The CX trends to watch in 2025

Recent years have seen an explosion in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities for CX and this in itself has shifted the focus of experience management across the business world.

While the growing use of artificial intelligence (AI) is set to continue in 2025, AI is no longer simply about offering high-tech experiences for customers and employees. Instead, to drive progress and innovation in CX, the focus needs to be on meeting customer expectations through ethical and compliant AI deployment, better data utilization and operational efficiency powered by agentic AI. 

CX Network caught up with some of the biggest names in CX to see where they believe the focus will fall in 2025.

The future of AI for CX: From regulation to orchestration

There is no doubt that AI’s dominance will continue in 2025, but instead of it being about chatbots and automation, the focus is likely to be on much broader and strategic applications.

“The continuing advancement of AI will play an increasingly important role in 2025,” says Ian Golding, CEO and founder of Customer Experience Consultancy.

“There is still much to learn in this area, but the use of AI is already enhancing CX – especially for consumer brands – and giving organizations the ability to become more efficient and more agile,”  he adds

Bruno Guimarães founder of Amigos do CX, says: “AI combined with personalization will be the major theme of 2025. This year, we saw a lot of discussion and numerous case studies on this topic, but now it will start to become an integral part of CX programs, generating real results rather than just being used as a minimum viable product (MVP).”

In Europe, AI is now being regulated more closely following the introduction of the European Union’s AI Act. In 2025, Olga Potaptseva, founder of CXpanda and CEO of European Customer Consultancy, expects more organizations to “master the art” of ethical and compliant AI deployment. However, AI's primary role “will likely remain behind the scenes, driving deeper insights, predictive capabilities, streamlined interactions and process efficiencies,” she says.

Innovating consumer-facing AI-powered experiences are "still contingent on real-time data integration” Potaptseva says, which remains “a challenge for many”. Although there is anticipation that 2025 will be the year of AI-driven hyper-personalization, it may not be possible for a large number of organizations to deliver.

For the brands who can get hyper-personalization right, Annette Franz, founder of CX Journey, says the next frontier for AI is journey orchestration and prescribing next best actions.

“While hyper-personalization has become a hotter topic in 2024, the next step is that brands will first of all, figure out how to implement it to better orchestrate customer journeys, and second, not just use it to predict customer behavior but also to prescribe next best actions. This will lead to a more ideal experience, one in which customers are sure to achieve their desired outcomes in the best way possible,” she says.

How customers use AI

While much is written about the use of AI in B2C and B2B organizations, how customers use AI is also a force for change.

Earlier this year, we covered how the availability of customizable GPTs means machine customers could soon be a reality. That may remain a year or two away, but consumers are using generative AI more, particularly when it comes to product research and writing complaints.

Sharing his outlook for 2025, Jim Tincher, founder of Heart of the Customer and an author of multiple books on CX, says such consumer behavior trends are now accelerating and, in order to shop for the best deals, more are turning to tools such as ChatGPT.

“Consumers are reading less and summarizing more, which makes it tough to get them to read your detailed descriptions of how to follow your company’s processes,” he says, “That, in turn, requires drastic simplification of customer-facing processes.

Better data creates better AI

Great AI is built on great data. For those who are yet to get these foundations in place, 2025 is year to do so.

“Everybody is very interested in leveraging AI, but when data are not centralized or unified it will pose a big challenge for most organizations,” says Jeannie Walters, founder of Experience Investigators.

“In CX our whole goal is to have this consistent, seamless journey for the customer, and the only way we can do that is if the right data appear in the right moment, to the right person or right tool, or the right process. What I'm seeing – especially in larger organizations, but this problem is not exclusive to them – is that we have marketing data in one place, and we have a system for marketing and a way to communicate to people, and marketing owns that customer data. But then we have service and there we have a different data platform, or data might be connected through a workaround integration, but it is not all truly centralized.”

Walters adds: “What that means is when we start using AI that will learn from the data we provide, it might learn one thing over in marketing and one thing over in service and the customer then has a very inconsistent experience.”

Tincher says that in this respect, not only is CX failing to overcome the silos that have prevented innovation in the past, but it is now building its own silos.

“I’m seeing more organizations starting to combine their operational, financial and behavioral data with CX data, but it’s a depressingly small number of companies,” he says. “Those who are doing it are seeing tremendous advantages and, as I see it, this work is the future of CX. But it is also covering up one of our major flaws – the fact that in CX we’re frequently building our own silo.”

Walters agrees. “Too many organizations still treat CX as the act of listening to customers and nothing more. But really, we need to talk about it as a winning business strategy. That means you actually have to be strategic, and you have to connect things with your organizational outcomes.”

