CX Today

Constellation Research’s Liz Miller explains why Salesforce’s $5.66B Braze deal is about the execution layer behind data, AI, content, and customer engagement. Salesforce has agreed to acquire Braze for $5.66B. The deal adds Braze’s real-time, cross-channel customer engagement and decisioning capabilities to Salesforce’s growing stack of CRM, data, AI, and content tools. But, according to Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research, this is about more than ano...

Contact centers are under pressure to automate, cut costs, and reduce customer contact. But are efficiency targets improving service, or simply making it harder for customers to get help? In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher speaks with Natalie Beckerman, Chief Business Officer at iQor and author of When Did You Stop Caring?, about the “caring recession” she believes has taken hold in customer service. Beckerman explains why containment, deflection, and average handle t...

Brands have more customer data, dashboards, and campaign tools than ever. Yet turning a useful customer signal into the right action can still take too long. In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher speaks with Kabir Shahani, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Amperity, about Pér, Amperity’s new customer data agent. Shahani explains why customer engagement often slows down after a business spots the signal, as information passes between analytics, marketing, service, and activation t...

In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Suzie Dieth, VP and Chief Experience Officer at NRG, about why churn should concern every customer experience leader. In deregulated energy markets, customers have plenty of options and can switch providers with relative ease. Dieth explains why the decision to leave often starts much earlier, and what businesses can do to spot the warning signs before it is too late. A customer switching provider is ...

In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Kim Johal, Retail Specialist at Infobip, about WhatsApp’s growing role in UK retail customer engagement. Infobip’s research points to a shift away from one-way notifications and toward richer conversations across service, shopping, loyalty, and returns. Johal explains why the next challenge for retailers is not sending more messages, but making every interaction feel relevant enough to deserve a pl...

Are customer experiences becoming too clunky for the way people now want to communicate? In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Peter Bell, VP of Marketing, EMEA at Twilio, about how voice is changing the way consumers interact with technology, and what that means for brands designing the next generation of digital customer journeys. Peter explores Twilio research showing that almost a quarter of Brits now talk more than they type when using technology, rising to 33 percent a...

In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Russell White, Transformation Lead at Bluecrest, and Reece Harper, Account Executive at NiCE. Bluecrest has moved from reviewing a sample of calls to analyzing every customer interaction through NiCE CXone. The conversation explores what happens when contact centers stop relying on assumptions and start using customer intent, real conversation data, and human-reviewed AI summaries to guide decisions. ...

In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Christina Augustine, COO of Bloomreach, about the growing impact of AI on product discovery, personalization, and retailer loyalty. With shoppers increasingly asking ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude where to buy, the conversation unpacks whether brands deliver the same depth, confidence, and relevance once customers arrive on their own sites? AI is quickly becoming the first stop in the shopping journey. B...

Are contact center buyers still using yesterday’s criteria to make tomorrow’s technology decisions? In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Keith Dawson, Research Director at ISG, about what contact center leaders should prioritize in 2026 as artificial intelligence, automation, analytics, and customer expectations reshape the market. Keith explains why the contact center is evolving from a routing and efficiency engine into a broader customer engagement environment. He explor...

In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Hannah Deveney, Senior Director of Product Management at Zendesk, about the changing role of voice in AI-powered customer service. As AI agents handle more routine requests, live calls are increasingly reserved for urgent, sensitive, and complicated issues. Deveney explains why Zendesk is bringing real-time, two-way translation into its contact center, and why the technology needs strong guardrails...

Marcus Law speaks with Guy Yaffe, VP of Interaction Recordings at AudioCodes, about the changing enterprise recording market and why native recording alone may not meet the needs of regulated organizations. They explore the difference between convenient recording and compliance-grade recording, including policy-based capture, long-term retention, access controls, resilience, and the ability to retrieve historic communications when needed. The conversation then moves beyond retention. Yaffe ex...

