Customer Experience is moving fast. But not always in the right direction. As AI becomes embedded in service operations, journeys grow more complex, and orchestration spans more teams and platforms, the gap between promising innovation and lived experience is increasingly visible.

In this article, three CX experts from Orange Business share their perspective on what they see changing in 2026, based on real client projects and ongoing CX transformations across sectors.

AI-first contact centers and unified CRM platforms

One of the most visible and operationally mature areas of CX transformation today is customer service and the contact center, where AI adoption is moving fastest from experimentation to scale.

According to Ayuna Asalkhanova, Functional Business Apps Expert at Orange Business, one of the clearest illustrations of how customer service is evolving today can be seen in Microsoft’s move toward an AI-first, unified CRM and Contact Center ecosystem.

Rather than relying on heavy integrations with external platforms such as ServiceNow or Salesforce, Microsoft is increasingly positioning its own stack, Dynamics 365 Customer Service together with Dynamics 365 Contact Center, as a more effective and financially attractive model.

Microsoft’s strategy increasingly moves from CRM into the Contact Center, leveraging a single data foundation to deliver AI-driven experiences across both customer service processes and live interaction channels. With a Copilot-first, cloud-native approach, generative AI is embedded across the service journey: voice, chat, digital messaging, routing, knowledge management and case resolution.

Ayuna highlights that these AI capabilities, including real-time transcription and translation, sentiment analysis, summarisation, intelligent routing and next-best actions, empower agents, reduce handling times and enable a more personalised and connected customer experience. At the same time, AI agents and voice bots are expanding rapidly, automating routine enquiries, improving self-service outcomes and reducing pressure on human agents.

She also underlines the strong economic rationale behind this evolution. Consolidating CRM and Contact Center under a single supplier simplifies operations, reduces architectural complexity and optimises total cost of ownership compared to multi-vendor environments.

Overall, the ambition is clearly moving toward AI-powered, natively connected service ecosystems, where CRM and Contact Center work together to deliver scalable, personalised and cost-efficient customer experiences across all channels.

AI as the decision layer across the customer journey

While customer service is often the first place where AI delivers visible CX impact, the next phase extends beyond the contact center into the full customer journey.

Jens Peeters, Customer Engagement Expert at Orange Business, underlines that by 2026 AI will increasingly act as a decision layer across the entire technology stack.

Rather than automating everything, AI will work with both modern and legacy systems to guide the next best step in the customer journey, making smarter use of the data and platforms organisations already have in place.

Many organisations have already taken initial steps in customer service, where AI recommends next-best actions in chatbots or contact centers, a capability that has evolved steadily over recent years. What is new, Jens explains, is extending this decisioning logic across the entire journey so that all departments share a unified understanding of which decisions are made, where, and why. This shared logic is essential to deliver a coherent customer experience rather than isolated, AI-driven optimisations.

He also emphasises that agentic AI requires a clear business vision for the experience an organisation aims to deliver, as well as the agility to test, learn and iterate closely with the business. A key question quickly emerges: how adaptable is the existing CX and data landscape to support this evolution?

As a pragmatic first step, Jens recommends starting with a customer insights agent. This helps teams better understand who customers are, how they behave and where value can be unlocked, while democratizing insights across the organisation. Before aiming for full-scale activation or hyper-personalisation, organisations should leverage existing CRM and data platforms to build clarity and alignment.

As he summarises, this is not a sudden transformation, but an evolution, aligning the organisation step by step around a shared customer understanding.

Customer Journey Management as the operating system of CX performance

As AI-driven decisioning expands across journeys, companies increasingly shift their focus from optimising individual touchpoints to orchestrating value end-to-end.

According to Marion Boberg, CX Expert at Orange Business, Customer Journey Management (CJM) is no longer a design-team artefact; it is becoming the operating system of CX-led business performance.

She points out how marketing, digital and CX are converging into a single discipline, recognizing that customer value is created at the intersections rather than within organizational silos.

At the same time, Marion highlights a quieter but critical technical shift. Major platforms are becoming increasingly interoperable, creating the backbone for true end-to-end experience orchestration. Combined with the rise of agentic AI acting as a connective layer across unstructured data, fragmented tools and operational silos, CJM is evolving from journey “mapping” to journey value management.

This evolution requires a profound mindset shift. Teams traditionally focused on marketing automation outputs or NPS dashboards must now tie their actions to tangible business outcomes, such as growth, churn reduction, cost-to-serve and operational efficiency.

Yet, she also stresses that technology alone is not the answer. The real differentiator remains human: collaboration, shared meaning and outside-in storytelling are what transform data into decisions and orchestrate aligned action across the organisation.

The trend is clear: CX leadership is moving from experience design to enterprise value orchestration, powered by smarter platforms and anchored in the human ability to connect dots that technology alone cannot.

CX in 2026 is intelligent, connected and value-driven

Taken together, these expert perspectives point to a clear direction for CX in 2026. Customer service is becoming AI-first and platform-unified. AI is emerging as a decision layer across the customer journey. Customer Journey Management is evolving into a core business capability that directly links experience initiatives to financial performance.

For organisations, the challenge is no longer adopting isolated CX tools. It is building a connected, yet flexible customer experience ecosystem, combining unified platforms, shared decision logic and cross-functional collaboration to turn insight into action at scale.