From Ancient Complaints to AI Excellence: Building the Agentic Enterprise

Michele Carlson reveals how leading organizations are transforming customer experience through five strategic AI priorities

Customer complaints aren't new—in fact, they're ancient. Michele Carlson, Director of Product Marketing at NiCE, opened her 2026 ICMI Digital Event session by sharing a 3,700-year-old cuneiform tablet from Mesopotamia: the oldest written customer complaint. A merchant named Nani demanded his money back after receiving subpar copper and poor service. His frustration? Completely relatable today.

"Bad customer experience is nothing new," Carlson explained. "But the tools to fix it at scale—those are brand new. And the companies that don't use them are writing their own version of this ancient story right now."

The AI Experience Gap

Consumer AI adoption has exploded 8X in just two years, from 100 million to 800 million active users between 2023 and 2025. This isn't just a technology curve—it's a total reset of customer expectations. Every time someone receives an instant, intelligent, personalized response from AI, they carry that expectation into every other interaction, including with your contact center.

Yet despite massive AI investments, most CX organizations are still falling short. Carlson identified three critical gaps:

• Reactive instead of proactive: Businesses wait for problems instead of anticipating them
• Lost context across channels: Customer information disappears with every handoff
• Customer-orchestrated resolution: People become project managers for their own problems, repeating information and following up endlessly

The Convergence Creating Opportunity

Four forces are converging to create a decisive window for CX leaders:

1. Rising customer expectations for effortless, connected experiences across every channel
2. AI shifting from tool to operating system, becoming the engine behind every decision
3. Platform consolidation, replacing fragmented point solutions with unified intelligence-driven stacks
4. CX moving from reactive to predictive, anticipating problems before they become complaints

The research backs this transformation. 72% of customers report real benefits from AI in customer service, and 69% trust companies using AI as much or more than those that don't. Operationally, AI now resolves 41% of interactions without live agent involvement, with Gartner predicting that by 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of customer service issues with a 30% reduction in operational costs.

Five Priorities for Scaling Agentic AI

Carlson outlined five leadership priorities that separate enterprises scaling agentic AI into real results from those still waiting for ROI:

1. Make Agentic AI the Front Door

AI shouldn't be a fallback—it's the primary way customers enter and move through your organization. This means:

• Getting personal and proactive by anticipating customer needs
• Empowering AI to actually resolve issues end-to-end, not just route them
• Blending AI and human expertise seamlessly so customers experience one unified business

"AI-first is not AI-only," Carlson emphasized. "Your agents still matter, and the combination between your humans and AI agents is a huge differentiator."

2. Shift from Automation to Orchestration

Automation handles a task. Orchestration connects systems, channels, people, and AI into one coherent experience. As Opus Research notes, "The magic happens when AI agents and human agents work as one, powered by shared context, data, and insights."

In practice, this means workflows that trigger instantly from any customer intent or channel, open integration that lets systems communicate, and end-to-end automation that fulfills outcomes, not just answers questions.

3. Build Connected Intelligence That Compounds

49% of organizations report that slow service is caused by fragmented data. Nearly half of your competitors are running AI on broken inputs—creating a significant competitive advantage for those who solve it first.

Blue Cross of Idaho unified data and workflows on NiCE's CX-1 AI platform, achieving 39% more efficient interactions, 87% faster talk time on specialized calls, and $250K in annual savings. The principle: agentic systems shouldn't just execute—they should learn. Every interaction becomes a data point, and every resolution improves the next one through compounding intelligence.

4. Operate a Hybrid Workforce of Human and AI Agents

When people hear "agentic AI," many fear automation replacing headcount. But Carlson reframed this entirely: "The organizations that are winning in this space aren't replacing their people. They're thinking about how they're accelerating revenue and improving customer experience."

Agentic AI is projected to grow from $7 billion in 2025 to $93 billion by 2032. Leading organizations are multiplying their teams—letting AI handle routing, research, and repetitive fulfillment while human agents focus on personal connections, judgment calls, and ensuring AI makes the right decisions.

5. Design for Your Complete CX Reality from Day One

Agentic AI only delivers lasting value when built for real CX impact, not experimentation. AI needs two inputs:

• Systems of record that capture what happens (transaction data)
• Systems of engagement that capture how and why it happened (sentiment, intent, context, conversation)

Together, these create "experience memory"—a persistent, unified view of every customer across every touchpoint, including preferences, sentiments, intents, issue resolutions, channels used, and likelihood to buy.

"37% of C-Suite leaders worry customers won't trust AI," Carlson noted. "But our Global Happiness Index shows 69% of consumers already trust AI companies as much or more. The trust gap closes when the experience is good, and the experience is good when the memory is real."

Real-World Results

Leading brands are already seeing transformative results:

• Disney Plus expanded to 100+ countries with AI-powered support
• Toyota customers overwhelmingly prefer agentic AI for care and in-car support
• Razer cut handle time by 14%
• Marriott consolidated 11 vendors into one AI-first CX stack
• Sony increased self-service success by 15%

All powered by NiCE CX-1, the unified AI platform delivering agentic experience automation, orchestration across channels and systems, and workforce empowerment for both human and AI agents.

The Competitive Imperative

"AI is no longer a competitive differentiator by itself," Carlson concluded. "Deploying it is table stakes. What differentiates is how intelligently you orchestrate it, how deeply you connect it into your data, and how seamlessly you blend it with the people in your organization."

The leaders who get this right will run CX that is faster, smarter, and more human than any competitor can offer. As Carlson reminded the audience: "We started with Nani. He deserves better. Your customers deserve better. And now, for the first time, we actually have the technology to deliver on it."

Session Title: The Agentic Enterprise: Five Leadership Priorities to Scale AI into Results
Speaker: Michele Carlson, Director of Product Marketing at NiCE
Event: ICMI Digital Event 2026

Want to dive deeper into these five priorities? Watch the full session recording here.

Explore more insights from industry leaders by checking out other recorded sessions from the 2026 ICMI Digital Event here.