If 2025 made anything clear, it’s that the promise of AI and the reality of AI are still two very different things.
On one hand, the potential is significant. McKinsey’s research suggests that AI-powered personalisation can increase customer satisfaction by 15 to 20 percent and drive revenue uplifts of 5-8%. It is an appealing proposition: improved customer experience leading directly to improved commercial outcomes.
On the other hand, the market is wrestling with a far more sobering truth. According to MIT NANDA, despite $30–40 billion being invested into enterprise GenAI, 95% of organisations are seeing no return (you can read MIT’s full report here). That is a striking mismatch between expectation and impact, and it is the backdrop against which businesses will enter 2026.
$30-40 billion is being invested into enterprise GenAI, 95% are seeing no return
The question now is not whether AI can add value, but whether organisations can deploy it in the right places to realise that value.
AI's early impact has been real, but limited
Over the past year, most organisations have taken logical first steps: automating the most repetitive and operational elements of Customer Experience.
Areas such as helpdesk ticketing, basic enquiry handling, invoice queries and out-of-hours support have seen genuine improvement. AI has reduced manual effort, sped up response times and improved the consistency of service. These are important gains, and they are worth acknowledging.
However, beyond these transactional environments, progress has been uneven. This is particularly evident in CRM.
In theory, AI-enabled CRM should offer deeper insights into customer behaviour, predicting churn and identifying opportunity. In practice, many organisations still receive generic, repetitive outputs that offer limited strategic value. The technology may be present, but the intelligence is not yet sufficiently advanced.
This is precisely why many leaders feel caught between compelling potential and underwhelming results.
The real opportunity still lies in relationships
Despite the noise surrounding automation, the largest opportunity for AI in Customer Experience sits within enterprise account management; those long-term, high-value relationships that rely on deep context and trust.
Account managers are being asked to do significantly more: cover broader portfolios, retain and grow revenue under tighter margins, and report more frequently to stakeholders. Yet the tools available to support them have not kept pace with these increasing expectations.
This is precisely where AI can offer the most meaningful value without compromising the human relationship.
Clientshare’s roadmap reflects this reality. The focus for 2026 is to support enterprise suppliers by applying AI deliberately in four core areas:
- Saving time by reducing the effort required to prepare and manage business reviews
- Improving quality by elevating the consistency and professionalism of what customers see
- Uncovering risk through stronger signals drawn from real customer interactions
- Identifying growth based on insights that go far beyond CRM activity
These four outcomes form the foundation of where AI can have the most impact — and they shape every element of the next generation of Clientshare’s platform. This is not about replacing the relationship. It is about strengthening it with intelligence that has previously gone unused.
Enterprise adoption of AI is accelerating
Large organisations that hesitated around AI adoption for several years are now moving quickly. Intelligent assistants, like Microsoft’s CoPilot or Google’s Gemini, are being activated across workplace services, logistics, facilities management and more.
This shift supports Clientshare’s direction of bringing an AI assistant directly into the business review meeting. With this in place, enterprises can integrate transcripts, actions and insights directly into the business review workflow. Instead of sitting in disconnected systems, this data can now strengthen the review process and, in turn, the overall customer relationship.
I also predict that, by the end of 2026, using an assistant to support customer-facing tasks will not only be expected, it’ll be considered standard practice.
Financial pressure is sharpening priorities
Budget constraints remain a defining feature of the current market. Organisations are scrutinising spend more carefully, reducing pilots and being far more selective about where AI investments occur.
In this environment, retention has become a leadership priority.
Many enterprises are now building structured, multi-signal retention models that bring together operational performance, contractual data, sentiment and stakeholder engagement. Business review insights, especially when captured and analysed at scale, are becoming critical components of this view. You can read more about how QBRs benefit enterprises here.
Clientshare’s AI roadmap strengthens this trend by ensuring that review data becomes connected, actionable and predictive, better highlighting areas of risk and concern or opportunities for account growth. With this, senior leaders are able to intervene earlier and more decisively, protecting existing and potential revenue.
The era of unexpected contract loss is ending
With the data now available and with the capabilities AI provides, unexpected contract loss should no longer occur.
There is very little justification for unexpected loss anymore. Those days are over. It’s as simple as that.
It’s an unfortunate fact of business that customers will always leave. Markets will always shift. But losing a contract without warning is increasingly a sign of a missed insight, not a missing insight.
Clientshare’s direction reinforces this shift. By analysing what is said in reviews, tracking actions, identifying themes and surfacing risk early, organisations can avoid the blind spots that once led to sudden churn.
There is very little justification for unexpected loss anymore. Those days are over. It’s as simple as that.
2026 will reward clarity & deliberate action
AI will not reward organisations that pursue every possibility at once. It will reward those that apply intelligence intentionally, to the processes that matter most.
I foresee that the organisations that succeed in 2026 will be those that:
- protect high-value customer relationships
- surface risk early
- elevate customer conversations
- act quickly on insight
- use AI to strengthen, not replace, the human relationship
Clientshare’s roadmap is built around these points, applying AI strategically to improve the outcomes that matter most: time, quality, risk and growth.
The technology is ready.
The need is clear.
And the value will come from execution.
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