A Look Ahead at CRM in 2026
As the following predictions indicate, artificial intelligence and automation are table stakes in the CRM industry; their influence is either mentioned or implied in nearly every prediction by industry insiders for 2026. But another trend is AI’s opposite: the need for interactions that are authentically human. Read on to see which technologies and strategies will loom large this year.
What’s Next for Customer Service and the Contact Center
“In 2026, human–machine interaction will be won on context, not automation. Voice may be the most natural interface across user experiences, but only if devices understand who’s speaking, from where, and with what intent. CRM platforms that embed context-aware, on-device voice intelligence will turn scripted interactions into conversations that feel personal, trustworthy, and seamless at scale.” —Dani Cherkassky, cofounder and CEO, Kardome
“In 2026, customer experience will be defined by how well brands balance automation with authenticity. Brands that win will make self-service seamless while ensuring human connection is always within reach for moments that require empathy. Rather than replacing humans with AI, the future is about orchestrating both to build trust and loyalty.” —Jadah Hawkins, global market leader for retail and e-commerce, Alorica
“In 2026, AI agents will become a defining force in customer experience, raising the bar for consistency and responsiveness. Companies already using them report faster resolution, higher satisfaction, and more reliable interactions across every channel. As expectations rise, consistency will emerge as the new standard for CX performance.” —Carson Hostetter, general manager of AI and customer experience, RingCentral
“For years, CX leaders have lived by the mantra of ‘more means more’ when it comes to data. More dashboards. More metrics. More customer feedback than anyone knows what to do with. But in 2026, that mindset will finally break. More is not always better, and in CX, the next big move won’t be collecting more data; it will be focusing on what matters most.” —Eric Williamson, chief marketing officer, CallMiner
“In 2026, contact centers will evolve into strategic data hubs, driving business decisions with actionable insights. Seamless human-machine collaboration will redefine customer interactions, blending CX automation with empathy and expertise. Finally, matured AI models will deliver measurable, reliable outcomes.” —Jaime Meritt, chief product officer, Verint
“In 2026, clarity will become the invisible infrastructure of customer experience. The next competitive advantage won’t just be faster response; it will be understanding customers more clearly. As AI evolves from automation to partnership, every interaction will feel more human, more confident, and more authentic because clarity, not speed, will define trust.” —Sharath Keshava Narayana, cofounder and CEO, Sanas
“Customers expect to be able to talk on a channel of their choice. Companies that don’t engage on the platforms customers use are playing Russian roulette with their profits and [customer satisfaction] scores.” —Chris Angus, vice president of communication platform-as-a-service and CX expansion, 8x8
“In 2026, AI agents will increasingly become self-optimizing systems, continuously improving their own performance, reliability, and behaviors without explicit human intervention. Rather than waiting for updates or retraining cycles, these agents will monitor how well they achieve goals, learn from successes and failures, and autonomously adjust their strategies in real time. Beyond pure performance gains, agents will optimize for stability, cost, safety, and user satisfaction, treating these as ongoing objectives rather than fixed design constraints.” —Stefan Ostwald, cofounder and chief AI officer, Parloa
"Hyper-personalization represents the next evolution in customer experience, moving beyond static data and demographic profiling toward real-time, contextual engagement. By combining behavioral analytics, automation, and AI, enterprises can anticipate intent and deliver interactions that feel more one-to-one. As we move into 2026, this evolution will gain momentum as more enterprises will continue to transform their contact center strategies by replacing reactive service models with proactive, predictive experiences that strengthen customer loyalty and improve operational efficiency." —David Fischer, chief sales officer, Luware
“We’ll trade in AI text chat windows for actual voice conversations. While individuals and enterprises primarily engage with AI and AI agents through written text today, we’re going to see voice become dominant in the coming year.” —Andy Sweet, vice president of enterprise AI solutions, AnswerRocket
“In 2026, more companies will realize that inconsistent omnichannel experiences don’t just hurt conversion, they hurt trust. Most consumers don’t think about channels at all. They just scan, click, and expect things to make sense. The brands that win will focus more on what happens after the scan or click. Meeting customers with the right context and a consistent experience will become table stakes, and companies that don’t connect those dots will feel it in both trust and revenue.” —Justine BaMaung, vice president of marketing, Uniqode
