Air Canada already learned that a company answers for what its chatbot says. Now AI agents can issue refunds without a human sign-off. CMSWire Columnist Scott Clark maps where personalization, disclosure and agent permissions break customer trust as new AI rules kick in. ow.ly/R9ZB50ZZcpt

Contact centers don’t have a strategy problem. They have a “now actually do it” problem. CMSWire INSIGHTS and @successkpi benchmarked 400 global contact center leaders across 7 maturity pillars. Strategy came out on top. Execution is where it falls apart, and customers feel every disconnected system even when they can’t see it. 📊 More than 50% of respondents say executives or a cross-functional leadership team own contact center strategy. Alignment isn’t the bottleneck 🤖 More than 90% run at least basic self-service, so human agents are left with the hardest and most emotionally charged cases ⚡ The least mature pillars are CX automation, real-time agent assistance and reporting on value. Add AI agents without measurement and you’re mostly adding tech debt A roadmap can’t hand a customer off between channels. Integration can. Until that’s in place, “omnichannel” mostly means customers repeating themselves in more places. Read more 👉 ow.ly/l2nX50ZXUr5 #SponsoredContent #ContactCenter #AgentExperience #DigitalTransformation

AI is making the "knows the most" marketer a lot less valuable. CMSWire Contributor Kathleen Schaub borrows from investors, navigators, statisticians and ecologists to show marketers how to rebuild their work identity before the job changes around them. ow.ly/4Z5l50ZYOS7

Paying €75 in tokens to automate a €25 job isn’t innovation. It’s an expensive hobby. At @ibexa_co’s Orchestration Day roundtable, the advice on agentic marketing wasn’t “go big.” It was “go boring.” Solve everyday problems first, keep deterministic workflows as the backbone and give agents autonomy the way you’d give it to a new hire: gradually. 🔍 Ibexa CPO Grégory Bécue’s rule: fix the everyday stuff first, like cloning last year’s campaign, before any org-wide overhaul 📊 Upson's Field CTO Guillaume Moigneux runs the tokenomics. If the AI costs more than the human doing the same task, “it’s not worth it” 🛡️ Ibexa’s Jean-Claude Pitcho warns that leaning too hard on US-based LLMs can bring operations “to a complete halt” The agentic era won’t be won by whoever has the biggest model. It’ll go to whoever manages their agents like employees. As Moigneux puts it: “You trust them but you check in.” Read more 👉 ow.ly/cbUU50ZXUnB #SponsoredContent #AgenticAI #MarketingAutomation #MarTech #AIOrchestration

A Five9 survey of 3,000 consumers found 92% give an AI agent fewer than 10 minutes before escalating to a human. Yet trust that AI can solve the problem jumps from 26% to 55% when a person is visibly within reach. The exit sign, it turns out, is the selling point. ow.ly/bfEw50ZYjtA

Starbucks stopped buying visits with discounts and started funding baristas. North America transactions rose 4.5% last quarter. CMSWire Columnist Pierre DeBois explains why a brand's most persuasive asset may be a staffing decision made outside the marketing department. ow.ly/NOMG50ZXTmP

Voice AI is getting charming. Understanding is lagging behind. CMSWire Columnist Scott Clark explains why timing, confirmation checks and an easy path to a human matter more than a pleasant voice. Hint: a call that never reached an agent isn't proof it worked. ow.ly/R46250ZXtlp

The best AI demo you'll see this year was built on data you don't have. Enterprises are deploying more AI than ever, yet McKinsey finds the share reporting positive financial impact hasn't budged in a year. @AlchemerHQ Chief Customer Officer Ryan Tamminga points to a familiar culprit: buying the tool before defining the job. 🎯 Start with the outcome. Define triggers, inputs, users, baselines and success metrics before any vendor shares their screen 🔍 Ask to see the governance, not just hear about it. Logging, reporting and security answers should exist before the contract does 🧪 Pilot on your real data with clear acceptance criteria, and favor open, cloud-agnostic platforms that keep lock-in off the table Buy the outcome. The demo is just the trailer. Read more 👉 ow.ly/YBn650ZVJ4H #SponsoredContent #AI #EnterpriseAI #AIGovernance #CustomerExperience #CX #MarTech

