As a marketing leader, you often spend so much time on the strategies and tactics that keep your brand growing that it’s difficult to keep up with what’s going on in the background with the platforms and the companies behind them.
While agility requires a flexible technology stack, it also requires a leadership mindset that can distinguish market noise from genuine strategic opportunity, and filter out the hype to understand the shifts that can impact customers and the bottom line. The ability to pivot your people, processes, and platforms in response to major market shifts is no longer a nice to have, but rather a competitive advantage.
Today, I’m excited to talk with our 2026 Resident Expert on the CX and MarTech platform landscape. We’re going to focus on the business and business opportunities that mergers, acquisitions, and big moves in the market provide to these platforms’ customers. Our focus today is going to be a recap of market activity in 2025 with an eye towards what to expect in 2026.
To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome, Bill Staikos, Founder at Be Customer Led.
About Bill Staikos
Bill Staikos is a senior customer experience executive with over 20 years of leadership across financial services, consulting, and technology. He has held senior roles at American Express, Freddie Mac, JP Morgan, and BNY Mellon, where he led global initiatives to transform client and employee experiences. A former SVP at Medallia, Bill helped organizations turn insights into measurable outcomes.
Recognized as a LinkedIn Top Voice and one of the Top 50 Global CX Influencers, Bill is also the founder of the Be Customer-Led podcast and is now preparing to launch The Multimodal Experience. Known for his pragmatic, impact-driven approach, Bill advises leading brands, including Apple, Bank of America, Marriott, and T-Mobile, on connecting customer experience to business growth.
Bill Staikos on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/billstaikos/
Resources
Be Customer Led: https://becustomerled.com/
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Transcript
[00:49:33] Greg Kihlstrom: As a marketing or CX leader, you often spend so much time on the strategies and tactics that keep your brand growing that it’s difficult to keep up with what’s going on in the background with the platforms and the companies behind them. While agility requires a flexible technology stack, it also requires a leadership mindset that can distinguish market noise from genuine strategic opportunity and filter out the hype to understand the shifts that can impact customers and the bottom line. The ability to pivot your people, processes, and platforms in response to major market shifts is no longer a nice to have, but rather a competitive advantage.
[01:25:01] Greg Kihlstrom: Today I’m excited to talk with our 2026 resident expert on the CX and MarTech platform landscape. We’re going to focus on the business and business opportunities that mergers, acquisitions, and big moves in the market provide to these platforms customers. Our focus today is going to be a recap of market activity in 2025 with an eye towards what to expect in 2026. To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Bill Staikos, founder at Be Customer Led. Bill, welcome to the show.
[01:52:90] Bill Staikos: Super excited to be here. Thanks for having me on, Greg.
[01:55:92] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, looking forward to to talking about this and and certainly love that you’re our resident expert here. Before we dive in though, why don’t you give a little background on yourself for those that aren’t familiar and and your role at Be Customer Led.
[02:08:44] Bill Staikos: Yeah, so I’ve spent over 20 years as an operator leading and building customer-led programs and teams. Largely in financial services, have spent time on the SaaS side as well. Started my consulting company Be Customer Led about six months ago, and we help organizations kind of rethink their operating model around the customer. That includes tech, that includes governance, that includes sort of organizational structure, talent, et cetera. So it’s been an exciting kind of run so far and yeah, last year was a doozy and I think this year is going to be one too on the tech side at least.
[02:43:53] Greg Kihlstrom: Well, yeah, then let let’s dive right in. And you know, what what themes did you see in 2025 and you know, maybe how is how is 2025 different relative to prior years?
[02:54:33] Bill Staikos: Yeah, so I think there are like three kind of big themes or so in 2025. But if we kind of zoom out a little bit on this, right, like it it was organizations not just buying kind of features or rounding out platforms. I think it really was about defensibility, right? So how do you like how do you think about trusted benchmarks? How do you think about vertical data? How do you think about the operational loop, turning insights into real action, whether on a marketing side or on the sort of core experiential side.
[03:24:00] Bill Staikos: So when I think about like defensibility, I think about like the big sort of major sort of event was the Qualtrics acquisition of Press Ganey. You even had Press Ganey buying um um or Press Ganey Force Qualtrics bought. You even had, you know, you had in moment in there before Qualtrics even stepped in. And like I think that’s a really strong example of a private equity business seeing an opportunity to really kind of create a moat and buy up sort of a marketplace.
[03:55:76] Bill Staikos: I think that really impacted the market. I think other notable examples might be just like private equity rebuilding the tech stack through roll-ups. And I think we saw obviously the Toma Bravo acquiring Verint and then sort of bringing it together with Calabrio to create a larger CX automation platform. Everstone, majority stake in Wingify, excuse me. You know, they combined Wingify with AB Tasty, that created sort of a scale experimentation and optimization platform.
