CX Today

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538

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Aug 2026

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News and Insights for Today, and Tomorrow CX Today reports on the latest customer experience technology news and marketplace trends. Every day our tech journalists uncover the hottest topics and vendor innovations shaping the future of work. Our coverage is fully digital offering our audience authentic news and insights on the channel of their choice. We offer daily news, weekly features, video conversations and authority content aligned to the needs of business leaders in today's world.For industry professionals, our weekly newsletter offers a range of popular stories hand-picked by our editorial team. Subscribe to our weekly newsletter.If you're seeking editorial coverage, connect with our news desk.

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August 13, 202621 min

Your Customer Journey Analytics Are Broken – And Buying More AI Won't Fix It

In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher sits down with Ty Givens, Founder and CEO of CX Collective , and Simel Kara, CX Account Director for Digital Experience and Transformation at Effect Digital, to dig into why end-to-end journey visibility remains out of reach for most organizations — and why reaching for AI as the solution is likely making things worse. Simel frames the core issue around what he calls a missing "conductor" — organizations tend to have reasonable visibility within individual channels, but no shared memory connecting them. The handoffs are where everything unravels. Ty puts it in starker operational terms. Customers bouncing between a bot, a new channel, and a live agent are retelling their story every single time — because the underlying systems simply aren't integrated. And piling AI on top of that doesn't help. "If you don't have any of those things, what's going to happen is that those issues are actually going to be amplified because AI doesn't fix that." Both speakers land on the same closing advice: stop buying tools and start fixing the foundations. Assign clear ownership for AI oversight, document what success actually looks like, and treat journey analytics as a live operational discipline rather than a reporting exercise. As Ty puts it, someone needs to get off the dance floor and oversee the whole room. Right now, in most organizations, nobody is.

August 10, 202625 min

The AI Race Has a Customer Experience Problem

In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Muj Choudhury, CEO of RocketPhone.ai and former Salesforce Director, about the uncomfortable questions surrounding enterprise AI. As organizations race to deploy AI agents, Choudhury argues that bigger investments and flashier product names do not automatically produce better customer experiences. This is a candid conversation about data, workflow design, agent coaching, risk, and how to find AI use cases that improve service rather than simply chasing automation. AI may be everywhere in CX, but Choudhury says the industry needs to get far more honest about where it delivers value and where it creates new problems. Drawing on his Salesforce background and his work at RocketPhone.ai, Choudhury joins CX Today’s Rhys Fisher to unpack why enterprise AI success depends on more than an LLM, a chatbot, or an ambitious product launch. Why Salesforce’s acquisition-heavy history and changing AI strategy create a difficult integration challenge, especially as smaller, less encumbered competitors move quickly. Why customer data, including voice and contact center conversations, is the essential foundation for relevant AI experiences. A real-world field-service example showing how AI can help engineers arrive with the right part, reduce wasted visits, and improve the customer outcome. Why AI should support human coaching and risk management, not replace experienced managers or introduce unsafe, non-compliant service interactions. Choudhury’s message is clear: start with people and broken processes, then apply AI where it produces a measurable result. Watch the full interview, then assess your own AI roadmap: Is it solving a specific customer problem, using trustworthy data, and keeping human accountability where it matters? For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

August 6, 2026Episode 224 min

How Vonage Is Rebuilding Agent Experience for a Multi-CRM, AI-Driven Era

Rob Wilkinson speaks with Rodney Hassard, Head of Product, Applications Group at Vonage , about how intelligent workspaces are reshaping the agent experience. Rodney explains why customer relationship management (CRM) fragmentation is becoming a major barrier for service teams, especially as organizations adopt more AI tools across the contact center. He explores how agents often become “human middleware,” switching between multiple CRMs, copying and pasting data, and trying to piece together customer context in real time. That friction affects confidence, consistency, handle time, first contact resolution, and customer trust. Rodney also discusses how the Vonage Intelligent Workspace creates a browser-based layer between engagement channels and CRM environments, connecting natively to 13 CRM platforms and giving agents a single pane of glass. He shares why real-time context is essential for AI to deliver accurate, useful recommendations, and why leaders should start with a workflow audit before investing in more technology. Watch the full interview to learn how CX leaders can reduce agent friction, improve AI outcomes, and create a more connected service experience.

August 4, 202615 min

HubSpot Got the Blame, But Does the Whole Industry Have the Same Problem?

