The state of customer experience in 2026 can be summed up simply: customers have never had more ways to interact with your brand, and they’ve never been less tolerant about friction when engaging.
While the power of technology is at its apex, so are expectations. And the gap between the two is where revenue goes to die.
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Brands using AI to deepen human connection by freeing up sellers, marketers, and service agents to focus on empathy, trust, and complex problem-solving are pulling ahead. Those still bolting AI onto fragmented systems, or using it purely as a cost-cutting measure, risk falling further behind.
To help organizations address the rapidly changing factors impacting CX, we’re proud to debut our first quarterly “State of” reports. Designed to pull together the latest research and data across sales, service, marketing, and e-commerce, these thought leadership pieces are available without a gate because we know that experience and expertise matter, and we want to share ours with you. (You can find links to the reports at the end of this post.)
The key takeaways from each report demonstrate that CX is no longer a single department’s job. Rather, it’s a cross-functional discipline, and the stakes for getting it wrong are higher than ever.
The cost of bad experiences is staggering
Let’s start with the number that should be pinned at the top of every leadership deck this quarter: bad customer experiences have put $3 trillion in global sales at risk in 2026, with consumers actively cutting back $2.1 trillion in spending and walking away entirely from $865 billion worth of it, according to Forbes data cited in our State of Service report. That’s not churn. That’s customers voting with their wallets in real time.
And they’re not quiet about why. A striking 82% of consumers say a brand has disappointed them, and 60% admit they don’t pay attention to brands even when their product needs are being met. Translation: satisfying the transaction isn’t enough anymore. If the experience around it feels disorganized or impersonal, customers check out.
On the service side specifically, 75% of consumers say they’re put off by disorganized brands that pass them between multiple people or teams just to solve one problem, and 46% say service flat-out feels too impersonal.
The combustible combination of sky-high financial risk and low tolerance for friction is forcing every customer-facing function to rethink how it operates.
That’s the backdrop. Now let’s talk about what’s actually happening in each corner of the customer journey.
AI is everywhere, trust in it is not
Every function is racing to embed AI, with good reason. AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail sites is up 4,700% year over year, and almost 60% of consumers have already used AI to shop, as cited in our State of E-commerce report.
On the marketing side, our report notes that AI has moved from experiment to foundational: 33% of marketing leaders are using it for hyper-personalized engagement, and 31% say predictive insights and personalization have been a top priority all year.
Meanwhile the State of Sales and Revenue report points out that digitized suppliers leveraging AI are outperforming their peers on sales goals by a jaw-dropping 110%.
But here’s the twist that ties it all together: customers don’t actually love the AI they’re interacting with.
- 79% of Americans say they strongly prefer human support over an AI agent
- 63% don’t believe AI can replace humans in service roles at all
- 89% believe brands should always offer the option to talk to a real person
- 81% believe AI is primarily being used to save the company money, not to improve their experience.
That’s the tension every function needs to sit with. AI is delivering real, measurable business value, but if customers believe that AI was deployed to cut costs rather than serve them, you might win efficiency but lose the relationship.
Trust is the currency, and it’s getting harder to earn
Each one of the reports circles back to the same word: trust. In marketing, 61% of B2B buyers say trust and credibility are the most important thing content can deliver, ranking above lead generation. Consumers are leaning on peer and creator trust more than brand messaging, too: 76% of brands report that sponsored content with creators now outperforms traditional advertising, and in social commerce, 45% of Gen Z shoppers say they’re more likely to trust a product once it goes viral.
On the e-commerce side, trust shows up as transparency. With tariffs pushing import costs up 15-30% across major categories, brands that explain price increases rather than quietly passing them along are building goodwill that pays off in retention. And in sales, the numbers show that your existing customers–the ones who already trust you–are an underused asset: 45% of revenue leaders are now focused on improving handoffs across marketing, sales, and service, while 39% are chasing expansion and upsell revenue instead of only hunting net-new logos.
The people problem behind the technology story
There’s one more thread that doesn’t get enough attention in the AI headlines: the humans delivering these experiences are stretched thin. Call center turnover is running 40-45% in 2026, spiking to 55-60% in high-stress sectors, while replacing a single agent can cost up to $46,000 when accounting for lost productivity.
As AI absorbs the easy tickets, what lands on human agents is the hard stuff: it’s complex, is emotional with high-stakes, and burnout is quietly eating away at CSAT and first-contact resolution scores. This matters because customer experience isn’t just a technology stack or a personalization engine. It’s fundamentally delivered by people; whether that’s a service agent handling an escalation, a seller navigating a buying committee, or a marketer trying to sound human in an AI-saturated feed. Protecting the people doing that work isn’t a wellbeing initiative separate from CX strategy. It is CX strategy.
Fragmentation is the enemy of good CX
If you weave every stream together, the state of CX has one clear directive: stop treating AI, data, and channels as separate initiatives owned by separate teams, and start treating the customer experience as the single thread that runs through all of them.
That means AI-shopping agents that use clean, structured product data. It means first-party data strategies that replace the crumbling third-party targeting most marketing was built on. It means service and sales teams that know exactly when to step back and let self-service work, and exactly when to step in and be human. And it means service organizations that give their people better tools instead of just more automation.
Future success won’t be shaped by the brands with the most AI; it will favor the brands that make customers feel understood, even as the experience becomes more automated. That’s not a technology bet. That’s a trust bet, and right now, trust is in short supply.
You can find our “State of” reports here:
Jessica Keehn is chief marketing officer of SAP Customer Experience.
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