Five9's 2026 Business Leaders Customer Experience Report has found that 92% of organisations have already implemented or piloted AI in customer service, with 65% actively deploying AI use cases in production. Consumer trust, however, remains the defining obstacle. Vendor surveys should always be read with a degree of caution, but set against recent Gartner research and other industry studies, Five9's findings reinforce a broader pattern. The industry's biggest challenge is no longer deploying AI. It is making that AI work effectively across the entire customer journey.
Adoption is Becoming the Baseline
Based on a survey of 3,000 consumers and 600 customer experience and contact centre decision-makers across the US, UK and Germany, Five9's report found that AI has moved from experimentation into production at scale, with organisations increasingly reporting measurable returns.
Gartner's recent global spending forecasts support this notion with worldwide AI investment at $2.59 trillion in 2026, a 47% rise year-on-year, even as the research firm cautioned that much of that growth still comes from vendors and hyperscalers rather than enterprises themselves. Five9's research adds to this that a meaningful share of spending is now reaching live, production environments rather than just sitting in pilot form.
Separate research from TELUS Digital pointed to the same conclusion but from a different angle, finding that AI deployment across contact centres has become a baseline expectation rather than a source of differentiation. Taken together, the studies suggest AI adoption is indeed fast becoming the norm, rather than the competitive advantage many vendors once promised.
The Real Challenge is Execution, not Deployment
Five9's research points to integration, workflows, governance, human support and the preservation of context across handoffs in order to improve trust and outcomes. Amit Mathradas, Chief Executive of Five9, explained: “Winning with AI in customer experience will come down to more than automating interactions at scale.” He continued: “It requires making every experience more relevant, more trusted and more human.”
That framing echoes Infobip's recent CX Maturity Report, which found that while 53% of enterprises globally have deployed agentic AI, adoption remains concentrated in low-value tasks such as feedback collection and reminders, while higher-value journeys including onboarding and returns still rely heavily on manual effort. Infobip pointed to fragmented data and disconnected systems, rather than the technology itself, as the underlying constraint.
The studies appear to be converging on a similar conclusion: enterprises have largely solved the AI adoption question and now they need to integrate it across entire customer journeys rather than isolated use cases.
Trust Remains the Missing Piece
According to Five9’s research, while 80% of consumers are willing to use AI-powered customer service, two-thirds still say they prefer speaking to a human, and 71% consider it very or extremely important to know when they are dealing with AI rather than a person. Perhaps most tellingly, 83% of consumers say they still have to repeat themselves at least sometimes after being transferred from AI to a human agent, even though nearly all decision-makers believe their organisation preserves context during that handoff.
That mirrors Gartner's warning that consumer scepticism towards AI-generated content is rising, with nearly half of US consumers now believing generative AI has reduced content quality overall. Customer expectations appear remarkably consistent across unrelated studies. One particularly interesting insight from Five9's data is that nearly every business believes context is preserved during AI-to-human handoffs, yet most consumers say they still have to repeat themselves, which suggests organisations may be measuring AI success differently from the customers actually experiencing it.
The Industry's Focus has Shifted
Rather than presenting a radically new picture of customer experience, Five9's research largely reinforces themes already emerging across other recent studies, which increasingly depict the first phase of enterprise AI adoption as nearing maturity.
The next phase of competition, it seems, will be determined less by who deploys the most AI, and more by who can orchestrate customer journeys, integrate AI with enterprise systems, preserve trust, and deliver seamless collaboration between AI and human agents. If AI deployment is the cost of entry execution may well become the price of success in CX AI.