CEO Tony Bates had a clear message to Genesys customers at Xperience: level up, orchestrate, and lead CX AI transformation with new business models, expectations, and outcomes.
Some tough love, perhaps, for many customers that are still running on-premise contact centers or getting used to the pace of cloud updates.
However, with all the aspirational AI messages in the marketplace today, Genesys balanced it with the recognition that it needs to help bring customers along.
At the conference, Genesys continued to outline its model for the evolution of an agentic enterprise, and highlighted the experiences of customers who are on their way to driving both greater efficiency and improved Customer Experience (CX) through the Genesys platform. The company also spent a lot of time talking about how to move customers from interesting AI pilots to autonomous agents in production.
AI ROI now – and how
As we gear up for the Fall conference season, every vendor pitching their AI is going to be challenged to differentiate their offering against competitors of different flavors – point solutions, hyperscalers, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) players with varying degrees of AI add-ons, and those pitching themselves as AI orchestration platforms like Genesys. Here are a few tips they should take from the Genesys playbook.
We all recognize that having customers successful with AI is a big chicken-and-egg story right now: to get customers comfortable adopting AI, they have to be able to see others like them that have done it successfully. Genesys addressed this with customers that talked about AI results and also how they achieved them.
The themes here ranged from high-level concepts such as how to manage culture change and real transformation – for example, focus 70% of your effort on people – to tactical execution advice, such as how to decide where to build an agent in a heterogeneous environment – decide based on availability of developer resources, where your data is, and where the interaction actually happens.
Anyone that has built an AI agent knows that there’s a big difference between building an AI agent and getting it to perform both correctly and cost-effectively in production, which is why having Genesys customers talk about their real experiences and best practices was such a useful framing.
Acknowledge the pilot-to-production challenge
To engage with customers at all stages of AI readiness, vendors need to address the AI FOMU (fear of messing up) that’s out there and the reality that promising AI pilot projects don’t naturally evolve to enterprise AI in production. Genesys’s pitch was not all just AI flowers and bunnies: the leadership team acknowledged that customers were struggling moving from interesting AI pilot projects to real enterprise AI production, and outlined both product innovations and services offerings to help customers bridge the divide including:
- Experience Orchestration Plans. Genesys offers a no-cost strategic planning experience with Genesys Customer Success to help customers connect business priorities, AI, and outcomes to advance experience orchestration.
- AI acceleration services. Genesys announced a 50 percent discount (through January) on all AI acceleration services including advisory services for agentic and AI transformation, AI vision and change readiness, and AI data foundations, and launch services for Copilot, AVA, Journey Management, and Predictive Routing.
- Expert Apps. Genesys has designed pre-built agents to accelerate AI time to value including Genesys AI Teammates, agentic vertical solutions, and tools to help customers build AVAs from existing flows and test and validate them.
Be prescriptive
CX and contact center leaders who are feeling the pressure to ‘do something with AI’ are also overwhelmed with the pace of AI evolution and often confused by the gaps between messaging and real products from vendors. Although Genesys announced a number of innovations at Xperience, it also gave pretty clear prescriptive guidance about how customers could access where they were today (building on the maturity model outlined by Bates last year) and how they could leverage their Experience Orchestration Plans for quick wins with AI.
Perhaps even more importantly, Genesys was clear and prescriptive about what agents should “live” in Genesys and which probably belong in other systems, such as ServiceNow and Salesforce. (If it’s in the customer interaction, Genesys; if it’s before or after, Salesforce or ServiceNow). In an environment where everyone’s launching Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and saying you can build agents anywhere you choose, it’s refreshing to hear a vendor giving prescriptive guidance on when you should – or shouldn’t – have an agent on their platform.
Keep the pricing conversation open
As AI pricing models continue to evolve and SaaS vendors seek to align AI token bills with value delivered, Genesys and others will have to continue to evolve their pricing strategies. Genesys’s pricing strategy today is ok, but not ideal – but it is a lot more closely tied to outcomes than many others. In an ideal world, moving forward Genesys and others will have outcome-based pricing that is based on telemetry and real data, and provides transparency for customers to be able to make decisions about when they want to use pricier models.
For now, Genesys is keeping its options open. It has also continued to evolve its model strategy, moving to smaller internal models and evolving its Agentic Virtual Agent (AVA) to reduce latency and increase context windows without changing price.
Be smart about your Total Addressable Market
As Genesys continues on its path to an expected IPO, it’s competing in a very noisy marketplace. ServiceNow and Salesforce partnership investments have helped it play a more meaningful role for joint customers; so has the newly-inked Sierra deal. By being clear about where it plays the lead and where partners will for customers, Genesys isn’t trying to be everything CX for everyone. At the same time, its new AI teammates have the potential to open up whole new market opportunities in areas like employee and IT service delivery.
My take
In a market flooded with hype and hyperbole, Genesys is being clear about its lane: CX orchestration. With real-life customer lessons, prescriptive guidance, and a focus on helping customers get beyond AI FOMU to enterprise AI in production, the company is providing both the aspirational message of CX transformation with AI and the pragmatic breakdown of what customers need to do to get there.
