March 09, 2026
Five Women on What CX Stands to Lose in 2026
In recognition of International Women’s Day 2026, we asked five leading voices from the CXM Stars 2026 programme to name the challenge that is defining their work this year. Spanning Kenya, Georgia, and the UK, their answers cut to the same fault line: automation moving faster than trust.
Claire Munene — Ajua, Kenya
Claire Munene, Chief Experience Officer at Ajua, says the most pressing issue in 2026 is not the pace of AI adoption, but what organisations are leaving behind as they accelerate.
“The biggest challenge we face is the Trust Gap created by over-automation,” she says. “As agentic AI becomes the industry standard, the real struggle is ensuring that we don’t automate the soul out of the customer journey.”
Munene identifies a pattern she calls metric obsession, i.e. organisations fixated on dashboard performance while losing sight of whether customers actually feel any better served. She points to the rise of autonomous agents as a specific flashpoint: when AI handles entire transactions without human oversight, the risk of “AI slop”, generic, tone-deaf, or inaccurate interactions, grows substantially.
“Trust is the new currency. The challenge is maintaining deep transparency about where AI ends, and humans begin,” she adds.
The challenge is compounded in the African market, where Munene works with enterprises across East and West Africa. As global CX platforms orient themselves toward high-spec device ecosystems, she argues that the industry risks creating a two-tier experience economy, which means premium service for smartphone users, degraded service for everyone else. She advocates for USSD and voice-AI channels that keep advanced CX accessible to the mass market, regardless of device. Digital transformation, she insists, is only worth the name when it includes everyone.
Katie Stabler — CULTIVATE, UK
Katie Stabler, founder of CULTIVATE and author of CX-ISM, is perhaps the industry’s most direct voice on what she calls emotional hollowness. Her challenge for 2026 is philosophical.
“The biggest CX challenge is preventing customer experience from becoming emotionally hollow in a world obsessed with scale, speed, and AI efficiency. The risk isn’t poor technology. It’s losing human intent,” she says.
Stabler is critical of an industry tendency to reduce CX to containment rates and deflection wins, metrics that measure cost avoidance while treating the emotional dimension of customer interaction as a rounding error. She is equally critical of how CX is funded. Despite years of evidence linking experience quality to commercial outcomes, she finds that CX budgets remain chronically vulnerable to competing priorities. Technology programmes, marketing, and transformation agendas absorb investment while CX teams are expected to demonstrate results without sustained resource or genuine executive ownership.
Her prescription is both cultural and structural. She wants organisations to treat CX as a movement, something that is led from the top and owned across functions, rather than a discrete programme that can be measured, reported, and then deprioritised when the quarterly numbers get tight. In 2026, she contends, the organisations that succeed will not necessarily be the most automated. They will be the ones who remember why the experience exists — because of its people.
Latina Stoyanova — Accenture, Bulgaria
Latina Stoyanova, CX leader at Accenture, has spent the past year inside conversations with organisations trying to figure out what AI can actually do for their customer, patient, and citizen experience programmes. What she keeps finding is the same problem.
“The core issue is not access to AI, but trust,” she says. “Trust in the data, trust in the models, and trust in how recommendations are prioritised and acted upon.”
The pattern Stoyanova describes is one of underutilisation. Organisations have invested in sophisticated tools, but struggle to interpret what those tools are telling them, and therefore struggle to act. There is still a widespread assumption, she argues, that technology alone will fix CX problems. It will not, and the evidence is accumulating: advanced AI capabilities sitting dormant because no one has built the governance structures or ownership accountabilities needed to translate insight into decision.
Her challenge for 2026 is about architecture. She wants CX leaders to design systems that are not only intelligent but explainable, where AI augments human judgment rather than operating as a black box that produces recommendations nobody fully trusts. In complex B2B and public-sector environments in particular, CX insights need to be woven into governance, planning, and investment decisions. Without that integration, AI risks amplifying noise rather than cutting through it.
Natia Jibladze — CX Hub, Georgia
Natia Jibladze, founder of CX Hub in Georgia, is watching the industry tip from AI that assists to AI that acts. Agents that summarise, route, decide, and execute are no longer experimental. They are being deployed at production scale. The challenge is making that transition reliable, explainable, and safe.
“Customers won’t tolerate wrong actions, inconsistent answers, or unclear accountability,” she says. “We need auditability, controls, and clear human escalation paths — not just for edge cases, but as a designed feature of every agentic system.” The governance question is particularly acute in regulated environments, where the consequences of an AI acting incorrectly can extend well beyond a negative review.
Jibladze’s concern is that many organisations are moving fast on agentic AI adoption while their data quality, integration architectures, and workforce readiness remain uneven. Speed without alignment, she argues, does not produce better customer outcomes but scaled-up inconsistency. The goal in 2026, as she sees it, is to build the systems and culture that make speed sustainable.
Zeina Taher — City Mall, Jordan
Zeina Taher, CX lead at City Mall in Jordan, is dealing with a challenge that is more about making the technology organisations already have work together. She says:
“Many organisations have adopted multiple digital tools over time, but these systems often operate in silos. In 2026, the challenge is no longer launching new solutions — it is connecting them meaningfully.”
Without unified customer profiles, shared data, and integrated workflows, even the most advanced tools produce fragmented experiences. Taher knows this at first hand. At City Mall, she has been building all solutions to read from a single unified database, with the entire CX strategy anchored to that connected data layer. It is an approach that requires strong governance and clear ownership, she notes, and a long-term commitment that many organisations are still reluctant to make.
Her other concern runs through this entire piece from a different angle: the risk of over-automation without emotional intelligence. Taher is not opposed to AI or automation. On the contrary, she sees both as necessary. But she firmly believes that in 2026, customers will place increasing value on moments of genuine empathy and personal connection, precisely because those moments are becoming rarer. The organisations that succeed, she argues, will be those that use technology to enhance human interaction rather than quietly remove it.
