2025 has been another tough year for CX teams. Budgets and headcounts remain under constant threat, and meaningful progress has stalled. Instead of helping their organizations become more customer-obsessed, many CX teams are drifting dangerously close to the event horizon of metric obsession — a gravitational pull toward dashboards and KPIs that threatens to consume purpose and impact.

Today, most teams are trapped in a stable but dysfunctional orbit, circling the black hole of measurement without meaning. But 2026 marks a critical inflection point. Some will break free — modernizing, upskilling, and repositioning CX as a catalyst for business value. Others will cling to legacy practices and risk being pulled beyond the point of no return, where CX loses relevance and credibility.

Here are three of our 2026 predictions that highlight the challenges (and opportunities) awaiting CX leaders:

  • Budget pressure will lure 15% of teams into a death spiral by feeding metrics obsession. Some of the CX teams under pressure to hold on to budgets will attempt to serve their organizations by feeding their metrics obsession. But while executives and colleagues ask for more and more real-time data, exhaustive reporting on narrative- and context-poor dashboards won’t reveal which problems to solve, how to solve them, or why they matter to the business. CX teams that stick with this approach will end up as replaceable reporting functions. Escape this trap by building advanced CX analytics capabilities and developing AI fluency. Embed CX data into AI models for customer interaction tools — key upgrades that make the team more valuable to the business. To do that, CX teams must shed ballast including generic website feedback collection, especially given the low response rates that will only sink more due to the decline in traffic on B2B and B2C websites.
  • At least two major scandals will result from firms acting on AI-led customer research. A third of CX teams already use AI to analyze customer data, and AI-generated insights have become the norm in research platforms. Interest in AI-powered research applications such as synthetic audiences and AI-moderated interviews is skyrocketing. In 2026, more overstretched CX teams will hand off research planning and execution to autonomous AI agents — a shortcut embraced by genAI decision-makers who tend to overestimate how consistent and accurate these tools really are on their own. Avoid the risks of AI-led customer research by leaning on skilled researchers who can pressure-test insights using complementary methods like qualitative interviewing, user testing, and participatory design — especially in organizations where AI agents have the power to shape customer interactions.
  • Three in 10 firms will harm their total-experience growth with frustrating AI self-service. More than three-fourths of AI decision-makers now say they trust generative AI outputs. This misplaced confidence, combined with growing pressure to cut operating costs, will cause companies to roll out genAI-powered chatbots and intelligent virtual agents prematurely — and in contexts where they’re unlikely to deliver. This will erode the customer and brand experience, leading Total Experience Scores to stay flat or decline. To manage the risk, CX teams should team up with customer service leaders to fine-tune their strategy for where and how to deploy AI-powered self-service and clearly disclose when AI is involved in customer interactions. This is especially important for companies using autonomous back-office agentic systems, since these tools can fail in subtle ways that are hard to catch but still affect customers — such as, for instance, if an AI agent mismanages supply and prices for a retail store.

Clients can read our full Predictions 2026: Customer Experience report for all five of our predictions, as well as more detail and specific advice for each of them. If you’re not yet a Forrester client, explore our complimentary Predictions guide for CX, B2C marketing, and digital leaders and sign up for our public webinar on January 21, 2026.