Chief operating officers and heads of business are facing a change in customer behaviour that feels less like an incremental upgrade and more like a whole new operating system.
According to CX Network’s annual State of CX research, consumers are increasingly using AI assistants for sales and service interactions—replacing the traditional “endless page” of product catalogues with conversational, decision-support tools. Perplexity, Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT are now part of the customer journey for many shoppers, helping them compare options, research claims, and arrive with shortlists before they ever speak to a human or contact a call centre.
For COOs, that shift has a practical implication: internal processes can no longer assume customers will be “helpfully confused” at the point of engagement. Instead, customers are coming in prepared, with screenshots, summaries, and follow-up questions designed to test policies, pricing logic, and promises.
Marl Levy, author of The Psychology of CX 101, highlights the operational risk plainly: if an organisation’s policies are vague, pricing has hidden edges, or claims don’t hold up under scrutiny, AI-powered pressure-testing can expose gaps faster than traditional dispute cycles or customer feedback loops.
At the same time, the research signals that winning convenience is only half the job. Consumer privacy has entered the top ten CX trends for the first time in 2026, and awareness of how AI uses customer data is the leading behaviour influencing CX practitioners today. Data security also ranks as a significant challenge facing businesses.
For business leaders, this is where the newsroom metaphor becomes an operational mandate. Customers may be happy to use AI to move quickly, but they want assurance that organisations handling their data are transparent, ethical, and compliant—not merely compliant on paper.
The numbers reinforce the urgency. Practitioners selected awareness of AI data use as the most influential customer behaviour, ahead of convenience. And when asked which trends will shape work to 2030, the top answers were AI-powered operations, agentic AI and AI agents, and AI-first customer journeys—suggesting that investment is already accelerating in the very systems that will interact with customer data at scale.
Melanie Mingas, editor at CX Network, frames the leadership question as control: customers now have personal “shopping assistants” in their pocket or on their desktop, meaning organisations can’t control discovery, comparison, or initial framing in the same way as before.
So what should COOs do next? Treat AI adoption as a full-stack responsibility—combining customer experience design with governance, data transparency, and operational readiness. In 2026, the customer doesn’t just test products. They test trust, in real time, through an AI lens.