In Qualtrics research, AI-handled service interactions scored 4.41 on friendliness but 4.08 on understanding. A pleasant voice won't fix a misheard date. CMSWire Columnist Scott Clark explains how CX leaders can build voicebots that resolve requests instead of just chatting. ow.ly/6ay550ZWIua

A contained ticket and a resolved customer are not the same thing. Your dashboard just can't tell the difference. Most CX teams have automated the easy stuff: password resets, balance checks, order tracking. The real test is complex support, where the stakes are higher and patience is shorter. So @zingtree partnered with CMSWire INSIGHTS to ask 1,000+ U.S. consumers how AI actually holds up, because deflection metrics are a lot like marking your own exam. ⚠️ 68% abandon AI support after two failed attempts, and 44% now actively try to bypass it 🤝 74% would use AI again if a failed interaction ends in a smooth human handoff with context intact 📉 Half of consumers had an issue go unresolved last year. Half of those simply gave up The handoff isn't the failure. The loop is. AI that knows when to tap out earns more trust than AI that never admits it's stuck, and the consumer grace period won't last forever. Read more 👉 ow.ly/82tU50ZVJ4o #SponsoredContent #CustomerExperience #CX #AgenticAI #ContactCenter #CustomerSupport

Marketing doesn't have a content problem. It has a ""who's actually going to ship this"" problem. Teams juggle an average of 40 tools a day, and most gen AI co-pilots just add more copy to a pile nobody has time to deploy. At Ibexa's Orchestration Day, Chief Product Officer Grégory Bécue argued that the real bottleneck was never ideas. It's execution. 🧠 LLMs are the brain. Agents get the arms and legs to connect to systems, pull data and do the work 🌍 Hand off the grind: translating content into 20 languages, building email and SMS campaigns, compiling weekly reports 🔌 A model-agnostic approach keeps your customer data as the differentiator while the models themselves turn into commodities The marketer of the future doesn't produce more. They conduct. The orchestra just happens to run on agents. Read more 👉 ow.ly/VN7I50ZVJ3H #SponsoredContent #AgenticAI #AIAgents #MarTech #MarketingOps #MarketingStrategy @ibexa_co

Treasure AI wants marketers to pay for email clicks, not sends. Martech godfather Scott Brinker calls that a reasonable outcome, but budgeting for variable spend is a new muscle. CMSWire EIC Dom Nicastro asks what happens when clicks go up and revenue doesn't. ow.ly/uzp450ZW9M4

Your CMS was built to fill web pages. AI agents want content they can find, version-check and govern. CMSWire Contributor David San Filippo explains why content architecture now matters more than the latest copilot or MCP feature. ow.ly/wN6P50ZVIZs

Contact center agents used to vent about it in the group chat: "I just got another voicemail." Then Dionne took over the dialing. Dionne is a voice AI agent at Storage Vault. She makes outbound calls for the advisors and hands customers off only when they're ready to talk. Farah Ahmed, Director of Sales and CX Transformation, told Dom Nicastro the team went from nervous to fans. Storage Vault has since gone from one voice agent to nine. "The new BPO is actually voice AI." If you asked your agents which task to hand to AI first, what would they say? Catch the full episode here: ow.ly/q2Oq50ZVvzJ

Pantheon unveiled P1 at GoLive Miami, an AI-native CMS where humans and AI agents share work streams spanning content and code. Agents even get their own identities and permissions. The message: Pantheon wants to be your CMS, not just the place it lives. ow.ly/zjcx50ZVfbx

Happy CX Day! 🎉 Today we’re celebrating the people turning customer experience from a business buzzword into something customers actually feel. The strategists. The designers. The technologists. The service teams. The innovators connecting the dots across every touchpoint. Great CX doesn’t happen by accident. It takes curiosity, empathy, smart technology and a relentless focus on making every interaction better. Here’s to everyone pushing customer experience forward. 🚀 #CXDay #CustomerExperience #CX #DigitalExperience #CustomerService

