Automation has become the default setting for customer experience (CX). According to CallMiner’s 2026 CX Landscape Report, 99% of CX organisations now use automation in some form across customer interactions. That figure suggests the industry has largely settled the question of whether to automate. This year’s findings point to a harder question: whether that automation is actually working.

Fewer than one in four organisations (23%) describe their customer interactions as both highly automated and consistently optimised using CX insights. Automation, in other words, has scaled faster than the intelligence needed to guide it. The result is a widening gap between organisations that deploy automation and those that continuously improve it.

CX automation adoption outpaces optimisation

Nearly every organisation surveyed has introduced automation somewhere in the customer journey. Yet just 24% describe their automated customer experiences as “Very Positive”, showing that deployment alone doesn’t guarantee a better outcome for customers.

Organisations aren’t short on data to close that gap. Every organisation surveyed reports collecting CX data, and 66%* now rely on automated processes to analyse it, up from 53%† last year. But collecting and analysing data isn’t the same as acting on it. More than two-thirds (68%) say they still don’t use their CX data to its best advantage, up from 62% in 2025. When CX insights do get used, they’re applied more often to understanding customer satisfaction than to improving automation itself. Only 30% use insights to refine how automated interactions perform, and just 22% use them to decide what should be automated in the first place.

Cross-departmental misalignment compounds the problem. Nearly all organisations (94%) report difficulty aligning CX data and feedback across teams, which leaves customer intelligence trapped in the department that generated it instead of informing automation decisions elsewhere in the business.

What separates the strongest automated experiences

The report draws a clear line between organisations reporting “Very Positive” automated experiences and those reporting “Mixed” or “Negative” ones. Organisations in the Very Positive group are far more likely to consistently optimise automation using CX insights, at 49% compared with just 8% among organisations in the Mixed or Negative group. They also draw on richer sources of customer intelligence during and after interactions, including automation performance data from chatbots, voicebots and interactive voice response (IVR) systems, as well as omnichannel conversation transcripts.

Knowing when to bring in a human matters just as much. Almost all organisations (95%) agree that human agents add more value than automation or AI in at least one type of interaction, particularly when complex problem-solving, significant business consequences, customer vulnerability or empathy are involved. Organisations reporting Very Positive automated experiences escalate to human agents more readily than those reporting Mixed or Negative experiences (76% versus 68%), suggesting that the most effective automation strategies are built to recognise their own limits.

AI is reinforcing this balance rather than replacing it: 96% of organisations are implementing AI within their CX initiatives, and 85% use it for at least one human-agent use case – most often for real-time assistance, to improve agent productivity and for training and coaching. Concerns haven’t disappeared: 43% of organisations say customers still prefer speaking with a human, while 40% believe AI struggles with complex, emotional or high-risk interactions. Those concerns are easing slightly year on year, but they remain a reminder that automation earns trust incrementally.

Download the full 2026 CallMiner CX Landscape Report

†Where historical data and comparisons with 2025 are discussed, business process outsourcing industry data is excluded to ensure the data points are comparable to previous years.