The HubSpot data enrichment controversy generated plenty of heat. Alexi Hatch, CMO of Acoustic , is more interested in the light. Speaking with CX Today's Rhys Fisher, Hatch reframes the episode not as a one-company scandal but as a symptom of a wider industry habit she calls "signal debt" — the over-reliance on borrowed, static enrichment data that tells you what a contact's job title was last quarter but nothing about what they actually want today. "Piling on more enrichment and external data feels like deeper customer understanding, but it's just an illusion of intelligence," Hatch says. "The antidote to signal debt isn't borrowing more consumer signals, it's having the in-house capabilities to analyze better ones." The conversation covers where brands typically go wrong, with Hatch pointing to declining open rates and flat engagement as the clearest early signs that a CRM built on static data is running out of road. She also draws a hard line on consent — opt-in, she argues, is black and white, and brands that rely on "fuzzy" opt-ins are storing up a trust problem that no amount of enrichment will fix. The discussion then shifts to the activation gap: collecting behavioral data is one challenge, but acting on it fast enough to be relevant is another. If the insight and action layers of your tech stack can't talk to each other in real time, the window closes before the message lands. For CX and marketing leaders trying to make sense of where the industry goes from here, it's a grounded and practically useful conversation.

August 3, 202623 min

Adobe Summit 2026: Liz Miller Calls Out the Market on AI Strategy – and She's Not Holding Back

From agentic AI to brand intelligence and Firefly's trust-first model, Constellation Research's Liz Miller drops unfiltered insights from the Vegas floor. In this on-the-ground dispatch from Adobe Summit 2026, CX Today Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Liz is one of the sharpest voices in the CX and marketing technology space – and she's not here to sugarcoat anything. From the buzz around Shantanu Narayan's succession to Adobe's evolving agentic AI platform strategy, this conversation cuts through the noise and gets into what actually matters for enterprise marketers right now. Adobe Summit is buzzing... and not just about leadership transitions. Liz Miller joins Rhys Fisher to break down what's actually moving the needle for CX leaders on the ground in Vegas. 🔴 Adobe CX Enterprise reframed: It's not a new product, it's a clarified story. Liz explains how Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) has always been the foundation, and why this rebranding is about helping enterprises understand how all the pieces connect in an agentic world. 🔴 Brand Intelligence is the standout: Adobe's new solution lets marketers track how their brand appears across LLMs and AI search, not just the traditional web. As agent-to-agent engagement becomes real, knowing how your agents get found is mission-critical. 🔴 Firefly's trust-first architecture: Adobe didn't bolt on safety after the fact. Liz walks through why Content Authenticity and invisible watermarking aren't lip service; they're structural, and they matter deeply for enterprise brand security. 🔴 The radiologist moment: Jensen Huang's story from the keynote – AI can now read 100% of CT scans, yet demand for radiologists is rising – perfectly captures why Adobe's decade-long AI investment is a strategy, not a slogan. For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

August 3, 202637 min

CX Experts Expose the Ugly Truth Behind Customer Journey Orchestration

Why connected journeys remain broken in 2026, and what it actually takes to fix them. CX Today's Rhys Fisher is joined by Adrian Swinscoe (Punk CX), Jeannie Walters (Experience Investigators), and Robert Bradshaw (WiserOwl) to tackle one of CX's most persistent frustrations: the gap between the promise of orchestrated customer journeys and the fragmented reality most customers still live with. The technology is often ready; the organizations aren't. This roundtable cuts through the noise on why journey orchestration keeps failing, and what leaders need to do differently. Data misalignment is the root cause. CX metrics and actual cost structures rarely line up, making it nearly impossible to accurately value or fix broken journey stages. AI amplifies what's already there. Layer it onto a fragmented journey and you accelerate the damage, not the fix. Ownership is the elephant in the room. Until financial accountability is tied to journey performance, CX loses the internal prioritization battle — even when every team's KPIs are green. Brilliant basics beat big promises. Consistency and reliability build the trust foundation that makes orchestration actually stick. Map a real customer journey with your data team — find where friction lives. 👉 Visit cxtoday.com for more on CX strategy, AI, and journey orchestration.