Most CX teams own every platform they need and still can't tell the CFO how feedback connects to behavior. They accumulated nouns but never architected for verbs. For CX Day, CMSWire Contributor Sean Albertson explains why the fix is architecture, not more tools. ow.ly/fV1o50ZUNPN

AI was hired to tidy up the martech stack. So far it has mostly added another layer of complexity. With tens of thousands of vendors each bolting on their own assistant, generative AI has deepened fragmentation instead of bridging it. @ibexa_co CEO Bertrand Maugain, speaking at the company's Orchestration Day in Paris, says hallucinations get created ""within the existing gaps."" Consumer-grade AI shines on a single laptop, then stalls the moment it meets compliance reviews, security requirements and a dozen departments. 🧩 Consolidate the foundation: A compact, integrated platform gives agents the shared context bolt-on assistants never had 🎛️ Promote the marketer: Humans become ""super-orchestrators"" who automate and supervise agents instead of drowning in manual execution 🇪🇺 Experience the European Way: Open, pre-integrated tools with the freedom to pick your own LLMs and CMS, sitting between cumbersome suites and best-of-breed taken too far Maugain expects 90% of content to be machine-generated by 2028. In that world, the human in the loop isn't a safety feature. It's the brand. Read more 👉 ow.ly/PWqg50ZUPuf #SponsoredContent #AgenticAI #Martech #MarketingOrchestration #MarketingTechnology #AIGovernance #DigitalTransformation

Your NPS is glowing. Your CFO is unmoved. Satisfaction scores measure how an experience feels, not what it earns. CMSWire Contributor Bryan Cheung explains which commercial metrics actually survive a budget review. ow.ly/mcwV50ZUktx

Every few years someone writes the call center's obituary. It keeps showing up to work. AI was supposed to be the final nail. @Nextiva co-founder and CEO Tomas Gorny argues the opposite: contact centers are what make AI work. The weak spot is the handoff. Nextiva's CX Trends Report finds 98% of CX leaders say smooth AI-to-human transitions are essential, yet 90% admit their organizations struggle to pull them off. 🤖 AI receptionists take the routine load: common questions, scheduling and every call that used to die in voicemail 🔁 Human agents monitor in real time, step in when sentiment dips and inherit full context on escalation so no customer repeats themselves 📊 Unified customer experience management tackles the silo problem, which 86% of companies running multiple CX tools say they're stuck with The future of the contact center isn't AI or humans. It's making sure neither one has to ask for your account number twice. Read more 👉 ow.ly/Nvqu50ZTO82 #SponsoredContent #CustomerExperience #ContactCenter #CustomerService #AgenticAI

Five years on, customers are still crying over customer service. Same complaints, new bots. Over half would happily take an AI that sounds like a toaster if it fixed things fast. CMSWire Contributor Adrian Swinscoe explains why the cure is process, not more tech. ow.ly/IGNX50ZTO65

American Airlines' NPS rose five points. Meanwhile, a 2-million-mile elite flyer quietly started booking other airlines. CMSWire Contributor Colleen Lonsberry explains why retention isn't loyalty and why most CX friction can't be fixed by buying more AI. ow.ly/uHKJ50ZTnPZ

"AI was hired to tidy up the martech stack. So far it has mostly added another layer of complexity. With tens of thousands of vendors each bolting on their own assistant, generative AI has deepened fragmentation instead of bridging it. @ibexa_co CEO Bertrand Maugain, speaking at the company's Orchestration Day in Paris, says hallucinations get created ""within the existing gaps."" Consumer-grade AI shines on a single laptop, then stalls the moment it meets compliance reviews, security requirements and a dozen departments. 🧩 Consolidate the foundation: A compact, integrated platform gives agents the shared context bolt-on assistants never had 🎛️ Promote the marketer: Humans become ""super-orchestrators"" who automate and supervise agents instead of drowning in manual execution 🇪🇺 Experience the European Way: Open, pre-integrated tools with the freedom to pick your own LLMs and CMS, sitting between cumbersome suites and best-of-breed taken too far Maugain expects 90% of content to be machine-generated by 2028. In that world, the human in the loop isn't a safety feature. It's the brand. Read more 👉 ow.ly/lkxe50ZSXPU #SponsoredContent #AgenticAI #Martech #MarketingOrchestration #MarketingTechnology #AIGovernance #DigitalTransformation"