“For service organizations, retrieval-augmented conversation—AI that holds multi-step conversations, asks clarifying questions, and guides users through tasks—will transform performance. Contact center agents will resolve complex issues without escalating; customers will receive more accurate answers without navigating convoluted portals; and decision-makers will gain higher-quality data that fuels continuous improvement.” —Assaf Melochna, AI expert and cofounder, Aquant
“For customer experience, agentic AI will become common in self-service portals. These agents will help customers find what they need more quickly, which directly improves the front-end experience. On the back end, this automation will reduce support ticket volume and overhead. This will free organizations to redeploy support analysts from repetitive tasks to more strategic, innovative work.” —Deb Ashton, cofounder and senior vice president of customer experience and operations, Certinia
“In 2026, the customer experience, and therefore revenue, will ultimately determine the balance between automation and the human touch. If customers feel understood and cared for by AI, the revenue will reflect it. If they don’t, they’ll show it by abandoning the brands that have deployed AI in a less-than-optimal way.” —Amy Brown, founder and CEO, Authenticx
“In 2026, customer success leaders will begin budgeting not just for people but for the autonomous AI systems capable of executing end-to-end workflows. Imagine an agentic system that can manage renewals end-to-end. From process automation to customer engagement, these capabilities will be game changers for businesses and their customers.” —Mari-Frances Bentvelzen, chief customer officer, ConnectWise
What’s Next for CRM
“Brands best positioned to thrive in the new year will know how to balance AI-powered workflows with authentic customer experiences. They will build agentic AI tools to automate tedious tasks, connecting the dots with unified analytics that help them break down the walls between their marketing, customer care, and commerce strategies. They won’t just survive in the new age of generative AI; they’ll define what it means to be a customer-centric brand.” —Susan Ganeshan, chief marketing officer, Emplifi
“In 2026, CRM will move from a static system of record to a dynamic system of action where intelligence will stop living inside isolated tools and start connecting every customer moment. Each conversation, transaction, and interaction will add context that makes the next one smarter, not just for a single team but for the entire organization.” —Terence Chesire, vice president of product management for CRM and industry workflows, ServiceNow
“Enterprises are evolving from managing processes to orchestrating intelligence. Experience orchestration platforms are emerging as the new operating system of business, powered by large language models, large action models, the model context protocol, and agent-to-agent collaboration at scale. Together, they will transform customer and employee experiences from being managed and reactive to adaptive and self-orchestrated. Every interaction will become part of a dynamic journey, shaped in real time by a catalog of specialized AI agents working across sales, service, marketing, operations, and finance departments alongside humans in coordinated harmony.” —Olivier Jouve, chief product officer, Genesys
"In 2026, as AI agents begin making decisions and conducting transactions for consumers, the meaning of “customer” will evolve. Brands will interact not just with individuals but with a shifting mix of people, devices, and intelligent intermediaries. Understanding who or what is engaging with your brand and how stable or volatile that identity is over time will be essential.” —Tom Burke, CEO, AtData
What’s Next for Marketing
“Agentic AI will be a major theme [in 2026]. Marketers want support that accelerates work while keeping them firmly in control. Early tools across the industry highlight demand for systems that can identify unusual patterns and assist with troubleshooting in more guided ways. The year ahead will likely bring wider adoption of these models as teams look for AI that improves efficiency without sidelining human judgment.”
—Joshua John, head of strategy, Yahoo DSP
“In 2026, brands will expect clearer, closed-loop measurement that reflects the full customer journey across both physical and digital touchpoints. They will look for insights that go beyond single-campaign reporting and show longitudinal, multi-touch, and cross-channel engagements, from discovery all the way to conversion.” —Harvey Ma, vice president and general manager, Sam’s Club Member Access Platform
“As conversational AI becomes the interface for how work gets done, data quality shifts from a back-office concern to a front-line differentiator. [Large language models] will always give you an answer; the question is whether your systems and people are equipped to verify it. In 2026, the organizations that invest in clean, connected data and teach teams how to interrogate AI outputs will outpace those that settle for faster wrong answers.” —Bryan Wise, chief information officer, 6sense
“Marketers who thrive in 2026 won’t be funnel-builders; they’ll be pattern recognizers. They’ll design adaptive ecosystems, not linear journeys. They’ll use fractal models powered by AI to predict when a customer is about to loop back and re-engage. They’ll use AI-driven fractal insights to spot influence points long before the funnel can. Sticking with funnels won’t just hold you back; it will kill your competitive edge. Fractals are the future.” —Mike Turner, principal business adviser for customer intelligence, SAS