[04:32:00] Bill Staikos: And then three, I think really importantly, I think the contact center automation moved from more innovation to really thinking about core economics. And that’s what that place is that that’s what that play is really about. So you got Nice acquiring Cognigy. It’s conversational and and agentic AI vendor. You had RingCentral acquiring Community WFM. So building kind of workforce management into the contact center offering.
[05:00:99] Bill Staikos: And finally, I think you also saw a lot of consolidation and right-sizing at the same time. And I think that was important because you just you have a lot of just market environment, market dynamics impacting the marketplace and you saw a lot of that happening.
[05:14:38] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. So one one of the things I noticed you didn’t explicitly mention was AI or, you know, just let’s let’s slap some some AI on it or whatever. Well, you know, certainly there was plenty of that. Yeah. For all the hype and all the all the talk about it, you know, what what were you how much of some of this was driven by the need to kind of shore up AI capabilities?
[05:37:79] Bill Staikos: I think that look, I think that the AI conversation was obviously a big theme like the the Verint, the Nice acquisition. Like those were very AI-centric and kind of rounding out those platforms. You know, they’re not they’re not building it on their own, they could just go buy it and certainly the market or the rate environment certainly was getting better. You had reduced sort of or or lower share prices, um or valuations on a lot of these companies. Even Orlando Bravo came out, I think just this week, talking about reduced share reduced valuations is making the market for private equity very attractive again.
[06:12:12] Bill Staikos: Interestingly, on the AI side, you had a lot of VC money flowing into the space. I’m sure you saw that as well. And, you know, everyone’s trying to pick the right pink pony, right? So like everyone’s kind of like trying to like get get the dollars flowing and certainly investors are very eager to to try and capitalize on that. So you had not only so the VC kind of piece filling some of the gap on the private equity side, but now private equity now coming back and saying, wait, there’s a lot of good opportunity for us here. And now you really see them starting to invest in different ways, either direct investment, privatizing companies, but also from the perspective of, you know, rolling up companies in their portfolio.
[06:52:19] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah. Were there any surprises or or maybe even missed opportunities looking back at 2025?
[06:59:43] Bill Staikos: I think the Press Ganey Force and Qualtrics move, that surprised a lot of people. One because it creates a new playbook so to speak, right? I think the winning vendors will not only defend themselves with new features, but they’re also defending themselves with benchmarks, vertical data. I mean, like think about the healthcare play there for Qualtrics. They’ve basically locked down the healthcare space. So I think that was a bit of a surprise and sort of rethinking the way certainly the the broader CX vendors are thinking about the marketplace.
[07:38:39] Bill Staikos: I think how aggressively private equity is is kind of shaping the tech stack again. I think that is a bit of a surprise. And, you know, we saw that in some of the transactions that I mentioned. And I think some of the missed opportunity is there are too many buyers that still treat M&A as an excuse maybe to buy more tools and not an opportunity to subtract. And and maybe we can talk a little bit about that and what that would mean, but I think that there’s a really there’s a lot of opportunity has as a buyer, if you’re seeing this M&A activity, you really need to think about what does it mean for me and then how do I take advantage of that? Because there I think there really is a lot of advantage for buyers right now in the marketplace too.
[08:20:51] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, let’s let’s go there then and um, you know, from a from a CMO, from a C-suite level, you know, what what should they be doing? I mean, obviously things are going to continue to change into 2026 and beyond, but, you know, what should they be doing knowing directionally what’s been happening over the last 12 months or so?
[08:39:15] Bill Staikos: So I’m always a proponent and I’m counseling enterprises right now. What first and foremost, I think you really have to look at what are the success metrics that you’ve got in place with that vendor. Not only how are you successfully leveraging it to achieve your goals inside the company, but then even from a shared scorecard perspective maybe with that vendor or with that partner. So, you know, thinking about, you know, at least, you know, my my real space is is customer experience broadly, thinking about like insight velocity, operational impact and tracking these metrics and not sort of your traditional, you know, like uptime or run time, right? Like those are okay, those are kind of table stakes at this point.
[09:20:70] Bill Staikos: I think number two, I think you can treat the consolidation as a contract moment, right? And not necessarily like a press release moment. I think a lot of people were clearly caught by surprise on on the Qualtrics deal, but that being said, I think that there’s real opportunity for your sourcing and procurement team, other leaders and the owners of the economic buyer of of that capability to say, okay, big transaction. I’m going to look, you know, I might be coming up for renewals as an example. Here’s an opportunity for me to take advantage of the fact that there’s a lot of change happening and a lot of transition going on at this organization. So I think that really puts the buyer in a really good position to think about think about it as a contract moment.
