In 2026, artificial intelligence (AI) agents are changing the customer experience game.
This was the word from Luke Duffell, director of customer service automation and solution engineering at NiCE, speaking this week at CEM Africa 2026, at the Century City Conference Centre in Cape Town.
Most people in this room use ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini everyday because in many ways these tools have fundamentally changed our lives for the better, he said.
In the past, when someone was looking for information online, they would go to a search engine, type in what they wanted to know and get a list of results back that they would then need to sift through to find the information they wanted, he added.
“This was inefficient and time-consuming. But now, we can go to any of these tools, ask our question and get an answer back. When was the last time you had an experience with a brand that was this seamless?” he asked. “In a world where this kind of interaction has become the standard, we need to be designing customer experiences to keep up.”
But he cautioned that this does not mean organisations can just throw AI at every interaction and expect customers to be delighted. Unfortunately, said Duffell, customers have developed a negative perception of interacting with chatbots, largely because most of the bots out there aren’t very good.
Also presenting at the event, Trent Rossini, CEO and co-founder of inQuba, stressed that if organisations want to know how to incorporate AI into customer experience and where it will make the most impact, they need to look at what customers do, not what they say.
For years, the CX industry has made big decisions based on survey data, but no one likes to complete a survey, so the data that comes out of them often inaccurately represents sentiment. What really matters is behavioural and operational data, he said.
“We've got incredible power in AI, but AI agents are largely ignorant if they don’t have context. This context comes from understanding what customers are doing on the customer journey and what obstacles they’ve faced along the way.”
Speaking during a panel discussion at the event, Rahul Jain, CEO and co-founder of Peach Payments, suggested that in five years’ time everything will be done by agents. While this delivers certain benefits and efficiencies, he said, it’s important to question whether this is the experience customers actually want. And if the answer is ‘yes’, then we need to deliver it well.
“Right now, AI is the big buzzword, but unless your chatbot can, with 100% reliability, solve the customer's problem, it’s just adding more friction to the experience,” he explained. “Most customers reach out to customer care because they have an issue and they want it solved quickly. If your chatbot can’t do that, it’s only making things worse.
“I think this is something super-important to think about. Does it actually help your customer, or is it just something you brought in because everyone else is doing it and you want to be cool?”
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