Genesys Xperience Focuses on AI to Enhance CX

LAS VEGAS — Artificial intelligence is causing the biggest shift in customer experience in a generation, Genesys Chairman and CEO Tony Bates said during his keynote at the Genesys Xperience 2026 conference Wednesday.

CX is the competitive battlefield for today's companies, Bates said. "You're no longer competing against just companies in your own industry, you're competing with the best experience that your customers have ever had anywhere. It's going further than that, because it's actually about competing with that personal use of AI that customers are using every day."

In the past year, personal use of AI has changed customer expectations for CX, Bates added. "It remembers context, understands your intent, helps you accomplish things like never before. For the first time, it has real contextual intelligence. That is a game-changer. That has raised the bar."

AI not only knows the user, but it keeps improving what it delivers, Bates said, while cautioning the audience about the need to pull together data that is often fragmented across enterprises for companies to realize the full value of their AI investments.

Bates touted the Genesys platform as meeting the needs of business customers in this changing environment. He noted that customers pay for a product or service, but it's in making the customer feel connected to the experience where companies build loyalty.

AI helps with that by working almost autonomously, Bates said. Humans are still needed to provide guardrails, to provide governance, and to assist in those areas that AI can't handle today.

Typically, companies don't have an AI problem, Bates added. They need to change their processes to work with the technology, rather than bolting AI on to processes designed to be handled by humans.

"You need to change, and you need to change a lot," Bates said. "We need to change the way we govern, and we need to change the pace of transformation that we've been on."

Bill McDermott, CEO of ServiceNow, added via a pre-recorded video that AI is fundamentally redefining the industry."The companies that lead will be the ones that turn intelligence into action, and together, we're defining a new enterprise operating model-one where AI agents don't simply answer questions; they collaborate across applications, data, and workflows to take action. While much of the market is still experimenting with AI, together we're putting AI to work at enterprise scale.

"Together, we are building it today."

However, the scale starts with a small project first, Bates said. Companies can learn from and build from those small projects to take AI across the enterprise to further enhance CX.

To that end, Genesys is adding capabilities to Genesys Cloud to advance it as the agentic orchestration platform for CX, and will deliver adaptive, personalized and governed customer experiences built for the age of autonomous AI.

"The future of CX is AI that understands intent, preserves memory across resources and moves the interaction forward until the customer's problem is solved," said Mike Szilagyi, senior vice president and head of product at Genesys. "With Genesys Cloud, organizations can turn AI from a collection of tools into an intelligent system that delivers better customer results at enterprise scale."

The innovations announced at Xperience form an integrated agentic foundation that understands customer intent, keeps interactions connected, and coordinates actions across AI, people, and systems within defined governance and controls. They include the following:

• Genesys Cloud Navigator -- an AI-native front door for customer experience that will bring conversational understanding, history, interaction signals, and enterprise context to understand what customers are trying to accomplish. It will clarify ambiguity and determine if the customer should move to an AI agent, workflow, or human employee.
• Genesys Cloud Orchestrator -- which builds on Genesys Cloud Navigator's intelligent start by creating the ideal plan to outcome and coordinating decisioning as the journey progresses. It maintains journey state and reasons over context, policies, and guardrails to determine the next-best step and move work across AI, human employees, and systems as conditions change.
• Contextual Intelligence -- which turns customer interactions into persistent enterprise memory by connecting real-time signals with customer identity, history, business events, and journey context. It preserves intelligence over time and instills AI with a richer understanding of the customer to inform relevant decisions throughout their journey.

Genesys is further advancing Genesys Cloud Agentic Virtual Agent to help organizations automate more complex customer interactions with greater speed, reliability, and natural engagement. New enterprise connectivity and interoperability will also enable Agentic Virtual Agent to securely work with business systems and other AI agents to drive customer outcomes across the enterprise.

These advances include a new Scaled Cognition APT-2 large action model as well as new native voice capabilities and integrations with ElevenLabs and Deepgram. Agentic Virtual Agent will also provide deeper Model Context Protocol (MCP) connectivity and Agent2Agent (A2A) interoperability with enterprise platforms.

