AI is no longer optional in 2026 - and that’s great news for CX.

The reality is that AI is no longer negotiable. It is a critical component of modern business success. Tools like Microsoft Copilot are now being used by almost every business. Even if you don’t have a big, expensive, and highly visible AI strategy, it is already being used by your people. They are not asking for the permission of the CIO. 

Success today depends on finding and using the right tools and ensuring that you have knowledgeable people who understand how to design processes that get the most from those tools. Augmentation is a crucial strategy today. For a business to not be exploring AI augmentation today would be like ignoring what email could do for your business in the early 90s because you are happy enough using the postal service to send messages. Looking back at earlier technological advancements makes this point obvious. Who would have ignored email? Yet anyone old enough to remember the 1990s knows that there really were executives who could not see how important this was going to be. 

Businesses are now better prepared to accept and use AI. Many have already experimented and run pilots. The case studies are out there. Many of the mistakes have already been made. Whenever any new and important technology arrives there are always mistakes and project failures - this is because you can’t create innovative business solutions by only ever doing what you did yesterday. Trying new ideas invites the possibility that some will fail. But we now understand the processes better. We understand the data requirements. We understand the weak points in AI strategy - where projects can fail because of a lack of planning.

We have many more knowledgeable and experienced people in 2026. Can you remember how many LinkedIn profiles suddenly claimed AI expertise in 2023? Every time a technology becomes big, there is a huge number of consultants riding the wave. The key understanding now is that if you combine knowledgeable and skilled people with AI tools, then you can design successful business outcomes. It is not just a possibility, it’s a reality.

Think about how significant this is for CX. We are now able to design truly transformational customer interfaces using AI. Look at how companies such as Expedia have realized this. Their ‘Romie’ chatbot allows a customer planning travel or a vacation to ask anything about flight schedules, hotels, local restaurants and activities. The customer can just have a natural conversation such as ‘if I book the hotel you just recommended can you suggest child-friendly activities that are nearby?’

Brands now realize that they don’t need to use the enormous LLMs trained with billions of items of data. If you are a retailer then customers will almost always ask about stores, products, stock and delivery times. You can reduce the model training down to all this information - reducing the risk of hallucination and reducing the cost of training. It is also clear that human interaction is still essential for the customer service environment. AI chatbots are becoming extremely powerful and useful, but sometimes the interaction itself requires the empathy and emotion of a human connection. A customer that just missed a flight because a hurricane has wrecked the airport schedule needs help immediately - they need to connect to someone and to feel that someone understands their problem and is helping.