“In 2026, AI will deliver major gains in ad-tech workflows, from optimization to traffic and measurement modeling. But where AI meets creative quality and brand safety, progress will be slower. As ads appear inside AI chat and AI search, premium brands will demand formats that feel safe, well-designed, and contextually appropriate. AI will lower production costs, but whether AI-generated creative can meet modern brand expectations becomes the defining question of the year.” —Orville McDonald, senior director, Mozilla Advertising
“In 2026, marketers will use predictive signals to recognize patterns early, prioritize the right accounts, and engage buyers before demand fully materializes. AI will increasingly handle research and administrative work, freeing go-to-market teams to focus on human connection and business outcomes. Plus, timing, not just personalization, will become the real competitive advantage.” —Ann Davis, senior vice president of sales, Crunchbase
“In 2026, the biggest loyalty wins won’t come from points or punch cards; they’ll come from personality. Guests are done with cookie-cutter offers. They want loyalty that reflects who they are and how they live. We’re already seeing brands use AI to create personalized offers, participation challenges, and even tones of voice that match the guest. The next evolution is emotional connection or loyalty that feels alive. Think gamified experiences, social tie-ins, and dynamic rewards that react to each customer’s habits in real time. The restaurants that act more like a friend than a brand will dominate loyalty.” —Joe Yetter, general manager, PAR Engagement
“In 2026, marketers will finally shift from chasing perfect attribution to embracing probabilistic measurement. AI-driven modeling will become the default for understanding incrementality, giving brands faster, directionally accurate insights. Creative and media teams will increasingly co-plan in real time as generative tools simulate outcomes before campaigns launch and more consistently throughout.” —Candice Rotter, president, RADaR Analytics
“It's time for greater transparency and scrutiny around your programmatic advertising. Brands are done with low-quality inventory and [made-for-advertising] sites, flooding budgets into curated deals and [private marketplaces] instead. Marketers need to stop being bidders and become curators, consolidating partners, deploying AI-powered context analysis, and auditing every supply path. Your competitive edge isn't chasing the lowest cost-per-mille (CPM). It's knowing exactly where your ads run and why it matters to performance.” —Elise Stieferman, vice president of marketing and business strategy, Coegi
“AI will move from a novelty tool to the default engine behind planning, transforming how campaigns are built. Instead of starting fresh each cycle, planning will draw from continuously updating behavioral intelligence, shrinking weeks of manual work into hours. AI will carry forward what drove performance and what didn’t. As this becomes standard, the gap will widen between advertisers who plan with live intelligence and those relying on last quarter’s assumptions. In 2026, the fastest-growing brands will be the ones whose media plans never start at zero.” —Matt Fanelli, chief revenue officer, Digital Remedy
“By 2026, [customer data platforms] will move from static systems of record to true systems of intelligence. Consolidating customer data won’t be enough. Brands will need platforms that can interpret signals in real time, recommend next-best actions, and continuously improve the customer journey through AI-driven decisioning. This is the shift from CDPs that simply describe customers to CDPs that genuinely understand them.” —Derek Slager, cofounder and chief technology officer, Amperity
“The next leap in programmatic efficiency won’t come from curated packages; it will come from smarter sell-side decisioning. [Supply-side platforms] are evolving from simple access points into real-time decision engines that determine which impressions to surface, which demand paths to prioritize, and which low-quality supply to filter out before the auction even begins. This shift creates a cleaner, higher-signal supply layer by default, giving buyers performance gains without the manual work of curation. As identity erodes, decisioning becomes a new form of addressability, powered by context, intent, and quality scoring rather than user IDs. —Karan Dalal, chief operating officer, Media.net
“With Gmail and Apple Mail now auto-summarizing content, email marketers face a new creative challenge as they are no longer fully in control of what a subscriber sees first. Instead of crafting solely for human readers, they will need to appeal to machines, too, writing with algorithms in mind and adopting SEO principles to guide how AI interprets their emails. We’ll see more marketers think about hierarchy and language the way web teams think about metadata. Even subtle word choices and formatting could influence what an inbox summary displays. It’s an entirely new skillset for email marketers: learning to communicate fluently with both the customer and the algorithm without losing brand voice in the process.” —Guy Hanson, vice president of customer engagement, Validity
