Episode Transcript
[00:00:21] Speaker A: Welcome everybody, Today to episode 89 of Metro G's Metro site. I am today's host, Matt Craig, senior director of Product marketing here at Metrogy.
2025 was very much of a whirlwind of a year, but we wanted to look at what's more on the horizon. So what are some trends for 2026 that we're tracking today? We have the full team of Metrogy analysts here talking about their different areas of what's going on. So we have Robin Garris, who's the CEO and Principal analyst, Earl Irwin Lazar, President and principal analyst, Beth Schultz, vice President Research and Principal analyst, Diane Myers, senior Research Director and Principal analyst, as well as Lainey Hoxma, senior Research analyst. So we have the full team today.
So we're going to kind of look at, you know, what happened in 2025, moving on to continuing to happen in 2026 and what we expect to happen.
So first I wanted to invite Robin to kind of share what are some of the trends and technologies that we're watching for in 2026?
[00:01:33] Speaker B: Yeah, and I'll look at specifically CX and what we're seeing happening there. And of course, with everything, AI comes into play. So, all right, I've got a lot of them, so I'm going to kind of zip through them and do like a power round here. I don't know.
I think that interaction and conversation analytics is really going to explode this year.
We've already seen it starting to grow, but I really do believe we're only scratching the surface. And when companies start to see the value within the contact center alone, I think it will extend out into other business units. Right now we see about half of companies using interaction analytics. That's like using AI to evaluate every conversation that you're having with customers.
So about half companies, like I said, are using it to some extent anyway. But more than 90% say it's either the most valuable or among the most valuable data that they have available in the entire company.
And 84% say that it should be used for executive level dashboards. So I think some of that we're going to really start seeing come to fruition as the value of this technology really starts becoming visible to companies.
Next thing I see somewhat related, that is baseline benchmarks I think are being completely reset now that we have more data. They're being reset, but also because we're comparing more human versus AI agents, right now we see about 58% of companies running analytics. To compare the two and I just, I think moving Forward this year, we're going to see more precise analytics and more importantly, decisions based on it, you know, moving forward. So if I see that, I thought AI agents would be really good to handle this particular issue in our company. But I'm seeing that, you know, when I look at our data, humans are way, way better. I might really change what my process is, or vice versa.
So I think that that's going to, we're going to start perfecting that more along the lines of AI agents. I think agentic agents are going to become, you know, more common. Those are your truly autonomous agents. And I think one of the big things we're going to see them doing is automating workflows between the front and the back office.
And also I think we're going to start seeing more and more specialized agents responsible for, you know, specific functions and they're going to be working with peer agents who are responsible for other functions. So a lot more agentic AI activity happening in the background. As I, a human agent, am talking to a customer, a lot of this, you know, agentic stuff might be happening in the background with my assistant, or if I'm a customer, I may be talking directly to one of these agentic agents and that agent is dealing with others in the background. So a lot more automation coming into play there.
I do think because of AI, we're going to start seeing much more.
This, this whole rise of what we're calling the universal agent, and that is basically you can, you can hire anyone is kind of the theme there. Doesn't matter what their skills are, their education, their background, their training. If they fit the culture of the company, you can hire them and AI is going to train them to do the rest. Right now we're seeing about 35% of companies saying we expect this to happen fully at any higher, especially in the contact cent.
About 49% say they expect to see that happening to some extent. So vast majority sees this movement toward a universal agent really happening moving forward. And I think we'll really start seeing that start this year.
I shouldn't say start. I think it already has started. I think, Matt, we talked about what we saw in 2025. I do think we already started seeing some of that happen and I think it's just going to continue to grow this year.
The other thing we've already started to see happen extensively and I think it's going to really get more and more embedded in companies is AI driving more sales in the contact center. So right now 58% of companies have A sales quota attached to their service reps. And 64% of those companies use AI to help generate the best sales offer or the best upsell offers. So if I'm an agent, I've just finished solving a problem for my customer and hey, this customer's pretty happy. AI will kind of come in and say, oh, now suggest this offer to them. And as an agent, I love this. Cause I'm now getting some commissions or bonuses for upsell that I actually close. And customers like it too. Cause they're getting offered products that kind of align with what their profile says.
