July 13, 2026
Study: Literally Zero Organisations Report Enterprise-Wide AI Impact in CX, Yet 62% Are Investing More
Not a single organisation in a new industry survey says AI has delivered enterprise-wide commercial impact on its customer experience operations. Despite that, 62% of CX leaders plan to increase AI investment over the next 12 months. That’s the central finding from a new report by CCW Europe.
The report has been published ahead of its October summit in Amsterdam and based on responses from more than 100 senior CX professionals across the sector.
The AI in CX report found that 57% of CX leaders say AI has had limited or no impact on their operations over the past year. Just 11% report significant or enterprise-level impact. Seventeen percent expect their AI budgets to grow by more than 25% over the next year, regardless.
Ambition is Outpacing Adoption With AI in Customer Experience
The gulf between intent and execution runs strikingly through the findings. Two-thirds of CX leaders (66%) call AI a high strategic priority. However, only 22% say they’ve fully adopted it across their operations. Everyone else is somewhere in between. The report is determinedly specific about where that “in between” tends to bite.
Forty-two percent point to a lack of capacity when moving from pilot to full rollout. This is the gap between a demo that works and a process that has to survive contact with the rest of the business. A further 21% say they can’t convert efficiency gains into figures anyone in finance would recognise. 18 percent say they can prove a use case in isolation but not much beyond it.
“There is a clear contradiction between aspirations for AI and what it is currently delivering,” said Simon Hall, Industry Analyst at CCW Europe. “Despite more investment in AI, many organisations can’t demonstrate measurable change or quantify the results.”
“It’s challenging to put a financial value on time saved or reduced human input required to complete a process, and even more challenging to clearly articulate how AI is impacting the metrics that matter like satisfaction, retention, and revenue growth.”
A Market Still Finding its Footing On AI ROI
None of this seems to be putting anyone off spending. Eighty-nine percent of organisations are increasing or holding steady on AI investment regardless of what they can currently prove. Only one in ten says they’ve paused decisions until the returns are clearer.
That’s feasibly a sign of where the wider market has settled. There are early signs vendors have noticed the gap, too. Zoom’s recent overhaul of its contact centre AI tools leaned deliberately on performance measurement rather than deployment speed. This suggests the “prove it” pressure identified in this report is starting to shape product roadmaps, not just customer scepticism. Only 13% of organisations currently treat senior-level involvement in AI decisions as a genuine priority, which may say more about the size of the coming correction than any single deployment statistic does.
What the Report’s Findings Suggest for Customer Experience Teams Concerned About AI ROI
None of this is particularly new or novel. If you’ve been paying even a cursory bit of attention to the CX space over the last couple of years, you’ll have heard or observed directly the gulf between AI hype and reality. However, the specific data the CCW report presents paints an even more troubling picture.
For anyone actually running CX ops, it suggests the prerogative is to get the boring groundwork done before the next tool goes live. Hall frames it as the end of an “AI honeymoon phase,” where decisions made on FOMO or vague promises of time saved now need to give way to something closer to a proper business case. This means clear goals and clear measurement, agreed before rollout rather than reconstructed afterwards.
That’s a fairly unglamorous conclusion for a tech still discussed in fairly grand terms. But it tracks with what’s actually holding teams back. Not the tools themselves, mostly, but the operating model, governance, and reporting lines built to sit underneath them.
