Customer experience and personalisation in the age of AI are shifting so rapidly that it’s hard for many marketers to keep up. In this article, key B2C and B2B marketing leaders weigh in on the critical considerations for the year ahead.
Passionberry Marketing‘s managing director and founder Geoff Main envisions ‘Human through AI’ becoming a standard service.
“Top CX teams will route high-emotion moments to humans, but move everything else to well-trained agents. This isn’t speed alone; it’s about appropriate escalation. Meanwhile, expect to see AI agents move from ‘novelty’ to P&L. Agent projects require a business case: target minutes saved, error rates reduced, revenue created,” Main said.
He also expects to see ‘unbundled journeys rebundle around context’. This means customers will move between chat, SMS, email and in-person seamlessly. Systems that can’t carry context forward create churn. Context-carry will become a board metric.
Marketing and growth leader Iris Chan expects to see more democratisation of agentic AI. The creation of custom AI agents will no longer be in the realm of software engineers and developers. With the success of no-code platforms, non-technical people can design, fully customise and create an AI agent.
“The proliferation of AI agents will lead to stronger yearning for authentic, humanised experiences. While people will love the convenience and speed of AI-powered transactional scenarios, they will crave for the presence of real humans and emotional connection in high-value, high-stakes exchanges. Human beings are innately gregarious so you can only defy human nature for so long. Covid has provided a strong proof point of this,” Chan added.
Meanwhile, she expects the buying journey will continue to be consumerised. “It is no longer enough to personalise buying experiences, the trend will be hyper-individualisation – being able to tailor experiences based on individual preferences and historical behaviours or patterns,” she said.
Pip Stocks Consulting‘s director Pip Stocks says that CX has matured beyond convenience.
“What people want now is to feel understood. Emotion, not efficiency, is what keeps customers close. Brands that win will design for reassurance, excitement, trust and joy at every interaction, blending empathy with tech to create experiences that feel alive and uniquely human,” she said.
She sees the next era of CX moving from journey mapping to emotional mapping, designing experiences that feel human, not just frictionless.
“At the same time, AI will no longer be the shiny toy; it’s the quiet force behind smarter, faster, more customer-led decisions. It’s what allows founders to move from overwhelm to focus on turning data into insight, chaos into clarity. In this next phase, AI becomes an enabler of creativity and compassion: a tool that helps us see customers more clearly, not just scale faster,” she added.
RAMMP‘s founder Dr Anna Harrison sees AI not as a tool, but as a confidant. She expects this shift in perception to characterise the year ahead.
“Most people still treat AI like a productivity hack. But recent HBR research shows the most common uses of GenAI in 2025 were therapy, life planning, and personal growth,” Harrison said.
We’re not just using AI. We’re confiding in it.
“This means when ChatGPT recommends a product, it doesn’t feel like a search result. It feels like advice from someone who knows you and has your best interests at heart. And with the updates in ChatGPT (InstantBuy), this is the space to watch in 2026,” she added.
Marketers must understand, she stressed that AI isn’t a channel; it’s a relationship and it’s intimate.
The Silva Spoon‘s founder and fractional CMO Fabrizia Roberto says the trends heading into 2026 are clear: experience will lead, technology will support (not replace) human creativity, and fractional leadership will become a strategic norm.
“People don’t need more content. I see that the brands that cut through are the ones that manage to create emotional, memorable touchpoints,” Roberto said.
“Brands that prioritise customer experience are seeing stronger engagement and trust than those focused on volume. Physical spaces, digital rituals, and service-led branding are all part of that,” he added.
He urges marketers to remember that AI is firmly embedded in the marketing stack now, but it’s no longer a differentiator. The real edge comes from how well it’s applied. A clear focus on understanding your customer and crafting your unique strategy to connect with them, not just automation, will drive results.
Marketing technology leader Satya Upadhyaya weighed in, adding that personalisation in 2026 isn’t a token merge variable anymore.
“The brand that can treat each customer interaction as a unique moment of connection wins. And the brand that treats consent, trust and value exchange as secondary loses,” Upadhyaya said.
Another area Upadhyaya envisions is that hyper-personalisation will be powered by AI, moving from ‘segment of one’ to ‘moment of one’ — dynamic content, real-time context, micro-communities, linguistic/cultural/behavioural nuance. This will be powered by event-streaming and live decisioning – Data collected, processed, fed into the decision engine, triggers action immediately. The “journey” becomes fractal and adaptive.
“Responsible personalisation will be the new trust currency. Brands that build transparent data practices, consent frameworks, zero-trust data design, minimise risk and earn deeper engagement. Creative & AI convergence: Generative AI will help scale creative personalisation, but marketers must guard against generic content. Authenticity, brand voice and context matter more than ever,” Upadhyaya said.
“AI will not replace marketing; it will redefine it as a living, learning system powered by collaboration between human creativity and machine cognition. It will play a supporting role to central intelligence. It will design segments, pick channels, adjust spend, optimise creative, predict behaviour, and orchestrate experiences — all within the guardrails we set,” Upadhyaya added.
B2B marketing leader & CMO Stuart Matthewman shared that most “CX issues” he hears about aren’t journey problems, they’re basic failures to deliver. Customers are chasing clarity, speed and follow-through.
“In 2026, the companies that win won’t have the nicest journey maps; they’ll be the ones who answer quickly, solve problems the first time, and stop hiding operational issues behind warm language. Fix the basics and CX improves,” Matthewman said.
When it comes to AI, boards won’t care about pilots, demos or clever use cases anymore. They’ll want to know what changed:
Did it speed something up? Did it reduce waste? Did it create revenue?
If the answer isn’t clear within 3-6 months, budgets will dry up. Not because AI failed, but because the business finally expects it to act like real technology, not a promise.
Marketers should rethink strategies to ensure clarity and peace of mind moving forward, as the AI landscape rapidly shifts.
