CX Today

In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher sits down with Ty Givens, Founder and CEO of CX Collective, and Simel Kara, CX Account Director for Digital Experience and Transformation at Effect Digital, to dig into why end-to-end journey visibility remains out of reach for most organizations — and why reaching for AI as the solution is likely making things worse.
Simel frames the core issue around what he calls a missing "conductor" — organizations tend to have reasonable visibility within individual channels, but no shared memory connecting them. The handoffs are where everything unravels.
Ty puts it in starker operational terms. Customers bouncing between a bot, a new channel, and a live agent are retelling their story every single time — because the underlying systems simply aren't integrated. And piling AI on top of that doesn't help.
"If you don't have any of those things, what's going to happen is that those issues are actually going to be amplified because AI doesn't fix that."Both speakers land on the same closing advice: stop buying tools and start fixing the foundations. Assign clear ownership for AI oversight, document what success actually looks like, and treat journey analytics as a live operational discipline rather than a reporting exercise.
As Ty puts it, someone needs to get off the dance floor and oversee the whole room. Right now, in most organizations, nobody is.

In this CX Today interview, Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor at CX Today, speaks with Muj Choudhury, CEO of RocketPhone.ai and former Salesforce Director, about the uncomfortable questions surrounding enterprise AI.

As organizations race to deploy AI agents, Choudhury argues that bigger investments and flashier product names do not automatically produce better customer experiences. This is a candid conversation about data, workflow design, agent coaching, risk, and how to find AI use cases that improve service rather than simply chasing automation.

AI may be everywhere in CX, but Choudhury says the industry needs to get far more honest about where it delivers value and where it creates new problems.

Drawing on his Salesforce background and his work at RocketPhone.ai, Choudhury joins CX Today’s Rhys Fisher to unpack why enterprise AI success depends on more than an LLM, a chatbot, or an ambitious product launch.

Why Salesforce’s acquisition-heavy history and changing AI strategy create a difficult integration challenge, especially as smaller, less encumbered competitors move quickly.

Why customer data, including voice and contact center conversations, is the essential foundation for relevant AI experiences.

A real-world field-service example showing how AI can help engineers arrive with the right part, reduce wasted visits, and improve the customer outcome.

Why AI should support human coaching and risk management, not replace experienced managers or introduce unsafe, non-compliant service interactions.

Choudhury’s message is clear: start with people and broken processes, then apply AI where it produces a measurable result.

Watch the full interview, then assess your own AI roadmap: Is it solving a specific customer problem, using trustworthy data, and keeping human accountability where it matters?

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

Rob Wilkinson speaks with Rodney Hassard, Head of Product, Applications Group at Vonage, about how intelligent workspaces are reshaping the agent experience. Rodney explains why customer relationship management (CRM) fragmentation is becoming a major barrier for service teams, especially as organizations adopt more AI tools across the contact center.
He explores how agents often become “human middleware,” switching between multiple CRMs, copying and pasting data, and trying to piece together customer context in real time. That friction affects confidence, consistency, handle time, first contact resolution, and customer trust.
Rodney also discusses how the Vonage Intelligent Workspace creates a browser-based layer between engagement channels and CRM environments, connecting natively to 13 CRM platforms and giving agents a single pane of glass. He shares why real-time context is essential for AI to deliver accurate, useful recommendations, and why leaders should start with a workflow audit before investing in more technology.
Watch the full interview to learn how CX leaders can reduce agent friction, improve AI outcomes, and create a more connected service experience.

The HubSpot data enrichment controversy generated plenty of heat. Alexi Hatch, CMO of Acoustic, is more interested in the light.
Speaking with CX Today's Rhys Fisher, Hatch reframes the episode not as a one-company scandal but as a symptom of a wider industry habit she calls "signal debt" — the over-reliance on borrowed, static enrichment data that tells you what a contact's job title was last quarter but nothing about what they actually want today.
"Piling on more enrichment and external data feels like deeper customer understanding, but it's just an illusion of intelligence," Hatch says. "The antidote to signal debt isn't borrowing more consumer signals, it's having the in-house capabilities to analyze better ones."The conversation covers where brands typically go wrong, with Hatch pointing to declining open rates and flat engagement as the clearest early signs that a CRM built on static data is running out of road. She also draws a hard line on consent — opt-in, she argues, is black and white, and brands that rely on "fuzzy" opt-ins are storing up a trust problem that no amount of enrichment will fix.
The discussion then shifts to the activation gap: collecting behavioral data is one challenge, but acting on it fast enough to be relevant is another. If the insight and action layers of your tech stack can't talk to each other in real time, the window closes before the message lands.
For CX and marketing leaders trying to make sense of where the industry goes from here, it's a grounded and practically useful conversation.

From agentic AI to brand intelligence and Firefly's trust-first model, Constellation Research's Liz Miller drops unfiltered insights from the Vegas floor.

In this on-the-ground dispatch from Adobe Summit 2026, CX Today Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Liz Miller, VP and Principal Analyst at Constellation Research. Liz is one of the sharpest voices in the CX and marketing technology space – and she's not here to sugarcoat anything. 

From the buzz around Shantanu Narayan's succession to Adobe's evolving agentic AI platform strategy, this conversation cuts through the noise and gets into what actually matters for enterprise marketers right now. 

Adobe Summit is buzzing... and not just about leadership transitions. Liz Miller joins Rhys Fisher to break down what's actually moving the needle for CX leaders on the ground in Vegas. 

🔴 Adobe CX Enterprise reframed: It's not a new product, it's a clarified story. Liz explains how Adobe Experience Platform (AEP) has always been the foundation, and why this rebranding is about helping enterprises understand how all the pieces connect in an agentic world. 

🔴 Brand Intelligence is the standout: Adobe's new solution lets marketers track how their brand appears across LLMs and AI search, not just the traditional web. As agent-to-agent engagement becomes real, knowing how your agents get found is mission-critical. 

🔴 Firefly's trust-first architecture: Adobe didn't bolt on safety after the fact. Liz walks through why Content Authenticity and invisible watermarking aren't lip service; they're structural, and they matter deeply for enterprise brand security. 

🔴 The radiologist moment: Jensen Huang's story from the keynote – AI can now read 100% of CT scans, yet demand for radiologists is rising – perfectly captures why Adobe's decade-long AI investment is a strategy, not a slogan.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com