July 24, 2026

This Week’s Customer Experience News: AI Hangs Over British Gas’s Contact Centre Job Cuts as ServiceNow Posts Record Revenues

By Kieran Devlin

This week in customer experience news, British Gas became the latest major brand to undergo contact centre redundancies with the spectre of AI hanging over them, new data revealed that most enterprises have already been forced to pull a live AI agent offline, and a $2.5 million settlement reminded the industry that what AI does with customer conversations is increasingly a legal question. Meanwhile, ServiceNow posted numbers that suggest the pilot era is genuinely over.

Here is what you need to know.

British Gas Cuts 1,300 Contact Centre Roles, With AI’s Shadow

Centrica confirmed it is cutting around 1,300 jobs across British Gas customer operations. This is roughly 14% of the workforce in that arm, with cuts impacting Glasgow, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Leicester, Stockport, and Leeds over approximately two years.

The notable aspect is how the explanation changed. When 500 of those roles were first announced last month, Centrica pointed to changing customer behaviour. Confirming the remaining 800 this week, it also mentioned a “targeted deployment of AI tools”. This ishe first time AI has been named alongside these cuts. CEO Chris O’Shea was careful with the distinction on the results call. He pointed to a 20% fall in customer calls and noting that over 90% of customers now use digital channels first. The GMB union argues the entire 1,300 amounts to roles handed to chatbots, and is not drawing the same line.

Read CXM’s full analysis of the British Gas AI job cuts.

ServiceNow: Customers Have Stopped Buying Pilots

ServiceNow posted subscription revenues of $3.8 billion for Q2 FY2026, up 23% year on year. It crossed $1 billion in AI annual contract value and is on track for $1.5 billion by year end. CFO Gina Mastantuono put the shift in buyer behaviour plainly. Customers are no longer paying for tokens, but for resolutions. Finance leaders, she said, have watched budgets burn on pilots that demo well and never reach the P&L.

The most pointed contact centre disclosure was an unnamed airline running five million annual voice calls through ServiceNow’s voice AI agents in year one. Meanwhile, the company’s L1 service desk AI specialist is closing 80–85% of service requests without human involvement. It is compressing two-day resolutions to around 20 minutes.

Read CXM’s full analysis of ServiceNow’s Q2 FY2026 results.

OpenAI Enters the CX Platform Market

OpenAI launched Presence, a managed platform for running voice and chat AI agents in enterprise customer-facing workflows. The emphasis is governance over capability. Each agent is allocated a single job, limited to relevant systems, and run through simulated edge cases before going live. A Codex-powered loop reviews production sessions and proposes fixes, which staff approve before deployment.

OpenAI uses its own support line as the reference case. Presence now resolves 75% of inbound calls autonomously, with human handoffs down 15 percentage points in its first ten days. BBVA Mexico, SoftBank, and Australian insurer IAG are early adopters.

Read CXM’s full analysis of OpenAI Presence.

74% of Enterprises Have Pulled a Live AI Agent Offline

Sinch’s new report found that 62% of organisations have AI agents live across customer channels. 88% expect to be in production by end of 2026. Of those that shipped an agent, 74% have since been forced to roll it back or shut it down entirely. This is consistent across every region and sector, from 66% in technology to 85% in professional services.

The leading cause is personal data exposure, cited by 31% of those who experienced a rollback. Hallucinations and brand risk follow. The counterintuitive finding is that organisations with the most mature governance fail more often, not less. The rollback rate among companies with fully mature guardrails rises to 81%. They simply have the monitoring to catch what less instrumented teams never see.

Read CXM’s full analysis of the Sinch AI agent rollback report.

Genesys Settles for $2.5m Over Domestic Violence Hotline Recordings

Genesys agreed to pay $2.5 million to settle a lawsuit brought by callers to the National Domestic Violence Hotline. The organisation alleged Genesys recorded and analysed their calls, texts, and webchats without disclosure or consent. Filed under California’s 1967 Invasion of Privacy Act, a wiretap statute courts have found applies to modern AI transcription, the case resulted in $500,000 going to the Hotline and the remainder distributed among class members. Genesys has not admitted wrongdoing; court approval is pending.

Read CXM’s full analysis of the Genesys settlement.

Also This Week: Accessibility, Zoom, and a New Vonage CEO

Nexer Digital research found that 87% of disabled consumers cannot complete a typical online shopping journey unaided. This study was published on the first anniversary of the European Accessibility Act. Only 4% of consumers filed a complaint when they hit a barrier. Most simply left.

Meanwhile, Zoom switched on Sales Assist, Ask ZRA, and Sales Roleplay inside Revenue Accelerator. These cover real-time call coaching and plain-language deal analysis, now GA in two new consumption-based pricing tiers.

And Vonage has a new CEO. Christophe Van de Weyer, currently running the API business, takes over from 15 August. Ericsson has stopped breaking Vonage’s revenue out separately in its results; the most recent call confirmed the unit is not currently contributing to group profitability.

Read CXM’s analysis of the European Accessibility Act data, Zoom Revenue Accelerator, and Vonage’s new CEO.

Takeaway of the Week

The Sinch rollback data and the Genesys settlement are interesting when placed side by side. One says most organisations have already discovered, in production, that their AI agent wasn’t ready. The other says a vendor’s tools were processing conversations in ways a caller to a domestic violence hotline would not have anticipated. Both illustrate the same gulf between shipping something and understanding what it does once it’s live.

ServiceNow’s CFO framed the commercial version of the same question. AI that only advises is a cost, while one that completes the work and holds up under scrutiny is a return. That last clause is the part the industry is still working out.

That’s your customer experience roundup for the week ending 24 July 2026. If you have CX stories to share, connect with me on LinkedIn or drop me a line at [email protected].