James Stephen

According to Forrester's latest report, three years into the generative AI era, most enterprises are struggling to turn AI investment into measurable business impact. Its latest Accelerate Your AI Voyage report identifies a list of actions that successful frontrunners or “high AI adopters” are enacting, as well as four barriers and solutions to grow a company's ROI.

HubSpot has brought TikTok natively into its Marketing Hub, giving marketers the ability to manage campaigns, schedule content, and measure performance across both paid and organic TikTok activity inside a single platform. The integration is built around what HubSpot describes as “full customer context”, drawing on everything already stored in the Smart CRM to inform how businesses reach and convert TikTok audiences. As research continues to show, the gap between generic and personalised marketing is widening, and the brands closing it are growing faster.

Asia is quietly rewriting the rules of customer engagement, and the lessons it offers have never been more important for Western brands. A new McKinsey report has identified six business model archetypes piloted across Asian markets generating growth rates well above underlying market averages. The consulting firm argues these models are not products of geography, they are strategic choices, which global customer experience leaders can make too.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff has criticised what he calls the “lazy” tendency among CEOs to blame artificial intelligence for job cuts. Speaking in an interview with The Future Live , Benioff said too many leaders “make AI the scapegoat” when announcing layoffs, arguing that the real reasons range from financial over-extension to data-centre commitments, or simply poor strategic planning. Benioff asserts: “You cannot bucket all these companies together. If you do, you're making a fundamental mistake.”

Across the CX technology market, vendors are under growing pressure to build AI that can justify its outputs, not just produce them.

When the job market is strong, disengaged employees leave. When it tightens, they stay and show up checked out, delivering less. That double bind is the central warning in Gallup's newly published analysis of its State of the Global Workplace 2026 Report, which finds that global employee engagement has now fallen for two consecutive years and sits at its lowest level since 2020.

Visa has launched Intelligent Commerce Connect as preparation for the coming wave of AI agents in online retail. The single on-ramp to agentic commerce enables businesses of any size to accept payments from AI agents, make their product catalogues discoverable within AI platforms, and process agent-initiated transactions through a single integration. With agentic commerce now more than just a future consideration, the organisations best placed to benefit will be those that are laying the groundwork to align their customer experiences with these new AI-powered digital experiences.

One of the most persistent fears surrounding artificial intelligence is that it will hollow out the workforce. New research from Boston Consulting Group (BCG) offers hope to an alternate narrative, concluding that the more immediate reality for most workers is one of transformation rather than elimination. The odds of being reshaped or replaced are not the same for everyone, however. It establishes a hierarchy of job replicability and for roles such as contact centre representative, the outlook is less rosy.

Oracle has launched Fusion Agentic Applications for customer experience. The new category of enterprise software is designed to move beyond supporting sales, service, and marketing teams to actively driving outcomes on their behalf. Announced at the Oracle AI World Tour in New York on 9 April 2026, the applications represent what Oracle frames as a direct response to the growing gap between what customers now expect and what traditional systems can deliver.

HubSpot has announced that its flagship annual conference, INBOUND, will be renamed UNBOUND from this year. The event, which has drawn hundreds of thousands of marketers and business leaders over 15 years, will take place under its new name in Boston from 16 – 18 September 2026. The change is more than cosmetic, however. For one of marketing's most influential voices, dropping the “IN” is representative of the end of an era. AI is fundamentally changing the ways customer find, evaluate, and engage with brands, making old funnel-based models increasingly redundant.