The agentic AI era has arrived, and customer experience is leading the charge. But what does that actually mean for enterprises trying to plan, prioritise, and deploy responsibly?

In this interview, CX Today's Nicole Willing speaks with Martin Taylor, Co-Founder and Deputy CEO of Content Guru, about the real shift happening right now in AI-powered CX, and what leaders need to do about it.

The conversation covers:

What the transition from GenAI to agentic AI actually looks like in practice, which CX tasks AI agents handle reliably today, and which ones still need human involvement, and how to build on existing automation investments rather than starting from scratch. You’ll also learn why the MIT finding that 95% of GenAI projects failed should inform your agentic strategy, a practical framework for scoping your first pilots, and why CX is the natural home for agentic AI adoption.

Taylor also addresses a question many leaders are sitting with right now: is it better to wait and let others test the water first? His answer is clear, but nuanced, and worth hearing in full.

In this episode, Rob Wilkinson is joined by Steve Blood, VP of Market Intelligence at Five9, and Martyn Redstone, a consultant specialising in AI regulation.

Together, they unpack where CX teams are most likely to misread the Act, why “we bought it from a big vendor” is not a compliance strategy, and how governance needs to shift from dashboards to outcomes customers actually feel. The conversation also digs into the clash between legacy on-prem approaches and the EU AI Act’s expectations around logging, data visibility, and conformity assessments.

If you are running AI pilots in the contact centre, balancing cloud migration decisions, or trying to protect customer trust while innovating fast, this is your practical briefing.

If your AI agent fails, customers escalate to a human and you “pay double.” In this CX Today interview, Gautam Vasudev, SVP Agentforce Contact Center at Salesforce, breaks down what CX leaders should measure as they roll out agentic service, and why cost alone is a trap.

We cover where AI works best today (high-volume, low-risk queries), where customers still demand a human (complex, high-stakes scenarios like healthcare and finance), and how the frontline agent role changes when routine work moves to automation. Vasudev also outlines how Salesforce thinks about giving customers a clear path to escalate, and why the real differentiation is not basic workflows, but what you build on top of them.

Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Rémi Guinier, Head of AI Product at Diabolocom, to tackle one of the most pressing challenges in customer experience right now: the gap between AI investment and measurable business value.

If your contact center has been pouring budget into AI tools but struggling to prove the impact, this conversation is essential viewing. Rémi pulls back the curtain on why generic models fall short, what “Shapeable AI” actually means in practice, and how Diabolocom's quality monitoring tools are helping supervisors work smarter, not just harder.

AI is everywhere in the contact center space, but can you actually measure what it's doing for your business? Rémi Guinier breaks down the hard truths and practical fixes CX leaders need to hear.

Generic AI models are failing contact centers. Trained on clean, idealistic audio datasets, most off-the-shelf models buckle under real-world conditions – background noise, interruptions, and latency that makes real-time use impractical.

Shapeable AI puts control back in your hands. Rather than forcing teams to fit a generic tool, Diabolocom's approach lets supervisors configure evaluation criteria, summary formats, and quality grids to match their specific business standards.

Auto-calibration closes the accuracy gap fast. By grading a "golden dataset" of calls, Diabolocom's quality monitoring tool self-adjusts its prompts – moving similarity scores from ~70% up to the low-to-mid 90s against supervisor evaluations.

The three signs of a truly successful AI project. Rémi's framework is refreshingly clear: improvement on core business metrics (CSAT, FCR, AHT), strong adoption rates across the team, and measurable time saved. Hit all three and you've got a winner.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit CX Today.

In this discussion, host Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, for a reaction to one of the biggest leadership stories in enterprise tech.

Shantanu Narayen’s decision to step down as Adobe CEO after 18 years sent shockwaves through the market, and for anyone running customer experience operations on Adobe’s stack, the implications go well beyond a stock price dip.

Liz explains why this is a “fast moving train” story, not a recovery story, and what that means for the next leader.

Brand Concierge and the contact center opportunity: Liz spotlights Adobe’s self-service bot solution as a genuinely surprising move into discovery-led CX, and why it matters for contact center leaders specifically.

What the next CEO must do in 90 days: It’s not about rebuilding. It’s about articulating a vision fast, leaning into ecosystem partnerships with AWS and Nvidia, and proving you can be “the conductor of one of the fastest moving trains in technology.”

If you think you understand what customers expect in 2026… this conversation might surprise you.

In this episode, Rob Wilkinson sits down with customer service and experience expert Shep Hyken to unpack insights from his State of Customer Service and CX 2026 report - and some of the findings challenge long-held assumptions about what actually drives loyalty.

They explore what customers say matters most right now, including why product quality can outweigh service, why convenience often beats friendliness, and why rudeness or apathy is a fast track to churn. They also tackle channel preferences: despite the continued push toward self-service, many customers still want to speak to a human on the phone when the issue is serious.

The conversation also explores a channel reality many teams can’t ignore. Even with the push toward automation and self-service, a significant share of customers still want to pick up the phone when the problem is serious.

With AI dominating the CX agenda, Hyken keeps the focus where it belongs: how customers perceive change, not just how organisations want to operate.

If you lead CX, contact centre operations, or digital service strategy, this interview is a grounded reset on what will actually move the needle in 2026.

Simon Leyland on $50k MDF, agentic AI in the contact center, and why “bold and fast” is the only strategy that makes sense in 2026.

In this discussion, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Simon Leyland, CEO and Co-Founder of CloudInteract – one of the UK's leading Advanced AWS Partners, built entirely around Amazon Connect.

With AWS putting up to $75k in Marketing Development Funds on the table for Connect implementations and new Agentic AI specialization categories, there's never been a more urgent moment to ask: is the traditional contact center industry running out of time?

Simon doesn't hold back.

In this candid conversation, Simon argues that the contact center industry is at the same inflection point newspapers hit in 2010 – and that the companies failing to move now will find themselves playing catch-up against competitors running AI agents around the clock.

Key Takeaways Include:

🔴 Why AWS is still being overlooked: even by large enterprises already spending millions with AWS on core infrastructure, Amazon Connect isn't on the radar. Simon explains the organizational disconnect driving that blind spot.

🔴 The 60-70% figure, explained: CloudInteract analyzed thousands of real calls and consistently found 60-70% are simple interactions. Simon breaks down what it takes to get from the industry's current ~10% automation rate to that ceiling.

🔴 Agentic AI vs. bots: technologically similar, but the stakes are entirely different when there's a customer on the end of the line in real time. Simon unpacks the guardrails, data requirements, and human change management piece that makes or breaks a deployment.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

A recent Gartner report suggests that by 2030, generative AI could cost more per customer interaction than a live human agent. What does that mean for small and midsize businesses?

In this episode of CX Today, Francesca Roche speaks with Nathan Strum, CEO of Abbey Connect, about how SMBs should rethink automation budgets, customer journeys, and long term growth strategies. Instead of focusing only on cost reduction, Nathan outlines a rebalancing approach that starts with human systems and works backward to apply AI where it adds value.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com