So I do think we're going to see more and more of that. We have been seeing that for a while. That's not really new. I think what will be new moving forward is when we do upsell offers and when we don't. So I think AI is going to be able to monitor and judge when to give an agent an upsell offer. So if a customer isn't had a rough call or they're not really happy, or they seem to be in a rush, no upsell offer or more importantly, the volume of the contact center will dictate. So if it's a really busy day, there's not going to be upsell offers or not as many upsell offers. Because we don't want to keep people in the queue. You know, we want to get people their problems handled. But if it's a really slow day, perfect day to do upsell offers. And what that does for agents too, and for the contact center is it doesn't show as much idle time. So we don't see all these layoffs happening right now, by the way. We see about.
I think it's about 17% right now of companies laying off people because of AI in the context center. It used to be higher three years ago, 20, 23, it was way higher. But it is coming down. And I think some of these types of tactics are one of the reasons.
Two more quick ones. I think IVR is going to start disappearing as companies shift to AI triage agents. 38% of companies overall say they're planning to do that. But when we look at our research success group, these are the companies who are kind of doing everything right and have the data to prove it. All their business metrics are going up much higher than everyone else's. About 63% of those companies are already doing this. They are the leading indicator when we see them doing something others follow. So I do think you're going to start seeing IVRs fade out and AI triage agents taking over and it'll really accelerate once AI prices for this comes down.
And lastly, I would say that technology becomes more important than people. We've been asking this questions for a few years, this question for a few years, and it keeps going in the direction of technology.
It went from 72% of people saying that or 72% of our research participants saying that people are more important than technology in 2024 to 59% this year. Still the majority, but our success group, already well into the technology is more important than people. And it's not that they're going to replace people with technology other than in very obvious areas.
It really is them looking at technology as being just kind of hypercharging everything.
Technology can help me make my people better. If I didn't have technology, my people wouldn't be as good.
Technology in the form of AI agents can help offload workload from human agents, so it makes them more productive. And third, it gives us, me, it gives me the analytics data that I need to know if what I'm doing is right. So you think of all the things that technology can do in those regards, you can understand why a lot of companies now are saying, well, you know, they're both important, but if you're forcing me to pick, it's technology. And I think that's going to just, I think, I think this is the year we're going to see it come pretty close to 50, 50, if not more important.
And that is what I see happening this year. I actually. A lot of other things, Matt, but you told me, you know, a handful of things, and I think I gave you more than a handful, so I'm going to stop talking.
[00:09:21] Speaker A: You're always the overachiever, Robin.
[00:09:23] Speaker B: No,
[00:09:26] Speaker A: well, Laney, you focus a little bit more narrowly on workforce engagement, management, so which while it's a subset of cx, it's very much a growing area with a lot of importance. Can you go into a little bit of kind of what you're seeing and what you expect?
[00:09:47] Speaker C: Absolutely, yeah. And just to add to Robin's last point of what's more important people are technology. I'm also doing our consumer research this year.
And it's funny because it's a little bit different on the consumer side of things, where the consumers, 83% of them said that the people are more important.
You know, year over year, I feel like the consumers are more opening up to AI and the technology, but they're, you know, the businesses are further ahead than them. So just an Interesting, I guess, comparison to the, to the people versus technology thing.
But as far as workforce engagement management, one of the biggest things we're watching is how AI and web is evolving. Of course, the focus shifting from the basic assist tools to the more agentic AI, which is something we're hearing about constantly, but rightfully so, because I think nearly 75% of companies are either using or planning to use agentic AI specifically for workforce engagement management.
We're seeing way more AI be used for supervisors as well.
And what that means for time savings for the supervisors per supervisor. We're seeing that automated quality management is saving 11.9 hours per week, AI training is saving them 7.4 hours per week, and AI powered scheduling and forecasting is saving 6.3 hours per week.
So, you know, what are they going to be doing with those time savings and seeing where that goes as the technology matures?
What also really is going to matter? Kind of what Robin said too, is how customer feedback gets pulled into this picture, especially when we're comparing the performance of live agents versus virtual agents.
And interestingly, our consumer research shows that they're not really preferring AI agents even for the easy tasks.
In fact, 80% of consumers say that they still prefer a human agent, even if they're guaranteed the resolution with AI.
So that just shows kind of the lag of the consumers to the technology and the businesses.
I do expect the consumers to start accepting AI agents more year over year. As long as they're having positive experiences with their interactions. As the technology gets better, you would hope that that positive experience is going to follow for the consumers.
And then another theme we're tracking is how we is expanding beyond the traditional contact center into other business parts.
So right now, only about 27% of companies said that they're using WIM outside of the contact center, but 47.5% said that they were going to, they were planning to expand that into the future areas like sales, account desk, that type of thing, or help desk, I'm sorry, account management.
