CX
2027 CX Trends: 13 Customer Leaders predict what’s next
AI is transforming customer experience, but what will that transformation actually look like in 2027? Will AI deliver better outcomes for customers? Will contact centres realise the productivity gains promised by automation? Will organisations be overwhelmed with consumers’ AI assistants? And where does this leave us humans?
We asked 13 of Australia’s Customer Leaders to share their predictions for 2027. Their responses reveal several common themes, as well as a few interesting differences of opinion…
The AI revolution continues, but humans remain central to great CX
The strongest recurring theme is that human interaction will remain a critical differentiator in customer service, despite the march of AI.
Alicia George, ANZ Customer Care Manager, Life Healthcare, believes the challenge will be “finding the right balance between people and technology. AI, transcription and automation will give us far more visibility into customer interactions and take away a lot of the manual work, but great CX will still come down to the human experience. I think the biggest opportunity is using technology to empower our people, not replace them, giving them better information and more time to focus on the customer.”
This view is echoed by Sam Youssif, who says the reality of AI impact is far from “what the white papers lead you to believe:
- AI will continue to scale, but large FTE reduction will not be realised.
- AI will not meet the expectations and the hype we’re seeing plastered everywhere.
- Good human service will continue to be king.
- What will win is augmented support founded on human-to-human connections at the core.”
His warning:
AI for AI is a death trap.
Beth Parkin, Director, Global Reservations & Journey Design at Beckons, reinforces the importance of being very intentional about where to implement AI:
Companies will look across the full customer journey to decide where AI adds real value and where a human touch matters most. Getting that balance right is what will drive ROI.
Sophie Imbert, Head of CX at Russell Investments, believes AI will only increase the value customers place on human support: “AI will raise expectations for personalised service, while making human support more valuable. People will increasingly expect quick, relevant help through digital channels, but still want human judgement when a situation is complex, sensitive or important.”
Ariane Fitzpatrick, Global Head of BPO Success, at Just Eat Takeaway, believes the distinction between what technology and people do best will become increasingly clear:
“In 2027, the division of skills and expertise in customer experience becomes clearer. AI takes a growing share of the repetitive, simple work: order status, how-to questions, first-level troubleshooting, out-of-hours cover. That is fantastic. It just won’t set anyone apart.
“For humans, scripted interaction is finished at every touchpoint where a person is in the conversation. Customers still want a person. But that person has to deliver an outcome, or uncover a need. That takes adaptive problem-solving, empathy, and people who understand and care about what they represent.
“Humans have to be the differentiator, they need to want to be, and the business has to equip them for it.”
The message is not that human service will disappear, but that its role will change. People will increasingly be expected to handle complex situations, exercise judgement and build relationships rather than follow scripts.
Agentic AI moves from assisting agents to delivering outcomes
While there’s broad agreement about the importance of human service, several contributors predict a much more autonomous role for AI in the contact centre.
Andrew Crawford, General Manager – Australia, New Zealand and Asia, at Railbookers, believes the industry is approaching a significant shift:
My prediction for 2027 is that AI will shift from assisting contact centre agents to independently resolving enquiries and completing transactions — moving from automating conversations to automating outcomes.
“I expect increasingly realistic AI voice agents to gain traction, alongside the emergence of AI-to-AI interactions, where customers’ personal AI assistants engage directly with businesses on their behalf.
Predictive CX will also gain momentum, with AI enabling businesses to identify dissatisfaction and potential service failures early enough to intervene proactively.
Chris Douglas, Director, Member Care at Accor Plus, also sees considerable potential in agentic AI, particularly in the voice channel: “AI is amazing and without a doubt, has the ability to truly revolutionise the contact centre industry globally. Enabling AI solutions, such as agentic voice, can offer meaningful CX benefits (think 24/7/365 ‘always on’ options for customers) and significantly reduce costs by deflecting traffic away from human agents.”
However, he notes legacy technology can be the blocker: “Whilst the AI technology is impressive, many companies rely on legacy systems to execute the customer’s request. Take an address change as an example. An agentic voice solution can do a beautiful job taking the address change over the phone with the customer, but how does the change take effect in the legacy system? Developing APIs between the AI and the legacy system takes time, money, and in some cases is simply not possible.”
Find technology solutions for your needs
Agent assist and behind-the-scenes automation will unlock productivity
Not every AI needs to be customer-facing. AI can remove administrative work from the contact centre so agents can concentrate on customers.
Martin Weichert, Head of Customer Experience, at Polyaire, predicts that agent-assist AI will move into mainstream adoption:
“My prediction for 2027 is that agent-assist AI will move from experimentation to mainstream adoption. The biggest shift will be the emergence of agentic AI as middleware between the contact centre agent and core business systems. Rather than an agent navigating multiple screens, entering data and executing transactions manually, AI will increasingly perform those tasks on the agent’s behalf.
“In a banking environment, for example, the agent could focus entirely on understanding the customer and resolving their need, while the AI interacts with the banking platform in the background to retrieve information, initiate approved actions and complete required workflows.
