Published on the 27/08/2026 | Written by Heather Wright

More CX AI spend isn’t delivering better outcomes…

Australia may be moving faster on AI in customer experience, but it’s New Zealand – lagging behind in adoption – that is getting more value from it.

At least that’s according to a new customer experience study which found Australian organisations are more than twice as likely as New Zealand organisations to be accelerating or expanding AI deployment in customer experience operations, at 71 percent versus 33 percent. Yet Kiwi organisations report stronger gains in productivity, revenue growth and cost efficiency from their AI-driven customer experience initiatives.

“Organisations have largely won the strategic argument around CX. The next challenge is execution.”

The findings come from the 2026 CX Capability Index, produced by Concentrix in collaboration with AWS and based on a survey of 545 senior decision-makers and customer experience professionals across Australia and New Zealand.

As the report bluntly puts it: “Buying technology isn’t buying capability.”

Of course, it should be noted that Concentrix is a customer experience outsourcer and services provider, and as such only to help to solve the issue of how to operationalise tech. Even so, the survey data it commissioned does support the broader argument that AI deployment alone isn’t creating differentiation.

Across Australia and New Zealand, 89 percent of organisations expect to increase customer experience investment over the next 12 months, up from 78 percent in 2025. Yet overall customer experience maturity has fallen from 70 to 66 over the same period and the proportion of organisations classified as CX Leaders has dropped from 28 percent to 21 percent.

The result is a growing middle ground. Sixty percent of organisations now sit in the CX Follower category, up from 46 percent a year ago, while one in four organisations that previously qualified as CX Leaders have now slipped backwards.

Everybody’s spending, but fewer organisations are pulling ahead.

Australia remains ahead of New Zealand on most customer experience metrics. Australian organisations scored 74 on the overall CX Capability Index, compared with 67 for New Zealand. Australia also reports higher customer experience maturity, stronger current investment levels and a greater proportion of CX Leaders.

But despite New Zealand’s company’s slower acceleration of AI in customer adoptions, those who already have live CX initiatives are outperforming Australia on productivity gains (61 percent vs 54 percent), direct revenue growth (57 percent vs 46 percent) and cost efficiency (44 percent vs 39 percent).

The report’s most interesting finding may be what happens after organisations deploy AI, and Concentrix isn’t alone in noting that adoption is no longer the main challenge.

Recent McKinsey research found many organisations are investing heavily in AI, rolling out tools across the workforce and encouraging widespread experimentation, but still failing to create enterprise-wide value. McKinsey highlights that AI does not create meaningful business outcomes simply because more people use it. Organisations generating the strongest returns are redesigning workflows, operating models and ways of working around the technology, rather than treating AI as another software deployment.

Boston Consulting Group also reached a similar conclusion in earlier AI Radar research which found three-quarters of executives rank AI as a top-three strategic priority but only one-quarter report generating significant value from AI investments. It found the companies achieving the greatest returns focus on a small number of high-value initiatives, scale them quickly and redesign business processes around them.

The same pattern is showing up closer to home: Datacom’s 2025 State of AI Index found 87 percent of Kiwi organisations are now using AI in some form and 88 percent report positive operational impacts. But only 12 percent had successfully scaled AI across their organisation. Nearly half remained in exploratory states despite widespread adoption.

That challenge of operationalising AI and gaining true value is visible in the CX Capability Index. While 63 percent of organisations are accelerating or expanding AI deployment in customer experience, 93 percent report barriers to deploying or scaling it effectively.

Cost leads the list at 45 percent, followed by privacy, compliance and trust concerns at 44 percent. Skills shortages and data quality issues each rate 38 percent.

The report argues the biggest obstacles are organisational, rather than technical with governance, operating models, workforce capability, internal resistance and strategy emerging as larger barriers than the technology itself.

That finding is reinforce by what the report describes as a widening execution gap.

Strategic commitment to customer experience increased 75 to 77 over the past year. Investment intentions strengthened. Yet the gap between strategic importance and maturity more than doubled, increasing from 4.4 points to 10.7 points.

In short, organisations understand the opportunity. Delivering on it is proving harder.

The report also challenges a common assumption about how AI will reshape customer-facing operations. The highest ranked AI use case was not autonomous customer service. Instead, 34 percent of respondents identified real-time support for frontline employees as the area where AI creates the greatest value. Hyper-personalisation ranked second at 20 percent, while autonomous handling of routine customer enquiries ranked lower.

“The strongest use cases are centred on employee enablement rather than customer automation. This suggests organisations currently see AI less as a replacement for frontline teams and more as a tool that enables employees to deliver stronger customer experiences,” the report says.

That ties in with 2025 results which saw a shortage of talent cited as the biggest barrier to improving customer experience. “Organisations appear to be directing AI toward last year’s most pressing constraint – augmenting scarce frontline capability, rather than replacing it.”

While the report issues a warning for New Zealand, saying the country’s slower rate of adoption risks seeing it fall ‘structurally behind, not just cyclically’, there’s also a warning for Australian organisations: Leading New Zealand on AI deployment hasn’t automatically translated into stronger business outcomes from AI-powered customer experience initiatives.

“The findings suggest organisations have largely won the strategic argument around CX. The next challenge is execution,” the report says. “Those that successfully translate strategic commitment into sustained organisational capability by treating CX transformation as an operating model rather than a technology procurement decision will be best positioned to differentiate themselves.”