Forrester released its 2026 Global Total Experience Score rankings this week, and the headline findings are striking enough on their own. USAA topped the US rankings with a Total Experience Score of 69.0 on a 100-point scale, while RBC Dominion Securities led Canadian brands at 60.0. The bigger story here is not which brands came out on top, but what the framework reveals about the next pressure point facing organisations deploying AI across customer, employee, and brand interactions.
Most companies still manage brand experience, customer experience, and employee experience as separate disciplines. That approach may hold up on an org chart, but as Keith Johnston, VP and Group Director at Forrester, argues, it fails in the market: “Customers do not experience your structure; they experience the promise your brand makes, the reality your business delivers, and the consistency with which your people make both believable.”
CX AI Has Been Built in Silos
Over the past two years, enterprise AI investment has spread rapidly across functions. Customer service copilots, AI-powered self-service, marketing automation, employee assistants, and knowledge management tools have all attracted significant attention and budget. The problem is that most of these deployments have been managed independently, optimising individual touchpoints while leaving the overall experience disjointed.
The symptoms of this are familiar to anyone working in contact centres or customer operations. Self-service channels provide different answers than human agents. Marketing promises outpace what operations can deliver. Customers repeat information as they move between AI and human support. These are not edge cases. They are predictable consequences of disconnected AI programmes.
Why Employee Experience Has Become a CX Variable
One of the most significant additions to Forrester's framework this year is the Employee Experience Index, introduced as a direct growth driver. Johnston is unambiguous about what the data shows: "Employees are not adjacent to the experience; they are the mechanism through which it happens. And in the US, the signal is impossible to ignore: only 25% of brands with EX data had a positive EX impact on their total experience, while 37% had a negative EX impact."
For CX leaders, this reframes how employee-facing AI should be evaluated. Agent assist platforms, AI coaching systems, and workforce intelligence tools have often been positioned as efficiency plays. Forrester's framework suggests they should also be measured as customer experience inputs, because faster issue resolution, better knowledge access, and reduced agent effort directly shape the interactions customers receive.
Orchestration as Competitive Advantage
The data makes a compelling case for treating brand, customer, and employee experience as a single system. Forrester analysed 406 brands across 13 countries and 11 industries using more than 350,000 consumer perceptions, finding that of the 375 brands measured in both 2025 and 2026, 41% improved and only 3% declined. Crucially, the gains were most pronounced where internal alignment was strongest.
The results mirror the direction that major CX enterprise platforms are already moving. Salesforce, ServiceNow, Genesys, NICE, and Cisco have all shifted their messaging toward orchestration, governance, and coordination across AI-powered interactions rather than individual point solutions. This all points to the same logical basis: organisations that connect customer interactions, employee workflows, brand communications, and AI agents into a coherent operating model are better placed to sustain the experience they promise.