Most CX leaders see little AI impact, despite spend

CCW Europe has published research showing that most customer experience leaders have yet to see a significant impact from artificial intelligence in their operations. The findings point to a widening gap between AI spending plans and reported results.

The survey of more than 100 senior customer experience professionals found that 57% said AI had delivered limited or no impact in customer experience operations over the past year. Only 11% reported a significant impact, while 18% said they had seen no impact at all.

At the same time, 62% of respondents said they expected to increase AI investment over the next 12 months. Within that group, 17% anticipated budget growth of more than 25%.

The figures suggest that many organisations remain willing to spend on AI even as they struggle to show returns in areas such as customer satisfaction, retention and revenue. The study also found that 89% of organisations were either increasing or maintaining AI spending, while one in 10 had paused investment decisions until return on investment became clearer.

Adoption gap

Beyond budgets, the research points to uneven adoption across customer experience teams. While 66% of CX leaders described AI as a high strategic imperative, only 22% said they had fully adopted it across their operations.

Many organisations remain in a transitional phase, where pilot projects may have shown promise but broader deployment has proved harder. According to the study, 42% of respondents said the main reason for the gap between investment and value was a lack of capacity to move from pilots to scaled operations.

Others pointed to persistent measurement problems. Some 21% said they found it difficult to translate efficiency gains into tangible financial outcomes, while 18% said they could not demonstrate return on investment beyond a single use case.

Those findings reflect a broader problem facing many corporate AI programmes. Time savings and reduced human effort may be visible in day-to-day work, but businesses often struggle to connect those changes directly to financial performance or customer outcomes.

Simon Hall, Industry Analyst at CCW Europe, addressed that tension in the report.

"There is a clear contradiction between aspirations for AI and what it is currently delivering. Despite more investment in AI, many organisations can't demonstrate measurable change or quantify the results. It's challenging to put a financial value on time saved or reduced human input required to complete a process, and even more challenging to clearly articulate how AI is impacting the metrics that matter, like satisfaction, retention and revenue growth," Hall said.

Pressure on ROI

The results come as companies across sectors continue to look for practical uses for generative AI and automation in customer-facing roles. Customer service and support have often been seen as early candidates for AI deployment because of the volume of repetitive tasks, the need for 24-hour coverage and the potential to route or resolve queries more quickly.

Yet the report suggests ambition has moved faster than execution. Organisations may have identified AI as a strategic priority, but they are still working out how to deploy it at scale, govern it properly and assess whether it is creating measurable value.

The research also suggests internal alignment may be lacking. Hall said only 13% of organisations were currently prioritising senior-level involvement and buy-in, which he linked to the challenge of making AI work beyond small-scale testing.

His second comment focused on the shift from experimentation to operational change.

"As we leave the AI honeymoon phase, organisations are under more pressure to move from making decisions based on FOMO or vague promises of intangible time saving to concrete ways of demonstrating ROI and value. A key part of this is setting realistic and achievable parameters around AI, including what you are trying to achieve and how you will measure success. Because the potential of AI is so huge, specificity, goals and clear expectations are key. This requires senior-level involvement and buy-in, something only 13% of organisations are currently prioritising, as well as systemic change to operating systems, governance frameworks and organisational culture. AI has always had potential. The challenge for organisations now is redesigning how they work to enable it to be realised," Hall said.

The respondent base included senior roles across customer care, support services, customer operations, customer insights and product management. Participants came from sectors including financial services, healthcare and pharmaceuticals, hospitality and travel, retail, automotive, telecommunications, energy, government and non-governmental organisations.

The picture that emerges is not one of retreat from AI in customer experience, but of mounting scrutiny over how its value is judged. With most organisations still spending or planning to spend more, the immediate issue for CX leaders appears to be less about whether to invest and more about how to prove that investment is changing business performance.