CX in 2026: Forrester predictions featuring guest speaker Joana de Quintanilha

A live session unpacking Forrester’s predictions for the future of customer experience

CX teams have never had more data, tools, or visibility, but for many, that hasn’t translated into more influence. In our latest webinar, Joana de Quintanilha, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, explains why. 

“A lot of these teams are acting a little bit more like a barista… taking orders… as opposed to a doctor that diagnoses problems,” says de Quintanilha. She says CX teams are at risk of being pulled into a “death spiral” of metric obsession, where more measurement doesn’t lead to more impact, just more noise.

Joined by Jochem van der Veer, CEO and co-founder of TheyDo, the conversation unpacks four predictions for the CX landscape in 2026: a budget-driven shift toward metric obsession and diminishing impact, the rise of AI-led research scandals, the risk of premature AI self-service harming customer experience, and the abandonment of journey mapping due to a self-inflicted stigma.

Read on to see how they explore what CX leaders should do next, how AI is reshaping the operating model for experience teams, and what it takes to turn journey work into real business impact.

The four predictions shaping CX in 2026

1. The metric obsession death spiral

Under pressure to prove value, CX teams are producing more dashboards, more reports, more outputs, but they’re losing influence. Teams are stuck describing what happened instead of explaining why it happened and what to do next. “We need to move from reactive reporting to much more proactive reporting,” said de Quintanilha. “… not only telling what is happening, but pinpointing why and what to do about it.”

The opportunity is to shift from reporting on the past to diagnosing problems and prescribing action.

2. AI-led research will break before it stabilizes

AI is accelerating research, but trust is outpacing validation. “There’s a danger that we overestimate the consistency and the accuracy of some of these AI tools,” said de Quintanilha.

She predicts at least two major scandals where companies act on flawed AI-generated insights, pointing to a growing pattern of overconfidence in AI outputs. Some will be highly visible customer-facing failures, while others may surface in backend systems, where errors are harder to spot and validate.

The takeaway is not to slow down, but to be deliberate: keep humans in the loop, compare AI outputs against traditional methods, and treat AI as a capability that requires governance, not blind adoption.

3. AI self-service will harm customer experience

Three in ten firms will degrade their experience by rushing AI into customer-facing use cases to reduce costs, with broken trust as a consequence. “It’s really important to appreciate what the right customer-facing use cases are that really make AI shine,” said de Quintanilha.

The difference comes down to context. Teams that understand where customers need speed versus where they need human support are the ones that deploy AI effectively.

4. Journey mapping will be abandoned by teams doing it wrong

Forrester predicts that two-thirds of CX teams will abandon journey mapping due to a self-inflicted stigma. The issue isn’t journeys themselves. It’s how they’ve been used. Too often, teams focus on mapping everything instead of using journeys to drive action and outcomes.

“We need to evolve from journey mapping to journey management to really drive action and continuously improve and prioritize,” said de Quintanilha.

From insights to action: Journeys as shared decision context

Across all four predictions, a clear pattern emerges: CX is moving from a function that reports on the business to one that shapes how decisions are made. “The traditional role of CX is to measure, to look backwards, and to inform people. That is clearly not where the world is going,” said van der Veer.

What replaces it is a model where experience data is available in the moment decisions are made, not after the fact. “The journey is about shared decision context. It’s about getting the insight at the right decision moment,” said de Quintanilha.

This shift changes the role of CX entirely, from producing outputs to enabling decisions, from owning journeys to activating them across the business, and from generating insights to driving impact.

AI raises the stakes. Without the right structure, AI produces noise. With it, it produces value. That structure is a journey-based context: a way to connect signals across systems, preserve customer intent, and give both humans and AI something meaningful to reason over. This is what allows teams to move from surface-level insights to root cause analysis, from static reporting to decision-ready storytelling, and from siloed optimization to coordinated action.

And it forces a reset in how CX teams work.