[10:04:80] Bill Staikos: I think the third right move also is, you know, how do you rationalize the tech stack particularly given the consolidation? A lot of enterprises are using multiple capabilities, some with overlap. So as you’ve got this consolidation happening or even the privatization plays happening, or even sort of thinking about that investment in AI, I think it’s a really good opportunity to kind of map out, right? All the technology that you’re buying. How does it relate to the problems as a business that you’re trying to solve? How does it accelerate your strategy as a business? And then how are all these systems connected? Not only to each other, but also to your data and also to your front lines, frankly, the people on the on the ground making decisions every day.
[10:52:43] Bill Staikos: And, you know, rethinking that architecture with your CIO partners and other teams internally and business owners. I think that’s like these moments right now create a lot of opportunity for that. And you should bring the vendors into that conversation, right? I mean, they’re your partners after all. And I think that they can be critical in helping you understand that. Now, if they can’t be, I think you’ve got your answer in terms of where you rationalize or right-size sort of capabilities. Yeah, yeah. But nonetheless, I think there’s a really good opportunity to kind of start to rethink that.
[11:23:40] Bill Staikos: And finally, I would say, you know, building sort of like the CFO friendly automation map. And what I mean by that is, you know, if you think about like conversational AI, right? As an operating program with containment targets, right? Quality targets, a plan for human escalation in there even, right? Like I think the fastest teams are connecting automation and though and outcomes associated with automation back to root cause, um so the organization can actually think about like why was the work existing in the first place? And tying those business outcomes to the capabilities is really critical. And I that goes obviously back to the success metrics I was talking about.
[12:07:93] Bill Staikos: A lot of CFOs are focused on growth, but they’re also really focused on is this platform, is this capability helping me drive the business outcomes that we need to be driving as a business? And that could be growth, revenue, that can be efficiency, that could be lowering risk. And in many cases, even improving the culture of the organization by putting these tools that empower people every day. So I think procurement gets sharper. I think we’re seeing teams right size using fit-for-purpose tools for very specific needs, as well as keeping sort of like the core backbone um where governance really matters. And I think smaller players are coming into the mix certainly, but, you know, those core big platforms are becoming more meaningful as sort of the backbone in that broader tech stack and that architecture.
[13:00:15] Greg Kihlstrom: Here point about right-sizing, you know, I was at Treasure Data’s their CDP world in Las Vegas last fall and, you know, one of the the figures that struck me, they I’m going to butcher the exact numbers so I won’t even bother. I’ll I’ll put a link in the show notes or something, but what struck me they had somebody from Forrester talking and um they said this within the last year or so was the first year that, you know, the number of platforms keeps growing and the that MarTech super graphic keeps, you know, getting crazier and crazier, but this was the first time where the average number of platforms used per company actually decreased. This was talking specifically about MarTech, but, you know, I think it can apply to, you know, more more broadly. So, you know, it’s kind of an interesting phenomenon when, you know, we talk about tool sprawl and and all this stuff and that’s real, you know, trust me and I’m sure you experience it as well, but
[13:53:57] Bill Staikos: As a buyer and as a seller, yeah.
[13:55:58] Greg Kihlstrom: Right, right. But, um, you know, the fact that these companies are, you know, the average number of platforms actually went down, you know, seems like a a trend worth, you know, worth looking into as well.
[14:07:37] Bill Staikos: Look, I think if you look at the last, let’s say couple of years in the market environment, one, there’s just a lot of uncertainty in the market. still is today on some level. Um, a lot of a lot of that uncertainty, frankly, is also driven by AI, right? Like I’d say 2024, the pendulum really swung towards and sort of like just the mind share swung towards AI. How are we investing? What are we doing? Let’s bring in solutions and let’s test.
[14:34:64] Bill Staikos: I think 2025 and I really actually saw a really big shift in the spring of 2025. I don’t know kind of what happened. But I think like companies started to wake up to the fact that one, this is harder than it sounds or looks. Two, our data really needs to be in much better shape. Three, this is super expensive. And four, I think, you know, the the kind of foundational thinking around, oh boy, it’s just not kind of a plug and play thing and let it run like I put in a prompt the chat GPT. It’s much more complicated than that. Right.
[15:04:36] Bill Staikos: The conversation really started swinging towards growth and identifying sort of opportunities for efficiency. So totally understand that data and I agree with that and it’s not just MarTech, but it’s it’s happening across SaaS, I think generally. You also have sort of these big consolidations that are happening, part of the part of the sort of the driver for that. And I think that that tech stack rethinking or right-sizing or, you know, figuring out like how does this all connect and and be meaningful, and being intentional about that. I think the CIO function in in a lot of these big organizations and mid-size companies, frankly, are starting to take a harder look and, you know, putting a sharper pencil to to to the architecture diagram, uh because of that. So, which I think is a good thing. I think it’s a good thing for the marketplace. I think it’s a good thing for buyers. You know, forces vendors to also rethink how they are positioning their platform differently and relative to some of these changes in the market, which I think is healthy.
