The gap between what executives believe about their customer experience (CX) and what customers actually feel has never been wider. While C-suite leaders speak confidently about being “customer-first” and “experience-led,” their own teams confessed to a reality of dashboard overload, survey fatigue, and tools that gather dust rather than insights.

This isn't just an implementation problem—it's an existential threat. As AI empowers customers with unprecedented choice and information, companies clinging to outdated customer experience approaches are already being left behind. The new battleground isn't digital transformation (that's now table stakes) but creating engaging relationships at scale that customers genuinely value.

At the Qualtrics X4 Summit 2025 in Salt Lake City, we got a glimpse of the future as a handful of customer-centric leaders revealed how they’re rallying their organizations and turning challenges into measurable financial results. Here are five trends that we uncovered at X4.

1. Customers don’t just want easier transactions—they want to feel known and cared for. While most companies have spent the last decade or so focusing on reducing customer effort, today’s customers expect more than ease and convenience. They expect recognition, understanding, and emotional connection across every channel and every moment. They don’t care who “owns” CX. They expect everyone to work to make their lives (or jobs) better. In other words, they want a human relationship.

Leading organizations have now shifted from siloed, department-driven improvements to a holistic, company-wide approach based on the customer’s view of the value proposition. Hilton, for example, told X4 attendees that all employees have shared goals for CX improvement, extending down to the property level. Making this a practical reality has required leadership alignment, ruthless prioritization of the actions that earn the greatest customer loyalty and create the most value, insights drawn from integrated data, and employees who are empowered to create meaningful, trust-based relationships. The most advanced companies have embraced AI to achieve these types of personalized relationships at scale.

2. Reliant on long surveys and static dashboards? You’re already behind. Traditional customer feedback—typically collected through surveys—will always have a role to play. But if your entire CX strategy depends on what 5% (or fewer) of your customers tell you in a 20-question survey, you’re flying blind and ignoring the shadow zone where your most valuable customers are likely hiding. Betting your company on the opinions of just the small number of customers willing to respond to your survey puts you at extreme risk.

Modern leaders now embrace predictive intelligence, real-time social sentiment analysis, synthetic customer research, AI-driven behavioral insights, propensity and response models, and next-best action engines that identify unspoken customer needs. Where these companies are still surveying the customer, they’re using the next generation of conversational feedback to engage the customer in a true dialogue that digs beneath the surface. Fiserv, for example, illustrated this when they shared the deep customer insights they uncover using AI tools to mine huge volumes of customer data. They use AI-powered conversations with customers to transform vague, one-word survey responses into meaningful customer dialogues. They then follow up with additional questions that elicit deeper insights from more than 40% of the customers involved.

To quote Qualtrics President of Product, Engineering, and User Experience Brad Anderson, “Organizations can now respond to people with an in-depth understanding of the human experience, addressing people’s problems and anticipating their needs.” Proprietary second-order feedback, combined with analysis from your full data ecosystem, delivers the insights needed to make timely decisions that shape a customer’s experience.

3. Digital alone won’t get you there—but AI might. Digital capabilities are now table stakes. Enabling digital self-service for most needs no longer sets you apart. In fact, according to Bain & Company’s NPS Prism benchmarking service, over 75% of UK banking customers say that the base customer experience meets their needs. However, only about 45% of those same customers say their needs for engagement with their bank or from the value proposition offered by their bank are being met. What has become clear is that, while everyone offers apps, bots, and online interactions, very few brands effectively humanize these digital experiences.

The new digital frontline now delivers empathy and humanity that meet or exceed the historical standards of the best human frontlines. Companies excelling in CX today have developed the ability to leverage AI that creates emotionally resonant, personalized interactions and fosters authentic connections with customers. In the words of Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin, “Using AI will make work more human.” If your digital experiences remain transactional rather than transformative, you’re missing critical opportunities to build the relationships that earn and retain deep customer loyalty.

