2026 marked the arrival of AI-first customer operations. Yet the reality of operationalizing AI in customer service and success at scale suffers because the work is hard, mistakes get made, and new risks continue to surface. As more brands deploy comparable AI capabilities, the resulting experiences may become increasingly indistinguishable, particularly as customers interact through personal AI assistants rather than directly with brands. Consequently, brands will lean into innovative human-first experiences to differentiate and add value.

In 2027, value will beat novelty. Inflation, debt, and economic uncertainty keep real retail growth near zero even as nominal sales rise. Scale players — especially Amazon and Walmart — will use price, data, logistics, and a strong balance sheet to take share. Struggling retailers will seek private capital and AI-led cost narratives, while consumer-facing AI will discover that its clearest shopping proposition is not autonomy but savings.

Learn key lessons about deploying conversational AI from practitioners who have delivered self-service applications for their organization.

At Dreamforce 2026, Salesforce presented its most complete vision yet for the “agentic enterprise.” It shifted the core focus away from individual apps (such as those focused on sales, services, or marketing) and unified them through a single architecture built around data, logic and AI agents. This vision includes: (1) AIforce, Salesforce’s UX layer that […]

Organizations can use an agentic conversational AI platform to create simple “tuck-in” self-service applications, but they must think of it as the first step in a multiyear customer service transformation. Agent-powered conversational AI uses modern AI capabilities to follow rules and guidelines to interact with customers and perform tasks on their behalf without requiring step-by-step instruction. The result is personable, useful, self-service agents that organizations can deploy with staggering speed. Our Forester Wave™ evaluation helps organizations deploy customer self-service solutions that are safe, friendly, and efficient, boosting customer loyalty and driving real contact center efficiencies.

Zendesk Relate 2026 showed that agentic customer service depends on structured knowledge, new service engineering roles, and operational readiness for AI execution.

Google Cloud Next 2026 opened with Thomas Kurian declaring the end of the AI pilot era and Sundar Pichai comparing the enterprise refrain of last year (“Can we build an agent?”) to today’s: “How do we manage thousands of them?” Google Cloud Next ’26 answers the second question with a single product story: Gemini Enterprise […]

Learn how conversational AI vendors balance rapid innovation with trust and fit for contact centers based on the 2026 Forrester Wave™ evaluation.

In our evaluation of conversational AI platforms for customer service providers, we identified the most significant ones and researched, analyzed, and scored them. This report shows how each provider measures up and helps you select the right one for your needs.

Recent, public AI agent and bot failures have exposed the hazards of forgoing testing. Here’s what you should do before rolling out your own agents.