August 3, 202610 min

Hot Takes or Hard Truths? The 2026 AI & CX Reality Check with Transcom

Eight of the biggest assumptions about AI and customer experience — tested, challenged, and corrected by two of the industry's most experienced voices Everywhere you turn, the conversation about AI and customer experience sounds the same. AI will replace the contact center. Customers don't want to talk to humans anymore. Automation will fix everything. But how much of that is actually true — and how much of it is costing brands real customers, real revenue, and real trust? In this CX Today reality check, Nicole Willing sits down with Jeff Blair, Chief Growth Officer, and Cortney Jonas Burnos, VP of AI and Digital at Transcom, to put the industry's boldest AI and CX assumptions under the microscope. Eight hot takes. Two experts with decades of frontline CX and AI experience between them. Zero tolerance for hype. What emerges isn't a defence of AI or a rejection of it. It's something more useful: a clear-eyed, evidence-backed challenge to the assumptions quietly shaping — and in some cases, quietly damaging — CX strategy in 2026. You'll find out why 78% of customers now attempt self-service first — and why self-service is simultaneously ranked the least effective channel for resolving issues. You'll hear why the brands seeing the biggest returns from AI are actually spending more on customer experience, not less. And you'll understand why the biggest barrier to AI transformation isn't technology at all. The conversation covers the moments that matter most — when digital tools fail, when customers escalate, when a bot loop turns a manageable issue into a brand reputation problem. It challenges the idea that outsourcing means losing control. It reframes what great agents actually do in an AI-powered environment. And it draws a straight line between poor automation decisions and the customer churn that follows. If your 2026 CX strategy is built on any of these assumptions, this is the conversation you need to have before your next budget decision. The real question, as Jeff Blair puts it, isn't whether AI will replace the contact center. It's whether organisations are ready to rethink how customer experience actually operates in an AI-powered world. The hot takes are provocative. The hard truths are harder to ignore.

August 3, 202612 min

Regal CEO says "The AI Regulation Patchwork Is Holding Innovation Back"

California's new AI executive order is forcing a conversation every enterprise needs to have – but what does it actually mean for customer experience? In this episode of CX Today, Francesca Roche sits down with Alex Levin, CEO of Regal, to explore how organizations can build meaningful AI safety measures without waiting for regulators to mandate them. From system-level guardrails to agent-specific compliance by industry, Alex shares how Regal has been tackling this challenge for nearly six years — long before legislation caught up. The conversation digs into the growing problem of state-by-state AI regulation and why Alex believes a fragmented patchwork approach is slowing innovation and putting unnecessary strain on businesses operating at scale. With the EU AI Act adding another layer of complexity, we examine how enterprises can design internal governance structures that hold up across jurisdictions – and why some markets, like France and Italy, are seeing companies opt out of AI altogether as a result of overly restrictive rules. Alex also lays out three core principles he believes the industry must rally around if federal leadership doesn't emerge: always identify AI as AI, apply existing consumer protection rules like TCPA equally to automated interactions, and keep individual customer data out of LLM training pipelines. It's a candid, practical conversation about where AI governance stands today – and what it will take to build customer trust at scale.

August 3, 202621 min

Talkdesk Calls Out the AI Hype Machine – And Offers a Way Out

Pedro Andrade discusses why most AI deployments fail, why your KPIs are lying to you, and how the Talkdesk CXA Operations Center changes the game Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Pedro Andrade, VP of AI at Talkdesk, to dig into one of the most pressing challenges facing contact center leaders today: deploying AI at scale without flying blind. With AI agents now handling real customer interactions, the stakes have never been higher – and as Pedro makes clear, the gap between expectation and reality is wider than most vendors want to admit. AI is everywhere in the contact center, but visibility, governance, and accountability are lagging dangerously behind. Pedro Andrade pulls no punches in this conversation, breaking down exactly why so many AI projects underdeliver and what it takes to fix that. 🔴 The black box problem: Pedro explains why deploying AI without real-time observability is like "driving at high speed, blindfolded" – and how Talkdesk's

August 3, 202618 min

How Agentic AI Is Replacing Scripted Retail Chatbots

Retail teams are moving beyond scripted chatbots and into agentic AI systems that can understand context, take action using tools, and coordinate across functions. In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing is joined by Gilbert Gooijers, Managing Director and Chief Operating Officer at CM.com, to explain what retail leaders often misunderstand about agentic AI, why multi-agent setups beat a single do-it-all bot, and how the right channel choice, from WhatsApp to RCS and voice, shapes customer experience across generations. Gooijers also shares real-world examples, including event-scale customer service and guided purchase journeys, before highlighting the biggest emerging risk: security. The message to retailers is clear: treat cybersecurity as the starting point, not an afterthought, as AI agents become more capable and more connected. For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com