Dive Brief:
- Just over half of senior enterprise leaders say they’re seeing signs of falling behind competitors on digital experience, according to a survey of more than 1,000 leaders released Wednesday by Sitecore.
- Nearly all respondents — 97% — agree that digital experience orchestration is essential to their strategy in the coming two to three years, but 60% say they are not equipped to deliver it at scale.
- Other surveys have identified such a disconnect. An October study from WSJ Intelligence and Code and Theory found that even though 94% of executives say CX drives business success, 93% agree that their digital experiences need improvement.
Dive Insight:
Many of CX leaders’ problems and predictions at the tail of end 2026 are similar to top of mind issues from earlier in the year.
One ongoing concern is proving the value of digital experience investments. More than 2 in 5 leaders say they can’t demonstrate return on those investments, according to Sitecore.
CX teams have been struggling to prove their value throughout the year, especially as budgets came under pressure due to tariffs.
Studies have shown that customer experience can impact the bottom line — and experts say that it falls on leaders to dig deeper than high-level relationship metrics like NPS or CSAT to demonstrate ROI.
Agentic AI remains top of mind as well, and 89% of leaders believe AI agents will soon be essential for real-time, multi-channel engagement, according to Sitecore. Another 90% believe AI agents will scale personalization.
This is in line with a Cisco survey from May that found 93% of business and technical decision-makers believe agentic AI will make customer service more personalized, proactive and predictive.
However, humans aren’t out of the loop yet. Nearly 9 in 10 respondents in the Cisco study said that agentic AI needs to be combined with human empathy and connection to optimize the experience.
