Artificial Intelligence

Your Employee Experience Roundup: The Manager Crisis, Falling Worker Confidence, and Persistent Perception Gaps

Are leaders and their employees actually working in the same organisation? That’s the question that springs to mind when looking at the key events and research findings of this week. Decision-makers think engagement is rising; employees disagree by 21 percentage points....

Start Human, Support With AI: Where AI Strengthens CX — and Where It Breaks It

According to Gartner research, 81% of senior marketing leaders measure AI automation success by time saved, while only 36% evaluate it through a CX lens. Leaders have long faced a trade-off between productivity and CX, and the usual outcome is...

Preventing AI Workslop in CX: How to Stop Rework, Escalations, and Brand Damage

CX teams seem to love AI. Usage has doubled since 2023, and investment is showing absolutely no sign of slowing down. Despite that, a large number of companies aren’t seeing a positive return on their investment. In fact, AI might...

Are Enterprises Deploying AI Agents Faster Than Their Governance Can Handle?

A large majority of enterprises have rolled back or completely shut down an AI agent in customer communications after it went live, according to a new global study from Sinch. Most of the industry still treats deployment as the biggest challenge,...

Airbnb Claims “Best AI Self-Solve in All of Travel” After AI Resolves 40% of Customer Issues

Airbnb’s AI assistant now resolves over 40% of customer issues without a human agent, up from roughly a third in Q4 2025. During the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, CEO Brian Chesky described the tool as “by far the best AI...

Parloa Locks In SAP Partnership to Run AI Agents Inside Service Cloud

AI agents provider Parloa has expanded partnership with SAP to embed its AI agents into SAP Service Cloud, giving enterprises a way to handle customer interactions with more context, continuity, and automation than most standalone systems currently allow. The deal follows...

Worker Confidence Fell for the First Time in Three Years – and Organisations Are Not Tracking It

Worker confidence is falling – both in AI and in organisations’ long-term outlook. But fewer organisations are tracking employee belief, leaving leaders in the dark about how their people actually feel about the future of work. ManpowerGroup’s 2026 Global Talent Barometer,...

Preparing Data for Predictive CX and AI: Building the Infrastructure Behind Anticipatory Customer Experience

Most companies are making the same mistake these days by investing more money into AI, automation, and analytics, before they’re actually ready for any of it. As a result, most innovation experiments aren’t paying off like leaders had hoped they...

Vapi Raises $50M to Bring Human-Quality Voice AI to Enterprise Contact Centres

Voice AI platform Vapi has closed a $50 million Series B round after surpassing one billion calls on its platform. The funding round was led by Peak XV with participation from a number of investors, including M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund....

Oracle Rejects Laid-Off Workers’ Petition – Some Lost Hundreds of Thousands in Unvested Stock

Oracle has reportedly rejected attempts by former employees to improve their redundancy terms, following a significant workforce reduction earlier this year. The failed public petition – signed by over 90 laid-off staff – has left those affected without the severance improvements...

Most Service Leaders Are Expanding Agent Responsibilities, Not Cutting Jobs, Gartner Finds

Sky cut 2,000 contact centre roles last year as part of an AI-led restructuring. Salesforce has tied workforce attrition directly to automation gains. However, a new Gartner survey suggests these high-profile cuts do not represent the majority response. Of 321...

AI Coaching for CX Teams: The Benefits of Always-On Guidance

Development is consistently ranked in employee experience surveys as one of the most important factors in whether employees accept roles, thrive in them, and stay with employers, and it is equally critical in determining whether your team members will be...