-based personalization just can’t keep up.

For me, the solution lies in AI that can adapt in real time, learning from how customers actually interact and tailoring content to match.
Automation

AI Integration

Egan: A major trend reshaping the DXP market is the integration of AI and automation to drive real-time, personalized content experiences.

As customer expectations grow, brands must deliver relevant interactions across multiple channels.

AI capabilities like predictive analytics, dynamic content generation, and automated segmentation are empowering teams to craft tailored journeys at scale while reducing manual effort.

At Contentstack, we’re seeing businesses use AI across the content lifecycle, from creation to delivery, to boost engagement and efficiency.

The New Tools Transforming DXP Solutions

Enhanced API-First Architecture

Gong: Generative AI holds so much promise to help companies in all facets of their business, including scaling content creation, automating workflows, building apps, and integrating technologies at speeds never seen before. But Generative AI is also evolving rapidly, with no one technology in the pole position for long.

The winners in the DXP market will balance a composable, API-first architecture with intuitive, drag-and-drop tooling that lets any user move fast and with confidence.

This will give companies the flexibility to integrate the newest and most effective technology at any point in time and adapt as the market changes.

AI-Native Tools

Faatz: According to the latest State of Martech report, there are more than 15K pieces of marketing technology on the market today.

Choosing just one tool is hard, as I personally believe technology decisions should be based on best of need as opposed to best of breed. That said (and based on my previous answer, this likely won’t come as a surprise), AI-native tools are having the most significant impact on DXP solutions.

According to the report, AI-native tools now dominate new entrants, accounting for 77% of new martech solutions. These tools are primarily leveraged for content production (78.1% of marketers), audience segmentation (42.7%), data analytics (38.5%), and personalization (34.4%).

This shift is transforming CMS and DXPs into more dynamic, intelligent, and adaptive systems.

Reaching Different Touchpoints

Hellier: Of course, this answer has to involve AI! Our focus is on enabling business groups to move quickly and deliver the information experiences that customers, partners, and employees most need.

Moving quickly leaves no room for error, and so AI is making it much easier and faster for functional teams to imagine a new experience, realize it in the DXP, and do it safely and using proven, approved delivery tools.

Imagine being able to go from Design to Experience in seconds, and to do it while leveraging the secure, tested, and proven connections necessary to safely and securely handle sensitive customer and business information. This is now a reality.

More Strategic Thinking

Cherif: Brand-aware, AI-enhanced intelligent DXP solutions allow marketers to work faster, smarter, and more strategically across the marketing lifecycle. By integrating agentic workflows, copilots, and agents in one orchestration layer, marketers can provide an elevated digital experience across channels.

Brand-aware AI is a critical tool for DXP solutions. The brand must remain a unifying thread across everything that marketers do, so activities must align with brand identity, guidelines, and values while adhering to security protocols to remain effective.

Exchanges Taking Place Via Audio Rather Than Visual Platforms

MacAuley: Across DXP solutions, we are seeing a switch from exchanges taking place via audio rather than visual platforms. Going forward, rather than typing messages to AI platforms on our devices, more people will communicate with their devices using audio, speaking to tools like agentic AI to deliver instructions.

From a user experience perspective, this will effectively switch the role of technology to be more like a personal assistant to take on tasks and carry them out.

AI Agents for Experimentation

Corey: Agentic AI is a game changer. Optimizely’s Opal is a good example of this in action. Opal introduces agentic AI that’s built specifically for marketers. Not just to automate tasks but to actually do the work in smart, creative ways.

Opal uses specialized AI agents trained on things like content, experimentation, and campaign data to handle everyday tasks like analyzing web pages, generating content, or pulling performance reports.

It’s designed to work the way marketers do, with a new, intuitive interface, persistent chat across the whole platform, and flexible workflows that can string multiple actions together.

Real-Time Data Activation

Egan: One of the most transformative capabilities we’ve introduced at Contentstack is real-time data activation, supercharged by our recent acquisition of Lytics. As organizations move away from monolithic DXPs toward composable architectures, activating data at the moment it’s captured is no longer a luxury; it’s a necessity.

With Lytics’ powerful customer data platform technology now integrated into our Composable DXP, we enable enterprises to unify behavioral, transactional, and contextual data and immediately turn it into personalized experiences across every digital touchpoint. This is real-time intelligence embedded directly into the content layer, allowing marketers to trigger content changes and customer journeys in milliseconds.

