5 Bold Customer Experience Predictions for 2026 & Beyond!

Recently, we interviewed five Verint experts in customer experience (CX) and asked them for their predictions on the future of CX in 2026 and beyond. Their responses differed, but a common theme among all was breaking down silos to create a more seamless customer journey. Silos between:

• Self-service and assisted service
• Support and sales
• Behavioral data repositories
• Voice of the customer and front-line actions
• Contact center and back office
• Manual processes and agentic AI.

Below are their responses and links to the video clips. Do you agree with their assessments? Leave a comment on their LinkedIn video post.

AI Agents Will Deliver Uninterrupted Self-Serve to Assisted Service Transitions

Heather Richards, Global Vice President, Go-to-Market Strategy, Verint (41 seconds)

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7431694672252588032

“I predict that in 2026 AI agents will begin to close the gap between self and assisted service. So the same AI agents that help a customer self-serve will actually hand off seamlessly to a human advisor with full context, real-time guidance, and automated actions already in motion.

To the customer this will feel like one uninterrupted conversation—not channel shift or a disruptive handoff. So, the self and assisted interactions will deliver an effortless CX experience created by this invisible collaboration between AI and human agents.”

Agent Copilot Bots Transform Contact Centers into Revenue Generators

Jason Valdina, Senior Director, Go-to-Market Strategy, Channels and Desktop, Verint (44 seconds)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/verint_ask-the-experts-jason-valdina-activity-7427433391366750209-IMZi

“My prediction for 2026 and beyond is that outbound proactive engagement and the rise of Agent Copilot Bots are going to transform contact centers into revenue generators.

Support and sales teams are going to come together more than they already have, unifying platforms and taking both a reactive and a proactive approach to customer engagement.

And as those contact centers shift to reengage with customers, my prediction is that agents that conduct those conversations are going to be coached in real time by AI Copilot Bots. So, they’re going to have guidance in real time about how best to not only support customers, but to drive upsells, to drive conversions, and increase the lifetime value of their customers.”

Unique Behavioral Data Becomes a Competitive Advantage

Daniel Ziv, Global Vice President, AI and Analytics, Product Management and Go-to-Market Strategy, Verint (44 seconds)

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7424523869169811457

“My prediction is in 2026, we’ll see a much greater separation between companies that leverage their unique behavioral data, their moat – the data that your competitors don’t have – and those who don’t.

Organizations that leverage that data to prioritize insights and take immediate actions – some of those will be more autonomous, agentic actions – will see much greater impact. That will separate the leaders from ones who are still worried about which models they use.

I think that 2026 will be an inflection year and it [behavioral data] will become not just a competitive advantage, but almost a survival need in certain areas where you’ll see the impact on increasing revenue, reduction in cost and obviously increase of CX.”

With Enterprise WFE, Any Employee Can Successfully Engage with the Customer

Trudy Cannon, Senior Director, Go-to-Market Strategy, Workforce Engagement (141 seconds)

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/verint_whats-trudy-cannons-prediction-for-2026-activity-7428076771641651200-gbCg

“I predict that in 2026, the fact that now any employee can communicate with the customer as everything has become asynchronous, meaning the customer can start anywhere. They’re not taking the traditional phone to e-mail to chat path, and employees are now empowered with the coaching tools to do more. That we will finally break down the silos and perceptions that exist across the contact center in the back office.

Workforce Management

Now that the work is executed across the enterprise, where we sit no longer dictates the type of work that we get. So, this means that we can now apply a standard but nuanced workforce management practice across the enterprise. Standard practices such as planning and scheduling that get us the operational efficiencies that we need, but with tweaks to that practice based on the type of work that we’re planning for.

Quality Management

Any employee can engage with the customer. So now that means we also need a broader view of quality. We need to move from quality insights into quality action.

AI tools have given us a bunch of insights and we need those insights, but we also need proven coaching and management workflows to really drive the improvement. So, it’s no longer a question about manual or automation.

Now it’s Yes, And. But we need to combine that with things such as automated, real-time coaching.

So, as we move into 2026, we’re driving into a more agentic type of quality where our systems will be able to measure the interactions, determine what the right action is, but then be able to schedule us to take the right action. Those are our predictions for 2026 for WFE.”

Be on the lookout for our next CX Insights from Verint series.