The CX Prediction That Got It Exactly Backward

About a year ago, a widely-shared article (I shared it, too!) made a confident prediction: CX differentiation would be easier than ever in 2025. The reasoning seemed sound—customer experience quality had hit rock bottom, mediocrity was everywhere, and the few bold leaders willing to “go all in” would stand out like beacons in the fog.

It was a reassuring story. It was also dead wrong.

The same forces that article celebrated—AI, platform consolidation, rising baseline standards—haven’t opened a wide lane for differentiation. They’ve quietly erased it.

Right About the Problem, Wrong About What It Means

Let me give credit where it’s due. The article correctly identified that CX has been in rough shape. Forrester’s index showed 2024 as an all-time low for customer experience quality. The easy wins got picked years ago. Simply doing the basics well no longer earns you any extra credit.

Where the analysis for 2025 went sideways was in assuming that widespread complacency automatically creates room for brave leaders to pull away from the pack.

That might have been true in a pre-AI world—when building something truly distinctive required time, capital, and courage your competitors couldn’t easily replicate. But in 2025, that advantage has been automated away.

AI Doesn’t Make You Special. It Makes You Standard

The original prediction leaned hard on this idea: generative AI would displace tens of thousands of frontline agents, and “bold” leaders partnering with forward-thinking vendors would ride that wave to differentiation.

Here’s what’s actually happening: AI has become the new electricity of customer experience. It’s everywhere, invisible, and largely interchangeable.

Your competitors now have the same ability to mine customer data for insights. The same models to automate routine issues at scale. The same toolsets to hyper-personalize offers and journeys.

What used to set a few organizations apart—genuinely knowing their customers, anticipating needs, tailoring experiences—has been packaged, API-wrapped, and rolled out as a subscription service. AI doesn’t just level the playing field. It flattens every carefully built hill you once stood on.

This is the uncomfortable reality I explore in my forthcoming book, Beyond Distinction: the more you bet that AI itself will make you different, the faster you become indistinguishable from everyone who bought the same “differentiation in a box.”

When Everyone Runs the Same Play, Everybody Gets the Same Results

Another prediction from that article: CX teams would cut underused tools, consolidate around enterprise suites, and free up resources for more “strategic work”—making differentiation easier for those bold enough to seize it.

Let’s be honest about what that actually means.

In 2025, CX technology stacks have converged dramatically. The same clouds. The same survey platforms and feedback engines. The same conversation analytics. The same “best practice” customer journeys baked into templates.

On paper, it’s rational—fewer tools, less technical debt, lower costs. In practice, it’s the mass-standardization of how customer experience gets sensed, measured, and managed.

When everyone runs similar playbooks on the same infrastructure, the experience converges too. Onboarding flows feel the same. Service interactions follow the same branching logic. Recovery moments trigger the same scripted empathy and token gestures.

Efficiency goes up. Distinctiveness goes down.

Raising the Floor Isn’t the Same as Creating Distinction

The original article was also right that accessibility is finally getting serious attention. Regulations like the European Accessibility Act are forcing more commitment to inclusive design. Good news, genuinely.

But here’s what happens next: accessibility patterns become standardized and widely distributed through design systems and major platforms. Regulatory pressure and platform defaults pull laggards up to an acceptable level.

This is unquestionably positive for customers and society. It’s also yet another way the floor rises faster than most leaders realize. Being accessible, usable, and inclusive is no longer a brand differentiator. It’s not even close to the Ultimate Customer Experience®. It is simply the minimum ticket to play the game.

You don’t stand out by meeting the standard everybody is required to meet. You simply avoid being eliminated.

The New CX Trap: Acceptable Sameness

Add all of this together and 2026 doesn’t look like a playground for bold CX leaders. It looks to me like a trap.

There’s the AI Trap—anything interesting you build can be modeled, mimicked, and mass-deployed by competitors with access to the same data and algorithms.
There’s the Stack Trap—consolidated technology makes journeys smoother while making brands feel eerily similar.
And there’s the Standard Trap—higher baselines lift general quality while compressing the space where real separation used to live.

For customers, this produces a new kind of mediocrity. Not the clumsy, frustrating experiences of the past, but something more insidious: acceptable sameness.

The app works. The chatbot is polite and mostly competent. The emails are hyper-personalized and instantly forgettable.

Everything is “fine.” And — as my friend, Shep Hyken has long said — “fine” is fatal when your aspiration is to be chosen, remembered, and recommended in a marketplace where switching is frictionless and alternatives are one tap away.

The Real Question for Leaders Who Want to Transcend

So yes—the original prediction was right that CX mediocrity is everywhere and that most organizations will cling to the status quo.

But it missed the deeper, more dangerous shift: the status quo itself is being upgraded by AI and platforms in a way that makes genuine differentiation harder, not easier.

This is exactly the question at the heart of my new book, Beyond Distinction: What does it take to create real separation when your competitors have access to the same data, the same AI, the same vendors, the same “best practices,” and the same playbooks you do?

In 2026, betting on technology alone to make you stand out is the fastest way to blend in.