But that tells us that WIM is really starting to be viewed less as just a contact center tool and more of a broader workforce strategy.
Last but not least, I think we're going to keep an eye on the digital twins or workforce simulations.
These are really moving out of the interesting experiment phase and into something much more actionable. They're giving leaders prescriptive insight into how workforce decisions impact ROI and engagement and performance, and they're getting that information before these changes are ever happening in the real world.
So we'll keep an eye on all that for when.
[00:13:25] Speaker A: Awesome. Thanks, Laney.
Now, Diane, you're taking a little bit broader view of things and looking at the market as a whole when it comes to, you know, CX and a bunch of these different technologies of how they're advancing across the market, how, how popular they've become. Can you, you know, kind of give us some thoughts on that?
[00:13:45] Speaker D: Yeah, thanks, Matt. So, you know, in 2025 we saw a lot of companies that were indicating to us that they were going to. When I say companies, I'm talking about buyers, right. Enterprises, small businesses mid market that were looking to keep their spending flat. Right. More and more. Right. In 2025 this was actually across CX and the collaboration space. That doesn't mean that there wasn't growth in key areas. But you know, a lot of the global geopolitical uncertainty and rust in some areas and concerns over tariffs really kept companies, you know, conservative with their, with their budgets. Right. Or where they spent their budgets.
You know, didn't, didn't mean that things didn't grow, but grow. Growth was definitely a little bit slower because of that.
You know, CCAS is kind of the shining star within the CX world. Right. You know, we had strong, you know, look, you know, after three quarters of, you know, through the first three quarters of 2025, on track for really good, strong double digit growth. But, you know, and we expect that to continue into 2026 as more and more companies transition to. On PREM solutions.
We, you know, we started to see, and I think this will be a big trend in 2026 is that companies really starting to make that transition based on AI. So AI being one of the strong pulls right to cloud, but also in their evaluations of companies. Right. So I may be doing AI first while still keeping some core platform pieces on prem. So AI pulls you to the cloud and you're making some vendor decisions on AI. And we started to see some of that in 2025 and I think it'll be accelerated in 2026.
But even that said, I don't expect the shakeup of the top three. Right. So we've got Nice Genesis and Five9. They'll continue to be the market leaders and then AWS leading the charge with a whole slew of companies below that on the front. It's still quite a crowded market, but still not expecting any big shakeups in 2026.
I think, you know, the other, you know, we look at CRM, you know, and Salesforce being up at the top, but then also you know, we think about CPaaS, that's the other big area. You know, we look at and you know the three big vendors there are Twilio, infobip and Cinch and there's a lot of other providers below that. Some are very regional, country focused. We've got providers in China, we've got providers in Europe and that will continue to potentially have some mergers and acquisitions. We've seen that in the last couple years more on the CPaaS side. But you know, Twilio, Infobip and Cinch, they're still very well positioned at the top and we expect that to probably not change significantly in 2026.
So Matt, back to you.
[00:16:39] Speaker A: Great. And that's actually a great transition over to Beth. Beth who you focus very much on CPaaS as well as knowledge management and CX assurance.
So maybe you could go into a little bit more depth with those areas.
[00:16:56] Speaker E: Thanks, Matt.
So Diane, touched on the market scenario around CPaaS. Let me just talk a little bit about the trends that we see there. Very much carrying forward from 2025, if not even earlier. But CPAAS providers continue to incorporate AI into not only their whole platform portfolios but their APIs in particular in order to introduce some advanced functional.
And then another area, a big area is support for rcs which is rich communication services, sort of the evolution of the long coming evolution of sms, but really enabling providers, sorry companies to brand their messages, create more interactive, put more interactivity into their messages.
So we've seen a lot of work from CPAAS providers to build up their partnerships with mobile operators. And then we're seeing enterprises start to adopt the use of RCS to support their more advanced messaging strategies. Maybe they're proactive outreach strategies in particular and some marketing efforts. So when we asked about RCS in our customer experience optimization study, you know, quite a large majority, almost 80% say that RCS is really important to their strategies.
You know, implementation of course is lagging a little bit from there with the, with about 26% already having implemented. And then a third area that we're watching, continue to watch around CPaaS is the adoption, the implementation of network APIs. Sort of joining what you do on the CPAAS side with your APIs with what carriers do with their network APIs.
Really a key focus for a few, a few CPAs providers. And we're seeing some activity around there kind of slowly moving, but particular particularly around fraud and location and quality of service use cases.