The thermostat said 70 degrees. Upstairs it was 84. CMSWire Contributor Tal Klein uses that gap to explain the watermelon effect: CX dashboards glowing green while customers turn red. His fix borrows from site reliability engineering. ow.ly/Utx050ZSXOj

The CMO of a company moving $50 billion in payments doesn't count leads. She cares who stayed for dinner. Anne Hay, CMO of PayNearMe, told Dom Nicastro on the latest The CMO Circle, that when a sale can take up to 200 interactions and as long as four years, lead counts don't tell her much. What she wants to know is who her team spent time with, and for how long. "Was it a two-minute booth conversation, or did they have dinner with us? It matters a lot." What's the one event metric you'd drop tomorrow if your CFO let you? Watch The Marketing Strategy Behind 50 Billion in Payments: ow.ly/lBwU50ZT4xH

Rush insurance customers off the phone and they simply call back. CMSWire Contributor Kim Johnson shares how bringing frontline teams along, not just bolting on new tools, delivered 39% fewer claims status calls and an 11-point NPS jump. ow.ly/Txe950ZSvQA

AI spending in customer service jumped 38% while overall service budgets grew just 2%. Yet 87% of customers still insist on a path to a human. CMSWire Columnist Scott Clark maps where call centers are headed as agentic AI takes over the routine work. ow.ly/u0Cr50ZS6vJ

No prompt can fix stale inventory or a mistaken identity. As Salesforce, Snowflake and HubSpot compete to own the context marketing AI runs on, CMSWire Columnist Scott Clark explains why the bigger martech decision may be which platform decides what your AI knows. ow.ly/Ax3j50ZRk7K

The customer you never met is the one you lost, and CMSWire Contributor Jesse Brock says the CEO probably approved the reason. His advice: if employees keep apologizing for the same thing, stop coaching better apologies and fix the thing. ow.ly/LFFv50ZQRlh

Tesla's brand value has fallen from $66.2 billion in 2023 to $27.6 billion in 2026, and CMSWire Contributor Liraz Margalit argues the real damage is psychological. When a CEO's identity fuses with a product, buyers lose the freedom to decide what owning it says about them. ow.ly/VRPG50ZQrwR

Some Buffalo Sabres fans were choosing between dinner and the game. Then they left a comment about it. Jeremy Cohen, Manager of Fan Development and Insights at the Buffalo Sabres, told Dom Nicastro the team read those comments. More than 40,000 of them last season. Then they did something about it. Grab-and-go concessions. A new sound system. Speed-of-service scores that finally climbed. “Because we don’t control what happens on the ice, we have to control as much as we can off the ice.” Jeremy covers so much ground, physical and digital, that Dom called the show The Digital Experience in the intro. It’s Beyond the Call. Jeremy thanked him for the intro anyway. What’s the one piece of customer feedback your org keeps hearing and keeps not fixing? Watch the full episode: ow.ly/N8Hq50ZQAQr

CMSWire Contributor Tod Chisholm breaks down why banking call centers are getting harder, not easier. With up to 65% of back-office tasks automated, agents are left handling the most complex, stressful calls. One fix: offer a callback. It turns a negative 3 NPS into a 28. ow.ly/c8HY50ZQ0wV

Your AI closed the ticket in nine seconds. Your customer is still fuming. Congratulations, you optimized the wrong thing. That's the trap in most AI customer service scorecards, according to @Nextiva co-founder and CEO Tomas Gorny. Deflection rate, first contact resolution and average speed all look great on a dashboard while completely missing whether the interaction built loyalty or quietly torched it. A fast resolution and a furious customer can post the exact same ""win"" in your reporting. 🔍 Real-time sentiment analysis needs to happen across voice, chat, email and social; read the room while the conversation is still happening 📊 Customer lifetime value is the actual scoreboard, since nobody upsells themselves onto a brand they already resent 🤖 Human handoffs should be built in for the complex cases, letting your team to do the part AI still can't A dashboard that's all green isn't proof your CX is working. It might just mean you stopped asking the right questions. Read more 👉 ow.ly/Iquo50ZPx26 #SponsoredContent #CustomerExperience #ContactCenters