In this CX Today interview, Technology Journalist Nicole Willing speaks with Amit Namjoshi, Executive Director of Technology Consulting at TTEC Digital, about why the EU AI Act should matter to customer experience and contact center leaders, not just legal and compliance teams. Namjoshi explains why CX leaders are becoming the “stewards of AI” in customer-facing operations, how hidden AI can appear in tools such as agent assist, call summaries, sentiment analysis, quality management and workf...

Are your customers getting joined-up conversations, or are they starting from scratch every time they contact your business? In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Karen Krivaa, Chief Marketing Officer at MMDSmart, about why so many businesses are still struggling to turn omnichannel ambition into real execution. Krivaa explains why fragmented systems, disconnected customer data, and poorly integrated messaging tools are holding organizations back. Findings from MMDSmart’s s...

In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Sean Jackson, Lead AI Architect at Sprinklr, about how AI-generated answers are changing customer discovery, brand comparison, and buyer decision-making. Sean explains why the customer journey is increasingly moving inside AI tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity, where buyers can research, compare, and shortlist brands before a sales or marketing team sees any signal. For CX and marketing leaders, that creates a new visibility cha...

In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Richard Manthorpe, Director of Product Management at Content Guru, about the changing role of customer data, customer relationship management (CRM) and orchestration in AI-enabled CX. As vendors increasingly talk about agentic experiences, AI-native platforms, systems of action, and systems of decision, Manthorpe explains why CX leaders need to look beyond the terminology and focus on outcomes. He discusses why CRM remains valuable as a s...

In this CX Today interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Kristin King, Chief Customer Officer at UJET, and Tena Curic, Senior Customer Success Manager at UJET, about what they learned by spending time directly inside customer contact centers. Rather than relying only on dashboards, reports, or quarterly business reviews, the UJET team sat with agents and supervisors to understand how AI is actually affecting day-to-day service. They discuss why agents want AI to remove repetitive work, how poor ...

Enterprise CX leaders face a difficult question: which AI strategies will deliver measurable customer and operational value, and which are simply buying time? In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher speaks with Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research, about how the customer experience AI market is beginning to separate into offensive and defensive camps. The conversation starts with Avaya, whose cautious approach to AI raises a bigger market question: can legacy vendors keep pace as ...

Support leaders are under pressure to improve customer experience, coach agents, manage technology, and keep operations moving. Yet quality assurance often becomes another task on an already overloaded list. In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher speaks with Ty Given, Founder and CEO at CX Collective, about why Quality as a Service could offer a more practical route for teams that need better QA insight without more admin. Given explains that running a support team can feel like running a sm...

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 i...

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 tha...

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 ...

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 exter...

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 suc...

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 ...

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 ...

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 nearl...

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 cl...

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 custome...

Three CX leaders get brutally honest about why infrastructure resilience has become the boardroom problem nobody is prepared for. In this CX Today Roundtable discussion, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher is joined by Ty Givens (Founder and CEO of the CX Collective), Rhona Bradshaw (CX Consultant), and Mike Wehrs (COO, TieTechnology) to tackle one of the most underestimated risks in enterprise CX: infrastructure resilience. Most organizations assume their stack is resilient. Most are ...

Retail customer satisfaction climbed to 94.6 percent in Q1 2026, but the headline figure only tells part of the story. In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche speaks with Tim Waterton, Chief Revenue Officer at HappyOrNot, about what is really driving improvements in retail CX and where performance still breaks down. Waterton explains why retailers are getting better at managing tough operational environments, how real-time microfeedback is changing decision-making on the shop floor, and ...

Salesforce’s Agentforce Contact Center launch has split analyst opinion, and this CX Today debate gets straight to why. Host Rob Wilkinson is joined by Zeus Kerravala of ZK Research and Dave Michels of TalkingPointz to unpack what Agentforce actually is, what problem it is trying to solve, and what it could break. Kerravala frames Agentforce as a serious attempt to reduce “fragmentation hell” by converging CRM, customer interactions, and AI into a single platform layer, so agents stop being ...

