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, EMEA CTO 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."