CMSWire Columnist Pierre DeBois breaks down how Netflix measures the marketing A/B tests cannot touch. Its Quasimodo tool randomizes whole media markets instead of people, turning every campaign launch, takedown and relaunch into a fresh statistical read. ow.ly/qup350ZPwpG

"Speed isn't the problem. Confidence is. Every AI vendor is racing to prove how fast their tool can turn data into insight. Ryan Tamminga, Chief Customer Officer at @AlchemerHQ says that race might be pointed at the wrong finish line. Teams don't stall because insights arrive too slowly. They stall because nobody trusts the insight enough to act on it. 🔍 Trust in AI accuracy, not speed, is the top barrier to adoption ⚡ ""Human in the loop"" lets AI handle low-risk cases while routing nuanced ones to people 📊 No action without buy-in: if you can't prove value to your CFO, the idea dies on the dashboard A faster dashboard means nothing if nobody's confident enough to click ""go."" The real AI upgrade isn't speed. It's the courage to act on what the data already told you. Read more 👉 ow.ly/Q9p150ZP0EF #SponsoredContent #CustomerExperience #ArtificialIntelligence #CX #AI #DigitalTransformation"

AI doom or AI marketing stunt? CMSWire Contributor Alex Kantrowitz says both readings miss the point. Extinction percentages are guesswork dressed as data. Researcher fears are genuine, but public warnings cost labs more than they help sell anything. ow.ly/PlXh50ZP0Ec

Forrester's new Wave names Medallia the lone leader in customer feedback management, merging two prior reports into one. The real barrier for CX teams is not AI. It is messy data, weak identity stitching and governance gaps stalling every program in the category. ow.ly/Zc2w50ZOzic

Acquia just rebranded around Drupal and agentic content, following Optimizely and Contentstack in dropping the DXP label within 90 days. None of the three were struggling. Analysts say the category is being redefined around AI agents, not abandoned. ow.ly/7lS750ZOa40

NiCE Chief AI Officer Philipp Heltewig says the model isn't the risk. The harness around it, the tools, permissions and connectivity it's given, is what turns a bad output into real damage across contact centers built on it. ow.ly/t7PH50ZNFyZ

CMSWire Contributor Gregg Johnson says Adobe's new CEO pick was not about the person. The board chose the exec who ran its stickiest enterprise data business over the one running Creative Cloud, the half most exposed to Canva, Figma and Claude Design. ow.ly/Mv5e50ZN7T2

Automattic's board voted Matt Mullenweg onto paid leave without his consent, installing CFO Mark Davies as interim CEO. Mullenweg says he got 50 minutes notice and no time for legal review. He keeps his board seat and stays in charge of WordPress.org ow.ly/oqao50ZMqHu

What happens when three CDP vendors are asked where the category is actually going? You get three different perspectives, but quite a bit of common ground. Zack Wenthe, Tealium: real-time activation and orchestration are becoming increasingly important, with marketers likely relying less on traditional interfaces over time. Rafa Flores, Treasure AI: having the data is not enough. The real test is whether you can act on it quickly, in context and within the workflows marketers already use. Elizabeth Dobbs, Databricks: marketers increasingly want to interact with their data conversationally, but as AI starts recommending what to do next, trust becomes a much bigger question. Different platforms. Different approaches. But all three pointed toward a similar future: the CDP conversation is moving beyond simply collecting and unifying customer data. The battleground is increasingly what happens next. Can you act on the data in real time? Can AI understand enough context to make a useful recommendation? And can marketers trust it enough to act? Watch 3 CDPs Enter a Room. Only 1 Narrative Survives. 📺 ow.ly/qB7x50ZMqSK