She adds: “When it comes to the function of CX, leaders need to continue to step into their own with the C-suite, with the executive team, and explain that the only way CX will work is if we treat it like any other part of business.”

Despite the now urgent need for CX to be connected to – and recognized as a driver of – business strategy, it still doesn’t get the recognition it needs in business education programs. While 2025 may not be the year that changes that, change is still needed.

“Business plans talk about getting the customers then you turn the page and it’s about internal process. It's like we forget about the customer, but we need to talk about CX as a business strategy, and people who are assigned this role, that's how they need to define their success,” Walters says.

Will 2025 be the year for generative AI?

It has been two years since the arrival of ChatGPT and the use cases for generative AI in marketing, hyper-personalization and service continue to grow. For now, Walters believes the biggest opportunity for generative AI in CX will remain in agent assist technologies, for example internal knowledge bases that can assist agents during live interactions – although the success of this still depends on the models having access to accurate data.

Elsewhere, she says there is also potential to realize when it comes to personalizing bots to deliver interactive features to customers.

“We have to be transparent and disclose to customers that they are dealing with a bot, but if we give them more personality, people really respond to that. People have started experimenting personally with ChatGPT and some of the other tools and finding that connection, and I think that that's going to serve people really, really well,” Walters says.

The flip side, however, is that bots are seen as the executors of  the mundane work, and agents will be expected to handle only technically and emotionally complex scenarios in service. Here, Walters says there is a hidden danger of more agent burn out.

She explains: “Empathy is a finite resource. We have to make sure that we are proactively thinking and designing the workplace and the way agents work in a different way. Because right now, those little mundane tasks actually provide a break as they don't require all that emotional energy.”

The consumer tech that will drive 2025

Meta and Snap are busy trying to sell augmented reality (AR) glasses and CES 2025 is promising innovations in digital health, gaming and beauty and fashion tech. Meanwhile in CX, which has traditionally been far more reserved about augmented and virtual reality (VR), Franz says 3D digital avatars could be about to transform customer engagement.

“They represent the next frontier in digital interaction, combining AI, advanced graphics and holographic technology to create immersive, lifelike representations of individuals or characters in three-dimensional space,” she says.

“These avatars can appear as holograms in physical environments or as part of AR and VR experiences. They can serve as virtual assistants, guides, spokespeople, educators, trainers and more!”

The future of CX in business

The ability for CX to survive another potentially disruptive year in the world of business is no doubt at the front of many practitioners’ minds. With a US election soon to be decided, persistently high interest rates, disruptions to global supply chains and all the pressure these factors bring to modern business, CX will need to continue to prove its worth.

Guimarães says CX teams “need to understand CX can generate significant savings, not just new profits”.

He adds: “Often, we are focused on chasing ROI, and depending on the maturity of the CX program, it can be challenging to connect CX directly to ROI. However, CX teams can identify numerous opportunities to generate short-term results that will yield savings through more efficient operations, reducing complaints and increasing customer lifetime value (CLV).”

Guimarães says practitioners need to put themselves in the customers' shoes to understand their needs and expectations, while also considering internal processes to combine both perspectives.

“This will help us understand how to improve processes to be more efficient and have a greater impact on the customer journey. In doing so, we can find many opportunities to save money while delivering a better customer experience,” he says.

Further to Walters’ observations on the connections between CX and business strategy – or lack thereof – many of our interviewees made similar observations, and this could spell trouble for the organizations that fail to take CX seriously in 2025.

For example, despite Golding’s positivity around AI for CX, he says that since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, organizations “have tended to become even more task focused than ever before and to a degree, even more short-term in their thinking”.

He explains: “As customer expectations continually increase, there appears to be a downward trend in the ability of organizations to meet those expectations. As a result, I believe we may possibly see a greater number of legacy businesses lose more relevance in their markets and this will open up more opportunity for disruptors to take advantage.”

Quick links

• Top 5 challenges facing CX practitioners - and how to overcome them
• Will AI replace most customer service teams by 2034?
• Solving the problems facing consumer insights

To share your outlook on the trends that are driving CX, click here to participate in our research into the Global State of CX 2025. The survey takes around 10 minutes to complete and qualifying practitioners will be entered into a draw to win one of three US$100 vouchers. 

Special Report: The Global State of CX

Now in its eighth year, this edition of our flagship annual report is also the first in the Global State series to examine the profit and loyalty benefits delivered by disruptor technologies such as generative AI and virtual reality. Download the Global State of CX now.

Download Now