As a 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.
That’s why I’m always glad to talk with our guest today, who is both focused on the business of CX as well as the business behind CX and the SaaS platforms driving so many customer experiences. I’m excited to talk again with our Resident Expert on the CX and MarTech platform landscape.
We talked right at the beginning of 2026 as a look back at last year. Now that we’ve had a quarter behind us in 2026, it’s time to talk about how this year is shaping up and what we can expect in the months ahead.
To help me discuss these topics, 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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Transcripts
[00:00:00] Greg Kihlström: As a 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. That’s why I’m always glad to talk with our guest today, who is both focused on the business of CX as well as the business behind CX, and the SAS platforms driving so many customer experiences. I’m excited to talk again with our resident expert on the CX and MarTech platform landscape. We talked right at the beginning of 2026 as a look back at last year. Now that we’ve had a quarter behind us in 2026, it’s time to talk about how this year is shaping up and what we can expect in the months ahead.
[00:01:20] Greg Kihlström: To help me discuss this topic, I’d like to welcome Bill Staikos, founder at Be Customer Led. Bill, welcome back to the show.
[00:01:27] Bill Staikos: It’s awesome to be back. A lot has been going on since we last talked, so I think we’re going to have a pretty meaty conversation here today.
[00:01:34] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, yeah, I know. It’s it’s crazy to think, uh, you know, it’s it’s only, it’s been a matter of weeks. I get, you know, a couple months, but you know, it’s been a matter of weeks since we last chatted and yeah, lot lots to to talk through. For those that didn’t catch our last conversation, why don’t you give a little background on yourself and your role at Be Customer Led?
[00:01:52] Bill Staikos: Sure. So, um, after spending 25 years as an operator in the customer experience space, um, buyer of technology, also as a seller of technology on the SaaS side. I started my own consulting business in August of 2025 and a couple of different things, just helping organizations think about the operating model around customer experience, but obviously tech is a big part of that. So staying very, very close to the tech space is sort of near and dear to my heart anyway and a lot going on in this space as you know, so.
[00:02:20] Greg Kihlström: Definitely. Well, yeah, let’s let’s dive in then and so maybe start with if there is a contrast, let’s let’s talk about that. You know, what were you seeing, you know, what are you seeing so far in 2026? And is it, are there differences than than what we were seeing in in late 2025?
[00:02:40] Bill Staikos: Yeah, there’s a couple of things and I think we talked about this on the first, on the first episode we were together on, um, 2025, there was like a real shift from, how do I use AI to save money to how do I use AI for growth opportunities? So like, like the promise of AI, right? Was really strong and front and center. I think 2026, and there’s a little bit of a backdrop that I think we can get into relative to the private capital space. 2026, I think, is where people now are starting to ask like, where’s the business outcome and the result? Like, show me hard metrics now. Um, and last year, like there are a lot of software companies, they got attention just for like even adding like generative AI features, right? Um, to their capabilities. This year, I think the that bar is gone, right? Like the bar is like now way higher. I think buyers are starting to ask very pointed questions around proof that this is going to lower my cost of serve. Proof that this is going to increase conversion. Proof that it reduces, you know, handle time, retention, et cetera. And that shift, right? Like, I think that’s showing up across the market, not in any one particular space. Um, a lot of that driven by pressure for even like context centers, like being taxed like, you have to deliver an AI solution this year to even just something that’s even less sort of forceful. I think the second big kind of thing that feels different, um, I think the the sort of the the space between categories are breaking down a lot faster. And what I mean by that is, like design tools that, you know, move into campaign execution or, you know, customer data, customer service platforms now deeper into agentic automation. So like the there’s there’s now more blurriness between what one platform used to do versus now what multiple platforms used to do versus now what one platform could do. Right? Like Zendesk buying forethought and closing on that, right? That’s a great example, right? Like and these aren’t like random tuck-ins as you use like private equity parlance, like these are like real market moving platform enhancing capabilities. Finally, Greg, really quickly, the one thing also I’ll kind of, um, talk about is the data conversation really has fundamentally changed and it’s very practical, like brass tax now. So maybe 2025, you had more people talking about data as an asset, a little bit more of an abstract way. I think now the conversation is way more operational. So, like, can, can my data actually support decisioning or personalization or service, compliance even, risk? That is a fundamental shift. Now, they’re looking at as an asset, but in very practical and operational terms.