The team looked into the billing complaints and came back with good news: the process was working as designed. Customers were still frustrated. Suzie Dieth is VP and Chief Experience Officer at NRG and CMSWire's 2026 CX Leader of the Year, the person who started CX at the company back when it wasn't a formal discipline. Rather than pushing from the outside, she found a leader embedded in that department to champion the feedback internally and built a mechanism to put customer comments in front of the team, and that leader eventually pulled a cross-functional team that redesigned and renamed the whole thing. "We're responsible for everything, but we don't own anything." How does your CX team get another department to act on something it doesn't own? Dom Nicastro goes deeper in the full episode of Beyond the Call, and applications for the 2027 CMSWire IMPACT Awards are open now. Watch here: ow.ly/5E8m50ZLtKY

A flawless AI dashboard is not good news. It is a warning sign. CMSWire Contributor Ricardo Saltz Gulko unpacks the two-ledger framework a Fortune 500 study exposed, where a rollout boosted newer agents and quietly cost the most experienced ones quality. ow.ly/AhiQ50ZL7aa

Three competing CDP vendors walked into the same room expecting a fight. Nobody threw a punch. Almost. Dom Nicastro asked Tealium's Zack Wenthe what Databricks can't do that Tealium can. "They can't operate as a CDP in general availability right now." Elizabeth Dobbs of Databricks took it on the chin. Then she, Zack and TreasureAI's Rafa Flores spent the rest of the hour agreeing on something more interesting: the fight isn't over platforms. Dobbs: "Ultimately, I think the real battle is going to be for trust." Would your team click the button an agent recommends without checking it first? Watch the episode 📺, 3 CDP Providers Enter The Room, here: ow.ly/PxLT50ZKKrm

Adobe just picked its next CEO from customer experience, not Creative Cloud. Anil Chakravarthy takes over Dec. 1 as Shantanu Narayen steps down after 18 years. The message: CX orchestration is Adobe's real bet, even though it's still the smaller side of the business. ow.ly/oUJ450ZK60L

CMSWire EIC Dom Nicastro talked to Webflow CEO Linda Tong about the company's pivotal moment. Source flips the platform inside out, making code the new source of truth. Enterprise MCP adoption jumped from 2% to over 50% in a year. The build was never the hard part. ow.ly/Wc3r50ZJeC1

Webflow unveiled Source at Webflow Conf 2026, a workspace giving marketing teams and AI agents shared, governed access to site code. The rollout adds agent collaboration tools, Webflow Campaigns and MCP updates, pushing the $4 billion platform past its visual builder roots. ow.ly/ePrx50ZIxti

Brand management software vs. DAM isn't a choice. It's a marketing trick. Vendors sell them as rivals because two SKUs beat one. In reality a brand portal is just the front end sitting on top of a DAM. Buying one without the other gets you either a pretty file library or a back-end system nobody outside IT can use. Melanie Duffy, product director at @papirfly put it bluntly: brand inconsistency breaks the psychological shortcut that makes people trust you in the first place. 🔍 52% of companies already run a DAM inside their CX stack and 34% more plan to within two years ⚡ Skip the front-end layer and your shiny DAM becomes a better-looking shared drive 🚀 Enterprise DAM only earns its complexity once you're syncing assets to a PIM or ERP, not before The real decision isn't DAM or brand portal. It's how much back end your front end needs to stand on. Read more 👉 ow.ly/Gyfh50ZIxGm #BrandManagement #DAM #DigitalAssetManagement #MarTech #SponsoredContent

58% of executives feel good about AI-driven change. Only 9% of employees do. CMSWire Contributor Myles Suer talks to BCG's Julia Dhar about why vague AI directives breed false consensus, and how Delta's VELVET program still wins two decades later. ow.ly/ilWz50ZI8PK

The Air Force designed its cockpits around the average pilot. The average cockpit fit exactly zero pilots. Jorge Camargo brings that story up a lot. He's Head of Digital Platforms at @BankofAmerica — the ecosystem behind Erica, who turned eight in June and has handled 3.4 billion client interactions. He told Dom Nicastro on The Digital Experience that designing for the average customer is the fastest way to build something that fits nobody. "If you're designing for the average — there is no such thing as an average customer." Where is your org still building for an average customer who doesn't exist? Watch the episode 📺, The AI Assistant That Was Winning Long Before ChatGPT, here: ow.ly/GR6s50ZIecj