4. Agentic AI is already here—and your organization is likely closer than you think. Most of us have come to dread interactions with chatbots because they rarely offer much beyond the answers to very basic questions. And even these are delivered in a stiff, structured, and frustrating way. Customers recognize this as a text-based doom loop and quickly give up or escape to a human.

The most recent generation of GPT-powered large language models (LLMs) enable conversational interactions with self-service tools. Until the recent introduction of agentic AI—autonomous systems capable of sensing, reasoning, and acting independently—even this new generation of smooth-talking basic chatbots failed to address or act on most customer needs. Now, these intelligent agents can autonomously resolve up to 85% of customer issues, deal with modest ambiguity, orchestrate specialized tasks, analyze sentiment, intelligently route inquiries, and execute smooth escalation of issues to human agents when necessary or desired.

Many attendees at the conference seemed not to understand how much of the foundation for agentic AI has already been laid in their organizations. In response to Qualtrics’ emphasis on providing agentic support for issues and opportunities arising from customer feedback, much of the hallway conversation at X4 centered on how distant a vision this painted.

Yet, the system of rules-based and robotic process automation that companies have already built to enhance the productivity and improve the accuracy of human agents is the foundation that AI agents need to autonomously complete their work. In many ways, these automations constitute the truly hard and intricate work required to enable action. With the help of agentic AI vendors, our clients include a number of companies that have been accelerating down a deliberate learning path to develop and deploy agentic AI in increasingly demanding use cases.

The value is worth the investment. Agentic AI reduces costs, effort, and customer churn simultaneously. It also offloads the drudgery and tedium of routine interactions from employees. This isn’t some distant future—it’s already happening. Deon Nicholas, chairman and cofounder of Forethought, says, “Agentic AI doesn’t just give you the information so you can solve your own problem. Agentic AI solves your issue end to end. It interviews you to understand your problem, and in real time, behind the scenes, it is troubleshooting and taking corrective actions to solve that problem without any human intervention.”

5. Maximize your CX investment—align capabilities with business results. At X4, Qualtrics CEO Zig Serafin made reference to the fact that many organizations have already invested huge sums in sophisticated CX platforms, data cleaning, data analytics, and AI technology. They attempt to derive meaning from unstructured data such as call transcripts and verbatims. Yet they struggle to realize the promised value.

Why is this? Zig noted that many improvements have so far been incremental and somewhat impersonal. In our experience, other factors contribute, too. Often, companies fail to prioritize appropriately to maximize value realization. Many fall prey to unforeseen project complexity and poor communication across business units or functional teams. And many suffer from misaligned goals and incentives, or even immature feedback loops in the organization. In all cases, resources are limited, and if your CX investment isn’t understood by C-suite leaders as contributing to revenue and profit growth demanded by investors, significant CX improvements will fail to get the support they require. At least 45% of X4 Executive Forum attendees said they could not confidently defend the business impact of CX or employee experience (EX) benefits to their CFO.

Leaders overcome these challenges by prioritizing CX investments that deliver the greatest measurable financial outcomes. Rather than allowing each functional department to engage in local optimization, they embed a customer-centric culture at all levels by managing to the shared goal of growing the value of the customer base. To make this manageable, they often focus on contributions to specific drivers of customer value, such as improved retention, price realization, cross-selling, and operational cost reduction. They systematically build on and adapt their existing tools, capabilities, and feedback systems to accelerate financial returns. This alignment ensures that CX efforts consistently deliver significant, tangible business value.

The age of relationships at scale

Incremental improvements and traditional digital transformation no longer differentiate most companies from the competition. Continued investment in the type of digital transformation dominating the last 20 years will barely keep pace with the simplest of customer needs. This moment demands an AI-enabled orientation toward relationships and humanity, rather than a transactional conversion of each individual interaction to digital. Regardless of where you are on the maturity curve, the time is now to lay the foundation for an AI-enabled reorientation of your customer experience. The future is about relationships, not transactions.

Companies that lead with empathy, leverage intelligent technology, and execute swiftly will not just keep pace—they'll set the pace, leaving competitors behind.