Nine In Ten Australian Firms Boosting AI Budgets But Fewer Reaching CX Leadership, Concentrix Research Finds

Nine in ten Australian organisations plan to increase their customer experience budgets this year, yet the proportion qualifying as CX leaders has fallen and more than 90 per cent admit they are struggling to move AI deployments past early trials.

The findings come from the 2026 Concentrix CX Capability Index, produced in collaboration with Amazon Web Services and conducted by YouGov. The research surveyed 545 professionals across Australia and New Zealand, including 429 in Australia, working in customer experience, digital transformation, technology and operations roles within medium and large organisations.

The central finding is that buying technology is not the same as building capability, and Australian enterprises are learning that lesson in real time.

Spending up, leadership down

Across Australia and New Zealand, 89 per cent of organisations expect to increase their CX investment over the next 12 months, up from 78 per cent in 2025. Current funding levels remain high, with 82 per cent of Australian respondents reporting strong or very strong backing for CX initiatives.

Yet despite the surge in spending, the proportion of organisations classified as CX Leaders fell from 28 per cent to 21 per cent year-on-year. The CX Follower segment, representing organisations with established but not market-leading capability, grew from 46 per cent to 60 per cent.

The overall CX Capability Index score remained relatively stable at 72.7, compared to 72.9 in 2025. But that headline figure masks a decline in CX maturity, which dropped from 70.4 to 65.9, while strategic importance and investment outlook scores both increased slightly.

The gap between strategic intent and operational maturity – in effect, the distance between what organisations say CX means to them and how well they are actually delivering it – has more than doubled in a single year, widening from 4.4 points to 10.7 points.

The execution gap

Global Vice President of Growth and Account Management for ANZ and Sector Lead-BFSI for APAC at Concentrix, Dhiraj Kumar, argued the disconnect is not about funding but about the ability to convert investment into operational results.

“When you buy technology, you’re not always buying capability, and that distinction is critical as AI complexity deepens,” Kumar explained.

“Organisations are pouring capital into AI only to get trapped in a cycle of stalled pilots and fragmented data.”

Among Australian businesses surveyed, 92 per cent face barriers scaling AI within customer experience. The primary obstacles cited were high implementation costs at 44 per cent, data privacy and compliance concerns at 44 per cent, data fragmentation at 38 per cent and stalled proof-of-concept pilots at 33 per cent.

Half of Australian respondents reported that AI-powered experiences becoming the expected market norm is their single greatest operational challenge, followed closely by rapidly shifting industry benchmarks at 49 per cent.

AI has moved beyond experimentation

The report found that AI is no longer an emerging capability for most organisations. More than six in ten, or 63 per cent, are either rapidly accelerating or steadily expanding AI deployment across their CX operations. Only 2 per cent remain in the planning stage or report no AI activity at all.

Australian organisations are moving faster than their New Zealand counterparts, with 71 per cent accelerating or expanding AI deployment compared to 33 per cent across the Tasman.

However, the report cautioned that adoption alone no longer differentiates. With almost every organisation now active in AI, competitive separation is shifting to the harder task of scaling it effectively, which is where the majority continue to struggle.

The most commonly cited barriers are organisational rather than technical. Privacy, compliance and trust at 44 per cent, skills gaps at 38 per cent, internal resistance at 28 per cent and unclear strategy at 28 per cent all relate to people, governance and ways of working. Purely technical constraints such as legacy systems ranked lower at 29 per cent.

AI augmenting, not replacing

When asked where AI creates the greatest value in customer experience, organisations consistently identified use cases that support employees rather than replace them.

Real-time agent support was ranked as the most valuable application by 34 per cent of respondents, followed by hyper-personalisation at scale at 20 per cent and resolving routine customer inquiries autonomously at 15 per cent.

Nearly a third of Australian enterprises, at 31 per cent, see the greatest value of agentic AI specifically in providing real-time support to help frontline teams resolve complex cases faster. A further 22 per cent identified hyper-personalisation across customer journeys as the primary opportunity.

The report connected this finding to the 2025 results, where talent shortage was the most commonly cited barrier to improving CX. Organisations appear to be directing AI toward that constraint, augmenting scarce frontline capability rather than attempting to replace it.

The commercial case

The research found a clear commercial gap between organisations with mature CX capability and those without.

CX Leaders were more likely than CX Laggards to report revenue growth, at 91 per cent compared to 68 per cent, and profit growth, at 84 per cent compared to 59 per cent. Leaders also reported higher employee engagement at 51 per cent versus 32 per cent for Laggards.

Organisations that bridge the gap and move AI past early trials are 34 per cent more likely to deliver direct revenue growth than those that remain stuck in pilot phases.

With CX Laggards now representing just 19 per cent of the market, the report argued the commercial question has shifted from whether to invest in CX to why that investment is not converting into stronger outcomes. That question is most pressing for the 60 per cent of organisations now clustered in the Follower segment, paying the cost of sustained investment without yet realising the returns enjoyed by Leaders.

Trans-Tasman gap widens

Australia continues to outperform New Zealand on the overall CX Capability Index, recording a score of 74.0 compared to 67.3. The largest differences are in maturity and current investment, where Australian organisations score almost 12 points and 11 points higher respectively.

Australia also has a higher proportion of CX Leaders at 22 per cent compared to 15 per cent in New Zealand, and a lower proportion of CX Laggards at 16 per cent versus 31 per cent.

The report flagged this as a potentially compounding problem. New Zealand’s CX maturity score of 56.5 sits well below the level associated with mature capability, and with AI deployment at 33 per cent compared to Australia’s 71 per cent, the gap risks becoming structural rather than cyclical.

New Zealand has largely closed the belief gap identified in the inaugural 2025 study, with strategic importance scores narrowing from a 13-point gap to around four points. But belief has not yet translated into operational pace.

Evolving customer expectations

The challenge is compounded by customer expectations that continue to rise. Ninety-five per cent of organisations identified at least one macro trend making it harder to consistently meet evolving expectations.

Increased competition was cited by 50 per cent of respondents as the biggest challenge shaping CX, followed by the expectation that AI-powered experiences are becoming the norm at 48 per cent and rising demand for deeply personalised interactions, also at 48 per cent.

The report noted that consumers now benchmark every interaction not against industry peers but against the single best digital experience they have had anywhere. A customer who experiences seamless service from a retailer expects the same from their superannuation fund, insurer or government agency.

Cloud foundations matter

Amazon Connect Specialist Leader for Public Sector ANZ at AWS, Max Tennant, pointed to the role of cloud infrastructure in bridging the execution gap.

“The shift from AI experimentation to live deployment requires an evolution in enterprise data foundations and architecture,” Tennant argued.

“Success is no longer defined by standalone proofs-of-concept, but by building secure, connected cloud environments where human expertise and intelligent automation work in tandem.”

What comes next

The report concluded that the strategic argument for customer experience has been won. Investment is flowing, belief is settled and AI is embedded in every plan. None of those things, on their own, will separate organisations from their competitors.

The differentiator, according to the research, is conversion: the discipline to turn spending into embedded capability faster than customer expectations rise.

The research was conducted as a quantitative online survey by YouGov in June and July 2026. Respondents were employed in organisations with 250 or more employees in Australia or 100 or more in New Zealand. The 2026 data have been weighted by organisation size to improve comparability with the inaugural 2025 benchmark.

Last Updated on August 19, 2026 by Nick Ross