[00:05:32] Greg Kihlström: So I I want to talk about all three of those things actually. So, um, maybe start with and this is based a little bit on what I’m seeing as well is, you know, the maybe the first and the and the third points. So, so essentially, you know, what I’m seeing is, uh, they’re definitely to your to your point about the the pragmatism is, you know, last year or even the year prior was all about, hey, let’s try some stuff and let’s slap gen AI on it and and isn’t that that’s enough? You know, kind of to say, we’re we’re in the game or whatever. Do you think there’s a relationship between, you know, the those pilot projects that could be kind of done off in a corner somewhere were, you know, whether they were successful or not, they could be done and and AI could be implemented or whatever. But now that we’re starting to talk about operationalizing these things and seeing returns, the first thing that in my experience that, um, or these orgs run into is is data, I’m just going to call it data problems, because that’s what they are. And so the the data piece is just kind of necessitated by, okay, we’ve got to do not just pilots, not just shiny stuff, but like we’ve got to do real stuff, but we can’t even get there until the data’s in the way, you know, So in other words, like, how connected do you see those two things?
[00:06:51] Bill Staikos: So they’re super connected. So like the last, if the last 12, let’s say even 18 months, Greg, were, you know, running pilots, right? Or about running pilots, like leaders should have been redesigning the underlying operating model. Right? Like the shiny demo and the shiny tool syndrome really hit hard last year. There was so much pressure from executives and leaders to like put something in place. We want to show investors that we’re actively doing something with AI, right? And I think something like the the number of times AI was even mentioned like in quarterly kind of analyst calls like was like parabolic, right? I think so like, not as much time being spent on the underlying operating model. And that’s why I think a lot of pilots frankly failed and didn’t show the result that, you know, people thought. Now, tested pilots. They tested chat. They tested content generation. But what they didn’t fix was like, who has decision rights or how does the machine sort of make decisions? How does the, how do we unify the data so we can get better output? How do we think about sort of process debt that we’ve accumulated over the course of the last 20, 30 years? What does this process now look like and do if we just put AI on top of it? Right? So like, you know, you hear a lot around like, oh, these and I’m not bashing the conversational AI folks. I think there’s a lot of great capabilities out there. But like the AI will hand it off to a live agent, right? If it, if it can’t answer the question. It’s not that it can’t answer the question, it’s that your process and your policy is such that it’s not manufactured in a way that actually AI, you can use the automated end of that AI, right? So it’s got to got to got to pass it off. So a lot of that stuff is now coming home to roost and I think people are and that’s why like, okay, way more to this than we thought, how do we get much more sort of practical about sort of these solutions? So I think you’re going to have the gas kind of like come off on more pilots, more testing and like here are the three kind of use cases, problem that we need to solve. Let’s go fix the foundation and then put AI on top of it.
[00:08:55] Greg Kihlström: So to get to now to the to the second point. I mean, you know, another thing that I’m seeing is, well, I, you know, I always say, you know, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should. But, um, at the same time, you can do an awful lot with, you know, whether it’s vibe coding or, you know, agentic and and all these things. And so, you know, I I do wonder when do, when does kind of the sprawl, this feature sprawl end, or does it, does it ever end? In other words, do we end up with 20 platforms that do everything and they do the same thing and, you know, right right now the things that prevent that from happening are are many. You know, there’s there’s even, you know, brand and market position, there’s tech debt, there’s there’s all kinds of reasons. But when it’s so easy to just either acquire a company and and and, you know, tie it in and or, you know, just build it yourself. Like, is this leading us to a good place? Or are we are again, are we just going to have a bunch of platforms that do everything?
[00:10:02] Bill Staikos: I think we’re going to be in the messy middle for a little while to be perfectly honest with you, right? Because, you know, like at an enterprise level who have their they’ve got the resources to go build, even internally. They’re the question now is, can’t we just build this? Yeah. Right? Like we’re spending so much on AI already. We’ve done all these pilots, we’ve learned a ton. We have now maybe an organizational structure in place to kind of manage this in a much more effective way. Why can’t we go build this? I hear that a lot, frankly, like on things around like experience analytics, right? Like pulling together disparate sources of data, analyzing them at scale. Yeah, you can do that, right? Like, you know, with a couple of really good engineers, let’s say a year’s worth of dedicated time, you can build what a lot of these platforms have today. The back to your point of like, could versus should. Like, but that’s years of maintenance and right? Like so like, I I think that, you know, with the we can go build it quickly and add it on internally or at these at these sort of SaaS providers, plus the fact that there’s market environment is very different, right? Like I think like people are more cost conscious at least in the US certainly. Um, given sort of like what’s going on in the world, like there’s just this weird dynamic happening right now, where I think that people are going to try to build things on their own, probably fail as a result or put in the wrong solution and then the next up and coming thing kind of comes around and says, we’ve got a better mouse trap, but I can’t use that for another couple of years, right? Because of where I am with current solutions. So I think that we’re this will shake out probably two to three years, but we’re going to it’s going to be awkward for a couple years, I think.