This capability turns data from something you analyse later into something you act on now. It transforms personalization from reactive to predictive. And most importantly, it closes the loop between insight and execution, giving brands the agility and intelligence to deliver truly dynamic digital experiences.

The Future of the DXP Market

Real-Time Data-Driven Experiences

Gong: At Contentful, we believe the future of the DXP market lies in real-time, data-driven personalized experiences powered by Generative AI. As content creation scales, data becomes the engine that fuels everything from audience segmentation to AI decision-making and dynamic content optimization.

Soon, teams will be able to deliver experiences that continuously learn and adapt based on live audience signals and performance insights. Next generation DXPs won’t just manage content, they’ll intelligently orchestrate it, ensuring every visitor sees the most relevant, high-impact experience in real time.

Hyper-Personalization

Faatz: It is an exciting time to be part of the DXP space, particularly if you thrive in an environment of change and experimentation. The DXP market will continue to evolve in the face of AI.

As the technology brings new innovations, I believe we will realize the promise of hyper-personalization. We will see precise targeting and higher engagement. I believe AI will change the face of the digital experience, allowing the end-user to tailor it to their needs and wants.

In some cases, AI will become the UI, and this will have a profound impact on the way end-users engage with the digital experience.

The DXP itself will become more malleable and scalable as the end-user’s behavior changes. This may mean that the DXP delivers content and experiences in different ways, including through AI Agents.

Broad View of Information Management

Hellier: Is DXP a platform, a set of applications, or highly composable experiences for both customers and the employees who help ensure customers are successful?

The future will be fast-moving, innovative, and highly agile. Organizations will need to do more with less and meet a wide set of customer expectations. Organizations will need to set a strong vision on how they will differentiate in the experience economy and adapt like crazy.

We’ve just begun AI and data innovation. The future winners will have a broader view of Information Management and look beyond marketing-led, customer acquisition-centric experiences.

It needs to be the full journey, especially post-purchase, where loyalty, growth, and profitability thrive. These critical experiences, such as onboarding, self-service, and interactive customer communications, to name a few, will be powered by well-integrated, composable DXP platforms. The name of the game is being open.

Agentic AI… Again!

Cherif: The future of the DXP market relies on a balance between human control and AI. With automation breakthroughs ongoing, success hinges on two aspects: the correct adoption of AI for a company’s needs and the correct combination of human input and automation.

As brands scale personalized experiences, AI will play a growing role in content creation, optimization, and decision-making. However, expert contextual guidance will remain critical for teaching AI systems how to be effective.

Agentic experiences will change the way marketers operate and the end customer experience. The evolution is clear, for example, at Microsoft Build, Open Agentic Web was announced, an internet where agents make decisions and perform tasks on behalf of users.

Alignment of AI with Traditional Infrastructure

MacAuley: The future of the DXP market will undoubtedly be focused on ensuring that sites and services are prepared for the adoption of agentic AI and the presentation layer of communications shifting from visual to audio.

These technological shifts will undoubtedly change user experiences on platforms, but must be backed up by robust interfaces to prevent early adoption issues.

Optimization of Data

Corey: The DXP market is maturing. We no longer need to convince marketers and CX professionals that personalization, real-time data, or omnichannel experiences matter – they already know. The future is now all about optimization.

With budgets tightening, teams stretched, and customer expectations climbing, marketers and CX professionals need to do more with less. DXPs must rise to that challenge, not just unlocking great experiences, but continuously optimizing them and improving on what came before.

AI will be absolutely essential to this future.

Composable API-First Platforms

Egan: The DXP market is at a crossroads, and many legacy vendors are struggling to keep up. Monolithic platforms are outdated, too rigid, too slow, and too expensive to meet today’s fast-paced digital demands.

The industry’s obsession with “all-in-one” suites is holding brands back from true innovation. The future belongs to composable, adaptive, API-first platforms that give businesses real freedom and control.

In my view, the market will consolidate around cloud-native solutions that prioritize real-time data activation and intelligent orchestration. Brands that fail to embrace this shift will lose ground to more nimble competitors. It’s time to challenge the status quo and rethink how digital experiences are built and delivered, before it’s too late.

Miss out on our previous CX Today roundtable? Check it out here: Contact Center Automation: Trends, Tricks, and Tools.