As customer support teams move from first-gen genAI co-pilots to autonomous agents, the real risk is assuming AI will “automate everything” without changing how support actually works. In this CX Today interview, Vishal Sharma, CTO at SearchUnify, explains why most enterprises still aren’t ready for fully autonomous support and what needs to happen first. Sharma breaks down the operational shift from “find” to “assist” to “act,” and why workflows and the underlying support stack must be rebui...

Blair Pleasant breaks down what this landmark contract really means for the CCaaS market, the hyperscaler threat, and why an eight-year contract is both bold and logical Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Blair Pleasant, President and Principal Analyst at COMMfusion, to dissect one of the biggest CCaaS deals ever announced. With HMRC committing to a $670M, eight-year contract via Capgemini and NiCE, Blair cuts through the headline noise to explain what thi...

How do retailers deliver a consistent customer experience when shoppers move fluidly between online research and in-store decision-making? In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche speaks with Daniel Todaro, CEO of Gekko Group, about the widening gap between digital information and shop-floor execution. Todaro argues the biggest disconnect is knowledge, including what customers can learn online versus what they can get from a trained advisor in store. He also explains why constant discount...

AI is making cyber attacks easier to scale, more personalized, and harder to spot, and that’s showing up directly in the contact center. In this CX Today panel, Nicole Willing is joined by Miguel Fornes, Information Security Manager at Surfshark, Randy Layman, CTO at AVOXI, and Ron Zayas, CEO at Ironwall by Incogni. Together, they unpack how attackers are using agentic AI to accelerate social engineering, exploit the vast amount of personal data online, and increase account takeover attempts ...

As AI generated answers increasingly replace traditional search results, brands are facing a new visibility challenge. In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche speaks with Peter Sloterdyk, Chief Marketing Officer at Gist, about the launch of Gist Geo and what AI driven discovery means for modern marketing teams. The conversation explores why traditional SEO metrics are no longer enough, how brands can measure visibility inside AI answers, and why sentiment, structured content, and actionab...

AI agents are everywhere in the CX conversation, but this CX Today case study gets specific. Nicole Willing speaks with Will Jones, GTM Operations Associate at CRM vendor Attio, and Paul Adams, Chief Product Officer at Intercom, about how Attio deployed Intercom’s AI agent, Fin, as a sales development representative (SDR) to handle inbound sales engagement. Jones breaks down what drove the move, including the push to stay ahead of changing buyer expectations and the reality that static forms...

A production database deletion and 30-hour outage at Pocket OS has become a cautionary tale for any organization bringing agentic AI into critical systems. In this interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Alex Gallego, CEO of Redpanda Data, about what went wrong and why blaming the model misses the point. They unpack the enterprise basics that still get skipped: separating development from production, tightening authentication and authorization and scoping agent permissions away from dangerous ...

CRMs and customer data platforms (CDPs) can store a mountain of customer data, but that does not automatically translate into better experiences. In this CX Today panel, Ben Robinson, Head of Technology at Fair Finance, Amory Somers Vine, Head of Customer Experience at Expereo, and John Cheney, CEO of Workbooks, discuss what it takes to move from systems of record to systems of action. The conversation digs into why many CRM programs still fall short, including heavy customisation, silo...

AI agents are handling more customer conversations than ever, but what happens when automation reaches its limit? In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Craig Cotton, Global VP of Product Management at Concentrix, about one of the most important moments in the modern customer journey, the handoff from AI to a human advisor. Cotton explains why brands risk damaging customer trust when customers have to repeat information after a failed bot interaction, and why even a small fail...

