25% of enterprises admit they’re ‘crawling’ with AI in CX
Seventy three per cent of business leaders working in large organizations say balancing artificial intelligence (AI) with human employees delivers the best customer experience (CX), according to research published by LiveOps.
The Scottsdale, Ariz.-based customer service outsourcing provider surveyed more than 815 executives with strategic decision-making authority over enterprise-level contact centers to produce its 2026 AI Maturity Benchmark for Customer Experience.
LiveOps asked survey respondents to rank their organization’s maturity along a scale of “crawl, walk, run and fly,” with “fly” representing the stage where AI adapts and optimizes CX decisions
continuously in real time. Overall, 61 per cent said they were in the walk or run stages, which means AI recommends actions within CX
workflows, either automatically or with humans approving decisions.
A quarter of those surveyed admitted they are “crawling,” or using AI for simple use cases such as summarizing information without a lot of automation involved. Just 14 per cent said they were “flying.”
The LiveOps report also asked organizations to rate the top constraints in using AI to transform CX. Not surprisingly, change management and workforce readiness topped the list, although every constraint, including “unproven or immature AI technologies,” received a rating greater than three on a five-point scale.
“Enterprises want progress, but they want it with control,” the report’s authors wrote. “They want innovation, but they also want accountability. They want AI to improve CX, but not at the expense of trust, quality, or operational resilience.”
360 Magazine Insight
Is it really any wonder that only six per cent of enterprise leaders prefer AI-only automation for CX delivery? We are still in the nascent stages of agentic AI, and most organizations still have a lot of work to do improving their data quality, establishing the right roles and permissions for AI agents and determining what “human in the loop” means in their particular CX context.
LiveOps actually found 21 per cent continue to prefer human-only support. That may not be realistic as more organizations change what it means to be competitive from a customer service standpoint through automation, but it reflects the caution that is still out there.
It would have been interesting to have some free-form examples from respondents on how they would quantify the extent to which they are “walking” or “running” with AI in terms of CX delivery. This kind of benchmark suffers from the fact it is based on highly subjective self-assessment, especially since it was done at the executive level rather than those using AI on the frontlines.
There are some vertical market breakdowns that show the differences in perceived CX maturity among those industries such as financial services versus those in the public sector, but few real surprises. Overall, this gated 12-page report confirms that flying with AI is going to be difficult until the technology is grounded in stronger governance first.
