CX Today’s 2025 Trends series brings together predictions from leading analysts, vendors, and practitioners to map out the year ahead.
To kick things off, there are six predictions that all examine what might be the most tangible shift taking shape in customer experience: agentic AI moving from underwhelming chatbots into systems that can actually handle real work.
After years of disappointing automation projects, the technology has reached a point where self-service might finally live up to its billing.
Meet the experts:
- Simon Thorpe, Director of Global Product Marketing for Customer Service & Sales Automation at Pegasystems
- Kishan Chetan, EVP and GM of Agentforce Service at Salesforce
- Matt Price, CEO of Crescendo
- Hakob Astabatsyan, Co-Founder & CEO of Synthflow AI
- Matthias Goehler, CTO in the Europe region for Zendesk
- Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research
The Chatbot Problem Nobody Wants to Talk About
Simon Thorpe, Director of Global Product Marketing for Customer Service & Sales Automation at Pegasystems, isn’t mincing words about where self-service has been.
“Look, everyone is talking about AI right now. And for good reason,” he says.
“But the thing that I’m really excited about is the fact that we can finally deliver self-service that actually works for our customers. You know, self-service that can get real work done. It’s able to resolve issues, complete tasks, deflect work from our centers and it’s self-service that our customers are actively going to want to use.”
Customers actively wanting to use self-service has been the unicorn of CX for the better part of two decades. Chatbots and IVRs promised a lot but mostly delivered frustration.
Simple queries? Sure. Anything remotely complicated? Straight back to the queue.
Thorpe sees agentic AI changing that dynamic because it can reason, adapt, and understand natural language in ways that rigid scripting never could.
He explains “What once took months is now going to take weeks, which is tremendously exciting.”
But there’s a catch. Speed without structure creates chaos, particularly in regulated industries where processes can’t just be improvised by an AI agent with good intentions.
“Without governance and workflow or workflow backbone, AI agents can go rogue. They can ignore processes. They can introduce risks.”
His solution is pairing agentic AI with enterprise-grade workflows that act as guardrails, ensuring “your rules, your regulations, your standards are consistently applied every single time.”
AI Agents Move from Pilot Projects to Production
Kishan Chetan, Salesforce’s EVP and GM of Agentforce Service, believes 2026 is when AI agents move away from experimentation toward becoming infrastructure.
“For me, the CX prediction for next year, the biggest one, is far more mainstream of AI agents,” he says.
“Companies across the board will use AI agents in their customer experience, and they’ll use that for different processes, and that’ll work seamlessly with their human service reps.”
The emphasis on working alongside humans rather than replacing them reflects how the conversation around AI has matured. Early hype suggested automation would eliminate jobs.
The reality is messier and more interesting: AI handles volume and repetition, humans manage complexity and judgment.
When AI Outperforms the Average Agent
Matt Price, CEO of Crescendo, makes a prediction that’s bound to spark debate: AI agents will become more empathetic and more efficient than humans in 2026.
“On average across all of the interactions between service agents and AI, AI will perform better because on average, AI assistants are able now to have great language, detect tone and respond appropriately to customers in the moment and have full access to all of the information that they need in order to give customers what they want, which is an answer.”
Price isn’t suggesting every AI interaction will beat every human one. Top-tier agents will still outperform AI. But AI doesn’t have bad days, doesn’t forget context, and doesn’t struggle with tone on the 200th repetitive call of the day. That consistency matters.
There’s also a perception angle here, as Price notes that “a lot of the time for clients, it’s not necessarily just how well you serve them, but how much effort you put in.
“And there’s nothing better than showing the amount of effort that’s been put in, than putting a human in the loop rather than an AI agent.”
So even as AI gains emotional intelligence, there will still be moments where customers want to know a person is involved.
The Innovation Slowdown (That’s Actually Good News)
Hakob Astabatsyan, Co-Founder & CEO at Synthflow AI, predicts 2026 will see a decline in forward-looking innovation and instead focus on making AI work at scale.
“My prediction for 2026 is that we will be seeing less groundbreaking innovation that we have experienced in the last two years and more ROE and value delivery to the customers, to enterprises.
“What I mean by that is more scalable, more reliable platforms that allow the enterprises to go into production and deploy agents, voice agents, but also chat, omnichannel chat and text agents into production and scale them to millions of calls.”
That might sound boring compared to the breathless pace of the last couple of years, but it’s what enterprises actually need. Over-the-top innovations don’t matter if the technology can’t handle production traffic without breaking.
From Reactive to Proactive
Matthias Goehler, CTO in the Europe region for Zendesk, sees AI shifting from solving problems to preventing them before customers even notice.
“My biggest prediction for 26 when it comes to CX is that AI will move from automation to anticipation,” he says. “Instant resolution still remains the biggest expectation of customers. But on top of that, customers also more and more expect personalized engagement.
“And then even on top of that, if companies could start to become more proactive and reach out to customers instead of customers having always to reach out to companies, I think then we’re really talking about the gold standard in service.”
That’s a higher bar than most organizations have reached, but the technology to get there has begun its early stages.
Customers Will Actually Prefer Virtual Agents (For Simple Tasks)
Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, predicts that for straightforward requests, customers will start choosing virtual agents over humans.
“My CX prediction for 2026 is that virtual agents get so good that for simple requests, people start to prefer the virtual agent over humans,” he says.
“And you might think that this is contrary to everything we believe, but if you look back at the early days of online banking and restaurant reservations online, people said that back then that no one would prefer a computer over a person. And in both cases that certainly wasn’t true.”
Kerravala draws a parallel to other initiatives that originally faced skepticism but eventually became preferred options once they proved faster and more reliable.
“Virtual agents can do things faster and more accurately than people now for complicated tasks. We’re still going to do prefer to a human, but in 2026 the quality of virtual agents will get so good that for simple tasks we’re going to prefer machines over people.”
The prediction doesn’t suggest humans become obsolete. It suggests customer preferences will align with the strengths of each channel.
What This Means for 2026
The common thread across these predictions is straightforward: AI agents are maturing from disappointing novelties into reliable tools that can handle real customer service work.
Self-service that actually works, agents that operate alongside humans without replacing them, and systems that anticipate problems rather than just reacting to them.
These aren’t abstract possibilities anymore. They’re becoming baseline expectations.