[16:02:51] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah. Well, and and so looking forward to the the year ahead, you know, we’re we’re, you know, this show’s going to run in in early February, so, you know, at the beginning of the year still. You know, what one of the things that I’m seeing, you know, related to AI and certainly agentic is the buzzword of, you know, I would say the last few few months and, you know, again, as with all the AI stuff, I think some of the hype’s justified, at least, but not necessarily all.
[16:31:37] Greg Kihlstrom: But, you know, what I’m seeing is there there seems to be a number of players that are trying to be the hub of agentic and and all that and, you know, everybody can’t be the hub, right? There’s got to be some spokes out there and and stuff. Are is that what you’re seeing in, you know, as as well? And, you know, how does how does this kind of play out? Are there going to be like two or three players when all all is said and done or is this is this going to stay competitive like this for for a while?
[16:59:02] Bill Staikos: So I think I’m going to burst some folks bubbles and hopefully I’m not going to burst yours on this, Greg. You know, I I think the agentic kind of thing for 2026 is not going to pan out. Um and and I may be going against the market on that a little bit. But I think they’re going to continue to be some small investments and and and pilot so to speak. But when you look at the data and what’s going on, you’ve got, you know, and and I think might be uh there’s data out there even right now and we can I can give it to you put in the show notes maybe. There’s like 15% of CIOs are saying they don’t really trust agents being autonomous in their organization. You’ve got COOs similarly saying, I’m not really seeing the value. You’ve got CEOs saying, go forth and let’s go do this and we’re we’re AI-ified and we’re going forward. But then on the ground, a lot of people are using their own personal tools, LLMs to kind of do work. They’re not really being truthful still about how they’re using AI. And I think, you know, frankly, there’s a lot of fear around agentic and what does that mean. So there’s a really big disconnect when you look at the data what’s happening.
[18:05:90] Bill Staikos: So at some point, right? I think we will see the proliferation of agentic really coming to the fore. I think the headlines are not going to meet up with sort of like the real story essentially. Now, that being said, in the contact center, 100% that that will be the story and there’ll be a lot of efficiency again kind of going back to the core economics of agentic and how that can really transform your contact center, your service center. I think absolutely we’re going to see that uh play out.
[18:38:62] Bill Staikos: You will continue to see consolidation in the marketplace. You know, that number uh that you kind of highlighted earlier, I think that number is going to continue to go down. And also, I think that we will continue to see organizations just right size and really look for that ROI. And a couple more things, um I might add there. One, you know, you and I have talked about synthetic data a lot. I think 2026 is the year of synthetic data. Companies are starting to wake up to the fact that it is a it is a great compliant and kind of low-risk way to kind of test and learn in an organization that has meaning for companies in healthcare, financial services or other um highly regulated industries.
[19:21:40] Bill Staikos: So I think that’s going to be a bigger story in marketing, in research, um in CX more broadly. And I think that’s going to start to flow into sort of the data side of the organization as well. And then finally, I think sort of like the capital market add-on. Um I think you’re going to see a lot of, you know, more even more VC money coming into the AI space and buying up these or investing in these smaller companies that are are frankly starting to take market share from like kind of the big players that you would consider in in our respective discipline. And um, yeah, I’m excited for that. It’ll be interesting how it all shakes out. But yeah, I think the consolidation play, I think the the the right-sizing will continue. I think the contact center from a core economics perspective is going to continue to evolve and certainly be kind of like the breeding ground for agentic and how that rolls out then more broadly in the business, and then just sort of the money flow will continue.
[20:16:08] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, yeah, love it. Well, Bill, looking forward to following the the trends here with you this year. So we’ll check back in with you next quarter and and see how things are going, see how things are are shaping up.
[20:29:05] Bill Staikos: I think that, you know, quarter by quarter, we’re going to see a lot of interesting stuff start to play out. I think there’ll be more privatization as well of organizations and the private equity big private equity players will continue to uh to buy up those SaaS companies. So it we’ll we’ll have a lot to talk about quarter over quarter.
[20:44:48] Greg Kihlstrom: Yeah, I believe it. Yeah, nice. Well, Bill, thanks again for joining. And one last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[20:55:76] Bill Staikos: Great question. I keep a a running deal log of sort of the big moves. I talk to operators as well as um leaders at these vendors uh pretty consistently. You know, I try and keep sort of a a short list of proof questions. And I use AI to do a lot of the research and and digging for me. And, you know, I that has really helped. Um and I’ve got sort of a a system in place and kind of help keep me up to date in terms of what’s going on and um, yeah, that’s been super helpful and and really has helped me scale and just sort of my thinking around this space.
