91% of Service Leaders Are Being Pushed to Deploy AI. CX Current's Top 50 Shows Who's Making It Work.

The order has come down from the top. In a Gartner survey of 321 service and support leaders, 91% said executive leadership was pressuring them to implement AI in 2026. Gartner research director Kim Hedlin said service organizations are entering a period where "AI and human expertise must work in tandem."

That pressure doesn't settle how the work actually gets divided. Some conversations should run start to finish without a person. Others need someone with judgment and the authority to make an exception. Wes Griffith, who left Coinbase this summer to run member experience at HealthEquity, has a short version: "AI in CX is not humans versus AI. It's AI handling scale and humans handling significance. But that means it's incumbent on the company to know the difference."

That's the backdrop for CX Current's Top 50 Leaders Transforming CX '26, released this week. The list names 50 people across five categories, and nearly all of them are working on some version of the same problem: running AI agents and human agents as one operation.

Deploying the agent turned out to be the easy part

CXM argued last month that getting AI agents into production is no longer the hardest job in customer experience.

There's still a gap between deploying AI and getting customers to use it. Gartner found that only 27% of customers would try a chatbot again after a bad experience. In their most recent service interaction, customers were about three times more likely to turn to a third-party GenAI tool than to the company's own chatbot. Customers aren't asking companies to switch the agents off, though. That same survey of 3,566 customers found that 87% said a company using generative AI for service has to give them a way to reach a human agent. They want that option available, and they want the handoff to work when they use it.

Gartner also expects the human jobs to change shape, with higher-tier reps acting as "judges" and "experts" on the cases too nuanced for automation. Wipro's Alok Kumar made a similar point to State of AI about banking, where even a 99% accurate agent shouldn't move money on its own.

The caller is changing too. Late last month we reported that consumers and businesses have started sending their own AI agents to call support lines, sit on hold and negotiate. Cresta's Antony Passemard saw that coming when we spoke with him in July.

The five categories, and who made the list

CX Current split the honorees into five groups. Read together, they line up closely with the jobs someone has to own once AI agents and people share the work. A striking number of them changed jobs in the past year, including Griffith, John McCahan, Samir Zabaneh, Mike Gomes, Dawn Block and Tawana Allen. Companies are clearly hiring for people who have done this before.

The Catalysts

Brandon Peterson's numbers at Achieve make the clearest case for this category. AI guides reps through calls and writes the summaries afterward, and Achieve has cut after-call work by 75% and hold times by 50%. Peterson expects AI to become the first point of contact in nearly every customer interaction. He's also direct about how that lands on the floor: "As we lean into AI, there's naturally concern among frontline employees about what it means for their jobs." His answer has been to show reps how the tools make their work easier.

Griffith built his version at Coinbase, where automation handled close to 80% of contacts. When customers made irreversible blockchain mistakes, the automated agent could give accurate answers but couldn't handle the moment, so his team routed those cases straight to specialists. The AI stayed in the conversation after the handoff and carried the context over, so customers didn't have to start again.

McCahan, who joined Fellers as chief CX officer in July, did similar work at FTD after its 2019 bankruptcy. He consolidated eight systems into one, put AI across voice, digital and agent channels, and got through peak demand with fewer seasonal hires. FTD more than doubled customer lifetime value during the turnaround. At MetLife, where Merrilee Matchett runs service for more than 10,000 people in over 40 markets, the stated goal is care that's "high-tech and high-touch."

See all Catalyst honorees on CX Current.

The Operating Architects

At Citizens Bank, consumer banking COO Domenick Forte is putting LLM and agentic AI into the contact center to finish simple requests outright, including balance and transaction questions, address changes, and parts of fraud claims. Citizens has also piloted AI that logs complaints automatically and feeds root-cause analysis, so a single complaint can point to the process that keeps producing it.

Charl Lombard of Goosehead Insurance argues that workflow redesign matters more than model choice, since competitors can buy the same tools. He's realistic about the starting point in insurance, where data is messy and legacy systems are common. "The teams that win aren't waiting for perfect data lakes," he says.

Burgoyne Hughes rebuilt knowledge management at GE HealthCare's service centers into decision trees reps can follow under pressure. GE HealthCare reported a 60% drop in hold times, and Hughes says the error rate fell from 1.6% in 2018 to 0.04%. He holds automation to a high bar: "You have to create an automated experience that is so smooth customers will prefer it over talking to a live person." At Veterans United Home Loans, Natasha Rader's team ships roughly 200 technology enhancements a week to the systems loan officers use.

See all Operating Architects on CX Current.

The Interpreters

Douglas Kramon, head of customer care and fan support for ESPN and EDTC offerings at The Walt Disney Company, uses AI for what he calls "catharsis scoring," which tracks how a conversation moves from frustration to relief. The best of those conversations become training material, and Kramon says interactions shaped by them score 20% to 40% higher on CSAT in situations that are usually hard to resolve. Before pushing further into generative and agentic support, his team overhauled more than 25,000 knowledge documents.

Rogers reported more than 320 customer-led process improvements in 2025, 174 of them changes to internal tools. Mahes Wickramasinghe oversees customer experience and digital there as president of group operations. At Hertz, Mike Gomes wants to replace "service recovery" with what he calls "service discovery," using AI to find friction in customer communications before it becomes a complaint. Susan Kelly's Be Well Buddies program at Wellabe started with 25 customers paired with employees and has grown to about 1,000 who help shape products before launch.

See all Interpreter honorees on CX Current.

The Pathfinders

UPS has set a goal of handling more than 98% of customer service requests through a mix of AI and people by the end of 2026. Olga Sulyagina, who runs customer experience and service there, is applying AI to tracking, claims, returns and international shipping. An app rebuild under her raised CSAT from 2.5 to 3.7 and NPS from 21.5 to 39.5 within six months.

Jenifer Robertson wants AT&T Consumer to absorb telecom's complexity so customers don't have to, through clearer offers, proactive fixes and connections that switch networks automatically to keep a household online. At Delta, Ranjan Goswami runs marketing, product and experience design together, and Delta Concierge uses trip and account data to help SkyMiles members deal with disruptions and lost bags in plain language. Eric Strom moved bswift's support for more than six million participants from a reactive, single-channel model to digital-first. His rule going in: "We're going to improve the customer experience, and that will save money."

See all Pathfinder honorees on CX Current.

The Trust Builders

Cliff Hagan helped design Charter's Customer Commitment for Spectrum, which attaches money-back guarantees to promises on reliability and transparency. Charter reported a 16% year-over-year drop in billing calls after simplifying pricing and billing, and Spectrum has added Agent Assist and Summary AI so reps can see a customer's earlier conversations. At eBay, Dawn Block backed the Authenticity Guarantee and the Vault to build trust into high-value transactions. "We start with trust," she says.

Tammy Williams holds both the experience and culture titles at Capital Credit Union, on the view that how a company treats employees shows up in how they treat members. Turnover there fell from 23% in 2021 to 15% in 2024, and engagement rose from 60% to 86%. Who an AI agent acts for, and what it's allowed to do, is becoming a trust question too. It comes up across our coverage, from Mastercard's agent payments to agent permissions that outlast their authority.

See all seven Trust Builders on CX Current.

What to watch next

With nearly every service leader under pressure to put AI to work, most of the open questions for the next year are operational. Someone has to own the handoff rules, measure AI agents and human agents against each other fairly, and decide what to do when the caller is a bot. The people on this list are a good place to look for how that gets done.

The full list, with each honoree's profile, is on CX Current.

The Top 50 Leaders Transforming CX '26 awards are presented by CX Current in partnership with Cresta.