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Automation has become the default setting for customer experience (CX). According to CallMiner's 2026 CX Landscape Report, 99% of CX organizations now use automation in some form across customer interactions. That figure suggests the industry has largely settled the question of whether to automate. This year's findings point to a harder question: whether that automation is actually working.
Fewer than one in four organizations (23%) describe their customer interactions as both highly automated and consistently optimized using CX insights. Automation, in other words, has scaled faster than the intelligence needed to guide it. The result is a widening gap between organizations that deploy automation and those that continuously improve it.
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CallMiner CX Landscape Report 2026
Discover how 700 global CX leaders are closing the intelligence gap in AI-powered customer automation. Explore the data, trends and strategies behind intelligence-led CX, human expertise and better outcomes.
CX automation adoption outpaces optimization
Nearly every organization surveyed has introduced automation somewhere in the customer journey. Yet just 24% describe their automated customer experiences as "Very Positive," showing that deployment alone doesn't guarantee a better outcome for customers.
Organizations aren't short on data to close that gap. Every organization surveyed reports collecting CX data, and 66%* now rely on automated processes to analyze it, up from 53%* last year. But collecting and analyzing data isn't the same as acting on it. More than two-thirds (68%) say they still don't use their CX data to its best advantage, up from 62% in 2025. When CX insights do get used, they're applied more often to understanding customer satisfaction than to improving automation itself. Only 30% use insights to refine how automated interactions perform, and just 22% use them to decide what should be automated in the first place.
Cross-departmental misalignment compounds the problem. Nearly all organizations (94%) report difficulty aligning CX data and feedback across teams, which leaves customer intelligence trapped in the department that generated it, instead of informing automation decisions elsewhere in the business.
What separates the strongest automated CX experiences
The report draws a clear line between organizations reporting "Very Positive" automated experiences and those reporting “Mixed” or “Negative” ones. Organizations in the Very Positive group are far more likely to consistently optimize automation using CX insights, at 49% compared with just 8% among organizations in the Mixed or Negative group. They also draw on richer sources of customer intelligence during and after interactions, including automation performance data from chatbots, voicebots, and IVR systems, as well as omnichannel conversation transcripts.
Knowing when to bring in a human matters just as much. Almost all organizations (95%) agree that human agents add more value than automation or AI in at least one type of interaction, particularly when complex problem-solving, significant business consequences, customer vulnerability, or empathy are involved. Organizations reporting Very Positive automated experiences escalate to human agents more readily than those reporting Mixed or Negative experiences (76% versus 68%), suggesting that the most effective automation strategies are built to recognize their own limits.
AI is reinforcing this balance rather than replacing it. Ninety-six percent of organizations are implementing AI within their CX initiatives, and 85% use it for at least one human-agent use case — most often for real-time assistance, improving agent productivity, and training and coaching. Concerns haven't disappeared. Forty-three percent of organizations say customers still prefer speaking with a human, while 40% believe AI struggles with complex, emotional, or high-risk interactions. Those concerns are easing slightly year over year, but they remain a reminder that automation earns trust incrementally.
Get the 2026 CallMiner CX Landscape Report
The future of CX automation depends on knowing where it works, where it needs to improve, and when human expertise still delivers the better outcome. The 2026 CallMiner CX Landscape Report explores how organizations are scaling automation, turning CX data into actionable customer intelligence, and building the cross-functional alignment needed to continuously optimize CX.
Surveyed markets include the US, U.K. and Ireland, South Africa, France, and Germany, with industry-specific insights across healthcare, financial services, technology, retail, and business process outsourcing (BPO).
Download the full 2026 CallMiner CX Landscape Report here.
*Where historical data and comparisons with 2025 are discussed, business process outsourcing industry data is excluded to ensure the data points are comparable to previous years.
