3 Drivers for Making CX Better in 2027

This is my first year as an ICMI Contributor, and this is the last post on the calendar for my 2026 contributions. I’ve enjoyed getting to know the ICMI community, and as a long-time technology analyst, I bring an industry-based perspective on contact center trends. For many years, I’ve been writing and speaking about this space, and the practitioner focus of ICMI provides a grounded complement to my work with the CCaaS vendors.

With that in mind, this will be my look-ahead post for 2027. Thinking about how to make CX better in the coming year, I’ve identified three success drivers for contact center leaders to focus on. This article just provides a high-level outline, as each driver warrants a standalone analysis to help map out a proper strategy. You should expect to see continued change in this space in 2027, and at minimum, this article should serve to sharpen your focus to manage those changes.

Driver 1: Be strategic with AI

This may seem like an understatement, but we’ve never seen technology change so fast before, and AI requires a different mindset than previous technologies. Many contact centers still have premises-based systems that have evolved and hardened over years, if not decades. While other parts of your organization have long since migrated to the cloud, this remains a new journey for many contact centers, and it’s a requisite first step for adopting AI.

As such, contact centers tend to be in catch-up mode for modernization, where applications such as ChatGPT and Conversational AI are still quite new. Every contact center responds to change in its own way, but if still trying to adopt these applications, you’ll need to find faster ways to adopt the more recent iterations, which are even more transformative.

More specifically, agentic AI (aka AI agents) has been the main AI theme for 2026, but adoption is far from universal. If not using already, contact centers must get agentic AI on their roadmap, not just for how it can quickly improve both operational efficiency, but also for enabling next-level self service.

Adopting agentic AI is a tactical response, since it’s something that contact centers must do now to modernize. However, it’s also a strategic response, because it sets the contact center up for the next AI wave that will hit critical mass in 2027. Just when you thought it was enough to use conversational AI to make bots good enough to improve CX, along comes agentic AI. This brings a new level benefits for the contact center, but it’s only the latest chapter in the AI story.

Next year will see mainstream use of customer-driven bots, where AI now is in the hands of consumers. What I have long described as M2M communication (machine-to-machine), will soon be framed as B2B, or bot-to-bot. Clearly, if you haven’t moved along the AI spectrum for agentic AI, you won’t be able to handle this new form of B2B inquiry. There is much more to talk about here, but the takeaway for contact center leaders is to develop a more holistic, strategic approach to AI for 2027.

Driver 2: Invest in agent upskilling

This is an extension of the first driver, since human agents are the main end users of your AI applications. Just as contact center leaders can feel overwhelmed with the pace of technology change, so can your agents. Long-term agents – who may well be your top performers – have been with you before AI’s rise, and may struggle with this degree of change. Even with the best training, you may lose some who are not willing or able to embrace AI.

Newer agents, especially digital natives, may be more AI-ready, especially those already using AI in their personal lives. Turnover remains an ongoing challenge in contact centers, and since there will always be new agents to onboard, upskilling for AI should be a strategic priority for 2027.

To whatever extent you can act on the first driver and accelerate AI adoption to keep pace with change next year, including changing customer expectations, that will also impact agent experience. As such, part of that trajectory needs to support more AI training and upskilling for agents. They can’t be expected to learn on the fly, and in many cases, the new demands may not be well-received.

If agentic AI is now handling all the routine inquiries, human agents will only be getting the most difficult and complex calls. That can create a constant pressure on agents to perform at a level that becomes too stressful at a certain point.

If not managed properly, this could turn the agent role into a job they didn’t sign up for, leading to even more turnover, not to mention poorer customer service. Without upskilling to show agents that you’re trying to support them as they adopt AI, you risk defeating the purpose of deploying AI in the first place.

Drivers 3: Think about C-suite priorities

A common theme in my research is how AI is often a top-down initiative, where senior management mandates this across the entire organization. In many cases, this becomes the line of business leaders’ problem to solve, along with their existing everyday challenges. This creates a difficult balance for choosing deployments that minimize risk but can also show a tangible impact.

For contact center leaders, this means deploying AI in ways that are not detrimental to CX, and do not create new attrition for agents and supervisors. For 2027, this means taking a realistic approach to what you can commit to, especially if still very early with your adoption of AI. Management may already be expecting results from agentic AI, and will likely be asking about how and when B2B CX can do the same.

In top-down environments, AI expectations will only increase next year, and this very much ties to Driver 1, where you need to be strategic about deploying AI at a pace you can manage. Given how strategic CX has become now for the C-suite, contact center leaders must show them how transformational AI is for the contact center itself. Care must be taken not to focus on operational efficiencies at the expense of CX, such as bad outcomes, impersonal service, privacy protection, etc. Unlike other parts of the organization, your domain is customer-facing, where the impact on customer satisfaction, loyalty, brand, etc. is too important to risk just for incremental cost savings.

Conclusion

These drivers alone won’t assure better CX for 2027, but they are building blocks for contact center leaders to build a viable roadmap for modernization, especially around AI. Improvements with AI are happening faster than our ability to process them, and this is where the mindset adjustment is so important. Before AI, technology changed at a slower, more manageable pace, but that pace will become an impediment for 2027 and beyond.

Contact center leaders will never become AI experts (and don’t need to be), so the broader focus should be on change management, and finding the best ways to adopt new technology, especially for making CX better. Some of this will come from adopting best practices from peers and some will come from finding the right technology partners who understand your challenges and have the track record to shorten your learning curve, upskill your agents and set realistic expectations with the C-suite.