APT-2 supports richer agent specifications, longer and more complex workflows, faster response times, and improved multilingual performance. These enhancements help Agentic Virtual Agent reason through sophisticated customer requests and carry work toward resolution within enterprise-defined guardrails.<

New voice capabilities for Agentic Virtual Agent enable more natural, responsive conversations. Through end-of-turn detection, Agentic Virtual Agent will understand when a customer has finished a thought, helping conversations flow with fewer awkward pauses and interruptions. With contextual tuning, Agentic Virtual Agent will automatically adapt its terminology, tone, and speaking style as needed.

Across the development lifecycle, organizations can more build and deploy Agentic Virtual Agent experiences. With spec-driven development, teams can describe desired customer experiences and outcomes using existing materials, such as process documentation, standard operating procedures, and interaction transcripts, which AI helps translate into deployable configurations. Development teams can also use a range of tools, such as Anthropic's Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, Cursor, and Kiro to create specifications that can be brought into Genesys Cloud for testing and governance, providing flexibility while maintaining enterprise oversight.

Genesys is introducing AI-assisted authoring that analyzes how Agentic Virtual Agents are designed, identifies opportunities to improve their effectiveness, and recommends ways to drive better customer outcomes. New AI-powered testing, expanded reporting and detailed auditability will also help organizations validate Agentic Virtual Agents before deployment, understand their actions, and continuously improve performance over time.

Genesys is expanding Agentic Virtual Agent with more than 500 integrations and access to more than 25,000 MCP-compatible tools, including CRM, enterprise resource planning, IT service management, knowledge, collaboration, billing, and other business applications.

"Enterprise AI is entering a new phase defined by what it can accomplish for customers," said Mike Szilagyi, senior vice president and head of product at Genesys. "We're further strengthening Genesys Cloud Agentic Virtual Agent with more context, intelligence and capabilities to act across the enterprise, work with other AI agents and carry increasingly complex customer requests through resolution. This is how businesses can turn customer intent into meaningful outcomes at scale."

The company also expanded its ecosystem with collaborations with Adobe, AWS, Meta, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Sierra covering the following key areas:

• Customer Intelligence: Adobe and Genesys are working together to deliver actionable customer signals via the ingestion of third-party platform events into Genesys Cloud. Organizations will be able to combine Adobe digital experience events in Adobe CX Enterprise with Genesys Cloud interaction events to enable real-time bidirectional data integration for enhanced customer journeys across both platforms.
• Multi-agent Orchestration: Agent2Agent (A2A) interoperability with Salesforce Agentforce and ServiceNow will enable AI agents to securely communicate, coordinate and automate work across enterprise platforms. Organizations can connect customer engagement with CRM, service operations and business workflows while maintaining shared context across every interaction.
• Specialized AI Agents: Organizations can incorporate Sierra agents and ElevenAgents into customer journeys alongside Genesys Cloud Agentic Virtual Agents. Genesys Cloud coordinates when and how those agents participate, helping organizations use the best resource for each task while preserving a consistent customer journey.
• Speech and Voice AI: New integrations with Deepgram and ElevenLabs will expand the choice of specialized voice and speech technologies available for Genesys Cloud Agentic Virtual Agents. Organizations will be able to use the Deepgram voice AI platform for fast, accurate conversational speech understanding and ElevenLabs text to speech for natural, expressive voice experiences in Agentic Virtual Agents while maintaining Genesys Cloud governance and enterprise controls to deliver fluid interactions.
• AI Infrastructure: Building on its collaboration with AWS, Genesys Cloud expands access to frontier AI infrastructure, foundation models and cloud services. Organizations can innovate with the AI technologies that best fit their business while scaling securely on enterprise-grade infrastructure.
• Customer Engagement: A recently expanded collaboration with Meta deepens WhatsApp capabilities within Genesys Cloud, enabling organizations to unify messaging, voice and AI on one of the world's largest customer engagement platforms. Customers can move seamlessly between digital and voice interactions while preserving context across every conversation.

"To realize the full potential of AI, organizations need the freedom to innovate across technologies without sacrificing the continuity of the customer experience," said Glenn Nethercutt, chief technology officer at Genesys. "With our growing partner ecosystem, Genesys Cloud provides a trusted platform for agentic orchestration, giving organizations the context and control to shape how AI and people work together to deliver customer experiences at global scale."