So that's on the CPAs Knowledge Management 2025 we launched our first, or we conducted, I should say our first real specific knowledge management study for cx. We covered that previously within our CX research in general, but this was a focused effort around knowledge management for CX in 2025. And from that what we saw was companies are really increasing, continuing to increase their financial commitment around knowledge management, particularly as they advance their AI strategy, budget increases planned by most companies, about two thirds of companies on average 25% increase and we see that those percentages even higher among our success group for the study. AI of course is the primary driver.
Companies are looking to implement and optimize how they're offering AI powered search, pointing AI agents to their knowledge sources and implementing RAG systems or RAG for those of you who aren't familiar, is retrieval augmented generation. So being able to complement what they're using with what they're doing with their large language models, with their knowledge data from their knowledge bases. So we saw about 35% of companies are using RAG today and then, you know, continuing to pick up in 2026 and beyond. About 12% say that they're looking to implement RA this year or next year.
Other focus areas for knowledge management, continued integration with other data platforms, particularly around customers. So your CRM, your CDP platforms in order to bring together that sort of consistent view of customer data for grounding AI interactions.
And then along that line, continuing to focus on establishing and operationalizing a single source of truth just to really ensure that, you know, the information that agents are receiving, the information that customer self service customers are receiving is it's really, really reliable and you know, they're not getting any hallucinations.
And that sort of brings me to the last area that I wanted to talk about today, which is CX assurance.
This is a newer area for Metrogy. We did ask about CX assurance in our latest CX optimization research and what we found is that almost half of companies say that the new risks introduced by AI and automation are really driving them to bring on CX assurance tools.
So and this is particularly as they're moving beyond their basic voice bots and their basic chatbots into more advanced AI agents, you know, using generative or agentic systems.
We'll see CX assurance tools evolve from really a focus on the sort of simple uptime monitoring to more complex and functional and conversational testing.
And with that said, we're seeing the sort of the CX insurance market expand beyond those traditional CX assurance companies to companies that are providing those AI agent platforms. They're doing so with capabilities meant to simulate their agents pre deployment and then continuous monitoring post deployment, as well as other platform providers, including those offering Contact center platforms.
So that's sort of my three areas in a nutshell.
Back to you, Matt.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: You know, I. I keep hearing AI come up in every single thing that we're talking about, and that seems to be a huge overarching trend of that. We continue to see that. You know, we plan to see that continuing to grow and everywhere, and I think that we will probably can be continuing that as we shift over to Irwin in a little bit of different space and unified collaboration, unified collaborations and workplace collaboration.
Do we start to see some of the AI trickling in there as well?
[00:23:45] Speaker F: No, AI is not at all.
No, I'm kidding, of course.
Yeah, I would. You know, again, Echo, I think what everybody else has said, especially what Robin said at the beginning around agency AI, you know, three areas where I see some really interesting developments over the next, over the rest of this year.
The first is around agency AI and again, echoing what Robin talked about, where AI is now starting to take on active roles. It's acting on its own again with appropriate guardrails.
We saw in our AI for a Business Success study that we published last year that about 35% of companies said that they saw the biggest value, biggest potential for benefit from agenic AI. And in the collaboration space, I think you're going to see by the end of this year, a fair amount of people have an AI agent working side by side with them that's looking at their emails and chats and highlighting things that they need to be concerned about and pulling in data from different applications, creating meetings, following on and managing tasks. And it really becomes a whole different way if we think about the way people typically work today. You come in, in the morning, you check your messages, you check your emails, you check your project status, you might check a few dashboards.
That AI agent can learn what is important to you and can surface insights to you and allow you to figure out what actions need to be done next. Automate workflows.
And again, I think we're really in its infancy right there. The next two are actually not as focused on AI. The one area is around connected Workspace. It's an area that Beth has covered for us in the past, that I'm leading now.
And the idea there is that we're moving away from siloed collaboration, where we live in spreadsheets and presentations and documents and so on, and pulling in a variety of different elements so that I can work across different contextual instances. I can communicate and collaborate around the work that I'm doing, and I can do all of that without constantly switching among different applications. So we see a number of examples from Microsoft called Loop Zoho recently introducing a revamped Zoho one late in 2025.
Zoom workplace now adding in Zoom Docs, companies like Asana, Notion, Smartsheet, Superhuman, the former Grammarly that are all bringing in messaging, task management, document and content collaboration all into a single workspace. ClickUp would be another example in that space. So the idea there is that we're reducing friction. We're reducing the time people spend hunting for information, commenting, chatting, and so on in different channels from where they do their work. The last area is around security compliance. This has been a core area of my coverage for the last several years now.