From Excel spreadsheets and NPS below zero to a 4.7 Trustpilot rating, Openreach and NiCE pull back the curtain on one of the UK's most ambitious AI deployments. Introduction Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, sits down with Chris Herbert, Director of Customer Service at Openreach; Eifion Lloyd, Senior Manager of Customer Enablement and Strategy at Openreach; and Giles Bryan, General Manager of Proactive AI at NiCE. With 25 million homes in scope and 700 communica...

Customer journeys are no longer linear, and AI alone won’t fix the friction customers feel when they need fast, empathetic support. In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Mike Clifton and Max Schwendner, Co-CEOs of Alorica, about how real-time data, emotionally aware AI, and human support are reshaping customer experience. They explore why businesses need to move beyond generic personalization, how AI can help agents understand customer sentiment in real time, and why the be...

What does it take to redesign a video platform used by teams across marketing, editorial, and media operations at scale? In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche sits down with Alessandro Fumi, Product Manager at Brightcove, and Matteo Paoli, Product Designer at Brightcove, to unpack the thinking behind Prism, Brightcove’s newly redesigned platform interface. The discussion explores how feedback from more than 100 customers shaped Prism’s focus on usability, consistency, and clearer info...

What happens when your “great” customer experience is optimised for humans, but your next customer is an AI agent? In this CX Today interview, Carrie Brough, Director of Strategy and Ops for TTEC Digital EMEA, argues that a single CX model is fast becoming a liability. Brough explains why AI-driven interactions need quick, decision-ready responses, while humans still need empathy, context, and brand nuance. Carrie breaks down the operational warning signs that your AI and human traffic...

Only 29 percent of consumers globally trust organizations to use AI responsibly. So, what does that mean for CX leaders trying to scale AI without damaging customer relationships? In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Dr. Ben Granger, Chief Workplace Psychologist at Qualtrics, about why trust has become one of the biggest barriers to enterprise AI adoption. Granger explains why successful AI transformation depends on more than deploying new tools. It requires leaders to bui...

Single chatbots are giving way to coordinated teams of AI agents that can execute workflows across systems, policies, and teams. In this interview, Rob Wilkinson speaks with Raj Koneru, Founder and CEO at Kore.ai, about why multi-agent architecture is becoming inevitable in customer experience (CX). Raj breaks down what has changed in the last 12 months as models have improved in generation and reasoning. He explains why “prompting alone is not an enterprise architecture” and why CX leaders ...

Cisco's VP of Webex CX discusses orchestrating AI-native contact centers, why “deflection” is the wrong metric, and what enterprise-grade really means in the age of agentic AI - In this CX Today interview, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Vinod Muthukrishnan, VP and GM of Webex CX at Cisco, ahead of Cisco Live. With a wave of major product announcements on the horizon, Vinod makes a compelling case that the contact center industry has reached a genuine inflection point...

AI video adoption is accelerating, but many CX teams are struggling to see measurable results. In this CX Today interview, Francesca Roche sits down with Brendan Cournoyer, VP of Marketing at SundaySky, to unpack why enterprise AI video initiatives often fall flat when personalization is missing. They explore why speed and scale alone do not drive engagement, how relevance changes effectiveness across the customer journey, and what CX leaders should prioritize to move from experimentation to ...

Are legacy CRM platforms ready for the agentic AI era, or are enterprises trying to force new intelligence into systems built for a different time? In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Jason Eubanks, Co-Founder and CEO of Aurasell, about why traditional CRM architectures may struggle to support autonomous agents, real-time decision-making, and truly connected customer operations. Eubanks explains why many legacy CRM systems were designed as systems of record, not systems of ...

The Principal Analyst at ZK Research breaks down whether Zoom's 'system of action' pivot is the real deal or just clever repositioning In this CX Today discussion, Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Zeus Kerravala, Principal Analyst at ZK Research. Zeus recently published a deep-dive on Zoom's strategic transformation, and the findings are more surprising than most in the industry expect. If you work in CX, contact center, or IT, and you still think of Zoom as a meetin...