The real transformation is not replacing the contact centre agent, but removing the system administration from the conversation.
Ariane Fitzpatrick concurs: “The hottest contact centre tech isn’t another customer-facing chatbot. It’s AI doing all the heavy admin behind the scenes. Strip away the backend friction so advisors can focus entirely on the person on the other end of the line, because that’s where great customer experiences actually happen.”
This is a compelling alternative to the traditional focus on chatbots and automated customer interactions. Rather than trying to remove people from the customer journey, AI can make human interactions more productive and effective.
Customer data, sentiment and predictive CX become increasingly valuable
AI is only as useful as the data and strategy underpinning it. Sheeraz Singh, who leads the Customer Engagement Centre at Sonova, emphasises the importance of having a defined customer experience strategy:
The AI momentum will of course carry on but there remains a very important human element: to define a clear CX strategy and objectives.
“How we collate data in a centralised way that can then feed a central view of a customer then drives that strategy and remains one of the great challenges.
“It’s all about clearly defining the end-to-end experience we want our customers to have. That then helps focus the energy and resources to define the right data, the interface for our contact centres and the right KPIs. It means a consistent experience for customers whether they go into store, they call or use digital channels.”
Sophie Imbert also predicts that “proactive communication will become a stronger expectation. Customers will expect organisations to keep them informed about progress, next steps and delays without having to ask (e.g. in the claims space). Clearly setting expectations and following through can build trust, even when an issue takes time to resolve.”
Rich Rose, Director Customer Service, at Nine, sees an important role for technology in monitoring customer sentiment across increasingly blended human and AI teams:
“My thoughts are focusing on how customers are interacting with AI and where their needs are being met or more importantly where experiences are falling short that will ultimately impact our brand. This new era of managing blended teams is definitely a time where we have to rely more on tools to proactively manage and identify Customer Satisfaction within the human and agent call in real-time.”
Tracey Holland, Project Manager – AI Enablement of Telephony, IRT Group, goes so far as to say that sentiment tools are a potential game-changer.
The contact centre becomes a revenue and product intelligence engine
Another development is how the contact centre is perceived within the wider organisation – not as a cost centre, but a source of commercial intelligence, product innovation and revenue growth. Ariane Fitzpatrick says:
When you mine real-time customer conversations, the contact centre becomes the team telling the rest of the business what to build, what to fix, and what to stop doing.
Organisations that connect customer interaction data with product, marketing and operational decision-making could gain considerably more value from their contact centres.
Customer-owned AI agents create a new challenge
One of the more disruptive trends is that businesses won’t just be managing their own AI agents. They’ll increasingly have to interact with AI agents acting on behalf of their customers. Pete Iannetta, Head of Operations Enablement, at Petsure, believes this is the trend to watch:
“While AI solutions are now firmly entrenched as BAU, the next piece of the puzzle will be customers having their own AI agent to interact with companies to get the best outcome.
We already have significant increases in customer complaints, mostly written by AI, and this will only amplify. How do we handle this at scale? What are the implications?
Cara Pring, Customer Experience Director at Winc Australia suggests that businesses will increasingly need to design customer experiences for AI agents rather than just humans:
“Right now, businesses are working hard, with mixed success, to use AI to serve customers without compromising their experience. But I think 2027 will see the tables start to turn. Customers will increasingly use their own AI agents to place orders, initiate returns and chase deliveries.
Suddenly, we’ll be designing experiences for AI agents, not just humans. When it’s agent talking to agent, things will move much faster, and the definition of great CX will shift. Conversational polish will matter less, while clarity, accuracy and transparency will become more important than ever.
“The next competitive advantage in CX might not be having the best AI agent, but being the easiest business for someone else’s AI agent to deal with.”
This raises some interesting questions for customer service leaders: How will businesses authenticate a customer’s AI assistant? How will they determine whether an automated request represents the customer’s actual intentions? And what happens when both sides of a customer interaction are represented by AI?
There could also be implications for complaints handling, negotiation, personalisation and the way businesses manage customer relationships.
What are the key take-aways for 2027?
Across the contributions, there are several clear messages.
- AI adoption will accelerate, but the industry is still working out where it delivers genuine value.
- Agentic AI will become more capable and prevalent in completing transactions and resolving customer issues.
- Human service will become more valued, with empathy, judgement, adaptive problem-solving and relationship-building at its core.
- The foundations matter: customer data, content, systems integration and a clear CX strategy will determine how much value organisations can extract from AI.
- The contact centre’s role will be further understood as an important source of customer intelligence and business innovation.
- The customer-AI relationship will evolve, creating new challenges as businesses begin interacting with AI assistants acting on behalf of consumers.
Perhaps the most important distinction is between organisations that simply deploy AI and those that rethink how they deliver customer experience.
As Ariane Fitzpatrick puts it: “2027 won’t be decided by who automates the most. It will be decided by who is clearest about what their people are for, and how technology and AI continue to serve both the business and the human.”