Unfortunately, we continue to see that we're going in the wrong direction. Our recent workplace collaboration, contact center, security and compliance study that we published in late 2025 showed that attacks on collaboration applications and collaboration platforms, phone systems, contact center platforms, et cetera. We're up over 300% since 2021.
Companies are continuing to wrestle with the fact that. I guess I'll have to talk about AI again. The fact that AI creates new vulnerabilities, things like injection attacks, poisoning, efforts to create hallucinations, to force AI to share data it shouldn't. To do things it shouldn't do. We certainly see that on a daily basis.
But also the potential use of AI as a mitigation tool. So companies will be increasingly looking at how they can leverage AI to protect themselves and to automate response, isolation, mitigation and so on from attacks. So I think again, security and compliance will continue to be a massive challenge. Also an opportunity for companies that are playing in this space as we go throughout 2026.
[00:27:49] Speaker A: Awesome. Thank you, Erwin.
Shifting over to Diane, much like you did for the CX space, you also have quite a bit of insight into the workplace collaboration space. So can you go into that a little bit?
[00:28:03] Speaker D: Yeah, thanks, Matt. I'm going to actually take a little bit of a different tactic on this side, because when we think about ucas, obviously Microsoft Teams is the kind of the gorilla in the room, right? When we think about what happened and, you know, and who kind of dominates this space. But going into 2026, you know, we're still going to look at all these vendors, we're still going to, you know, track the market, but really we're going to take a little bit of a different tack and we're really going to evaluate and do a lot more analysis around the combination of uc. Right. And collaboration and vendors who have kind of a, a joint platform with the CX side. Right. So UC plus cc. Right. And we're going to really do a lot more deeper dive and a lot more evaluation of what those companies look like. So, you know, and this isn't exhaustive, but the companies that really kind of stand out in terms of who plays in that space in a joint way is very different than the top of the, the ccas world. Right. It is Cisco, it is Zoom, it's ring central, it's 8x8, it's Vonage, it's Nextiva. Right. So, you know, and that's not an exhaustive list, but you know, those are the companies that come to top of mind when we think about who has kind of a really, truly integrated UC and CC platform and how they're differentiating and moving forward in the market in that kind of combined space. And I think that will be kind of a way to reframe and to look at who can really grow and succeed in the UC side by leaning into their assets they have on the side.
[00:29:40] Speaker B: Great.
[00:29:40] Speaker A: And we expect so much for 2026. And what are we going to do to kind of assess that? We're going to do quite a bit of research this year. We have quite a bit planned for 2026, you know, obviously continuing some of the research that we've done in the past, you know, like our Metrocast that Diane leads, looking at forecasting of the different markets.
As expected, we're digging a lot into AI, you know, so we have some dedicated AI studies looking at specifically in the workplace, in customer service, how the technology is being used and organizationally, how it's being used as well.
But we also continue to be doing our workplace collaboration research looking at those collaborative spaces and as Arun mentioned, a lot on security as that seems to be an area where a lot of focus needs to be done within a lot of companies as well as just overall customer experience that we've been, you know, Robin's been leading for all of these years to, to kind of shift everything forward in our research to see, you know, what's the new pieces coming coming forward.
As Lainey had mentioned, we are also dabbling into the consumer side research as well.
We are launching a new quarterly tracker looking at customer service and AI in that, so both sentiment and usage of each of those technologies.
So that's what we have to look forward to in 2026.
Does anybody else have anything they want to bring up before we sign off?
[00:31:22] Speaker B: No, I think we've covered more. Yeah.
[00:31:25] Speaker F: Look forward to an interesting year. And I think most, if not all of us will be at Enterprise Connect in March. So please find our sessions there. And if you'd like to set up a meeting, please reach out to us.
[00:31:37] Speaker B: Yeah, and also future of CX in Fort Lauderdale in March or I'm sorry, in February. It's coming up sooner than I'm thinking. We'll be running the content there as well.
[00:31:46] Speaker A: Yeah, those are great areas where you can come and speak with us if you happen to be there in person. You know, we always love hearing from everybody.
If you are not going to be there in person, you want to speak to us as well, you can either reach out through email or give us a call. You can head to our website and fill out contact information there.
I also urge everybody to sign up for our newsletter. We send out a newsletter every month with all of our latest research and, you know, kind of trends that we're seeing that may have be a little more detailed than what we could go into today. So I urge everybody to go to our website, sign up for our newsletter and stay in touch with us.
So with that said, I look forward to seeing what we're going to do and having a great 2020.