“For too long, digital identity has been treated as an after-the-fact exercise: piecing together disparate data sets to guess who someone is across channels. Meanwhile, fraud detection has operated in a silo, focusing only on post-authentication activity. In 2026, these approaches will collide. The rise of AI-driven operators where bots are instructed to mimic real customer behavior means that brands can no longer wait until login to decide whether someone is real or malicious. They’ll need to identify who or what is on their app or website the moment they arrive. This requires bridging marketing and fraud data, building a persistent and accurate view of every interaction, and acting before damage is done. The brands that can collapse this divide will be positioned to win, not just on customer experience but also on security and trust.” —Bill Bruno, CEO, Celebrus
“2026 will be the year RCS replaces SMS/MMS messaging with richer visuals, essentially turning the native text messaging into an app-like experience. Expect brands to start moving away from stand-alone apps to dive full into RCS instead, driven by higher reach and engagement than either apps or SMS/MMS.” —Alex Campbell, cofounder, Vibes
“AI platforms can give advertisers and consumers greater transparency into what is AI-generated by watermarking content. AI-generated sites and apps are becoming more widespread, and the traffic is increasingly being identified as AI-powered bots. Advertisers need to closely monitor where they invest and direct their ad dollars to quality sites and apps with real human traffic.” —Scott Pierce, head of fraud and ad quality, Integral Ad Science
“Whether it's owning your data, understanding customer intent, or focusing on outcomes, the priorities for 2026 aren't flashy; they're foundational. After a year of constant adaptation, marketing leaders are investing in infrastructure that won't crumble when the next shift comes.” —Keri McGhee, chief marketing officer, Attentive
“2026 marks the beginning of AI improving every part of advertising, from performance prediction to creative fine-tuning, to automated AdOps, and, for the first time, ads starting to appear inside AI chat and search experiences. The future isn’t identity vs. AI; it’s identity powering AI and AI transforming everything built on top of it.” —Graham Mudd, cofounder and senior vice president of product, Anonym
What’s Next for Sales
“In a year of intense AI noise and pricing anxiety, the most successful strategies will re-emphasize the value of the customer-provider relationship over simple sales transactions. Leaders must pivot from viewing sales negotiations solely as a math problem to a strategic relationship-building tool. Consistent, value-based feedback loops and a trusted partner approach, especially when delivering AI-informed price adjustments, will become the core defense against price-fixing and buyer weariness.” —Pascal Yammine, CEO, Zilliant
“2026 will be a year when CRM learns how to support the seller’s everyday experience. Whether it is prioritizing your day, identifying risks and opportunities, or being prepared for customer interactions, the CRM of 2026 will shift from CRM-based activity reporting to CRM-based seller experience support. This year will also be a year of change when it comes to value that CRM delivers to sales leaders. CRM will become a smarter revenue-generation engine.” —Maksim Ovsyannikov, chief product officer, SugarCRM
What’s Next for Retail/E-Commerce
“In 2026, product discovery for B2B and B2C organizations will level up with generative AI, enhancing the way customers search. The days of endless scrolling and reworking search terms will be over in favor of easy-to-navigate filters and precise results. Plus, product pages will transform into knowledge hubs that answer questions before they’re even asked, saving customers time and reducing headaches for customer service workers.” —Peter Curran, general manager of retail, Coveo
“Retail evolves from omnichannel to agentic commerce, where AI agents surface, compare, and purchase for consumers. Retailers who expose catalog and loyalty data via APIs become agent-friendly storefronts and win share. Real-time orchestration, hyperlocal fulfillment, dynamic pricing, and context-aware promotions shift from strategy to survival. Stores become micro-fulfillment hubs and experience nodes, while retail media and data monetization emerge as primary profit engines.” —Mark Menell, managing director, Silicon Foundry
“Omnichannel will reign as social media shifts from pure selling to social discovery, driving consumers back in-store and/or to events for experiences and community. Expect a renaissance of modern catalogs, print and digital hybrids that merge storytelling and tactile connection in an increasingly digital world.” —Sarah Molloy, director of strategic partnerships, Brij
"Consumers and merchants now expect a single experience that links onboarding, payments, loyalty, tipping, and rewards across every channel. What changes next year will be the shift to orchestration. Merchants will have to prioritize connected systems that hold consumer data and identity management to create shopping experiences that will feel tailored to the individual." —Jenn Reichenbacher, chief marketing and customer experience officer, Stax Payments
“In 2026, we’ll see some headline-grabbing failures in AI-led commerce. The root cause won’t be rogue AI. It’ll be overconfidence, driven by attempts to hard-code predictable outcomes into systems that behave probabilistically in messy reality. That will force CRM leaders to rebuild trust with clearer guardrails, better monitoring, and human escalation when automation hits uncertainty.” —Yury Bialykh, chief technology officer for digital, EPAM Systems