[00:14:46] Greg Kihlström: Yeah, I mean, I Iwrote this article for CMS wire where you know, I I don’t think I coined the term or anything, but like I use the term creation sprawl, which is like, you know, again, I I do it. I mean, I’m not right at the moment, but most hours of the day, I’m probably vibe coding something to help me do something better. So why wouldn’t anyone? And at the same time, you have all of these essentially ungoverned tools and processes and and things. So, yeah, it you know,
[00:15:53] Bill Staikos: I think the real interesting thing that’s going to probably create a lot of noise for company is like you and I, we’re on the same team, we’re both vibe coding solutions for ourselves. Right. Right. Right? So now now magnify that across 50,000 or 100,000 or 300,000 people in an organization. Yeah. Like, how do you even maintain one, it’s probably cost prohibitive if we’re all like hitting tokens left and right, right? Like for number one. But number two is like, how do you kind of capture that level of innovation, govern it, but also then consolidate it so you can impact many versus you and me as individual, you know, like mini innovation labs, right? So that to me is a real big problem for CIOs that they’re going to have to absolutely think through and solve over the next couple of years.
[00:17:05] Greg Kihlström: Because I mean, to your to your point, it’s I think I I love the freedom that I, you know, I’ve never I wrote a little action script back when Flash was the thing, but you know, never never really a coder myself, but so I love the freedom that that doing that stuff gives. But you where you gain individual freedom to be able to do this stuff, you lose that collaboration, which can admittedly lead to bigger innovation and stuff like that. So I agree like there’s got to there’s got to be a little like people need a little room to play because I think that that helps, but then there’s got to be that some governance for the sake of, you know, innovation and and really the company.
[00:18:47] Bill Staikos: Yeah. And maybe AI can help us do that too. I don’t know and just feed it to middle managers to better manage their teams and the things that they’re creating. But there’s a real solution to that problem in there somewhere, so.
[00:20:59] Greg Kihlström: So, you know, looking back to the next, um, at the last several months, um, any surprises, any missed opportunities, you know, anything you’re seeing in the market?
[00:21:13] Bill Staikos: I think certainly the one around, you know, we already talked about one, like not not thinking about sort of the underlying operating model, that more and more is now front and center of the conversation. That’s probably like top one, two or three conversations for the work that I’ve been doing. Um, I think one big surprising piece is how quickly the market started rewarding companies that connect all these disparate pieces from creation all like through action. You know, the the voice AI and the solutions coming up now, uh, proliferating in the context center space, like they’ve gone parabolic from a growth perspective. I’m not sure that people were necessarily ready for that, but, you know, boy, if there was any space where you can quantify impact immediately, it was it was in the context center. So, and then I like another surprise for me is, you know, what’s happening in the private capital space. You right? You’ve got these big private equity companies that are now publicly coming out even and saying, we we overpaid for some solutions because we overestimated growth rates. Um, you know, direct, I won’t name the company, but like direct quote from one of the founders. Um, you have a lot of challengers out there saying, all these companies are way overvalued and you got to start marking these to market much better. Um, and that’s impact of the market. And then third, like, I mean, I I don’t know if I saw this company coming, maybe others did, like the fact that like the anthropics of the world are developing solutions that are fundamentally challenging entire categories of software that everything from cyber to, you know, vibe coding, right? Like, you know, you there’s a lot of companies that last, let’s say two, three years and all of a sudden now you’ve got, you know, cloud code and co-work like those companies are done in the water at this point, right? So like, you know, that to me is super surprising. So, um, you know, I was always looking at like, these models will continue to get better and evolve, not like take out potentially, take out like big swaths of of of software providers out there.
[00:25:31] Greg Kihlström: So, Well, I mean, do you think it’s, you know, there’s there’s always been danger of of disruption, of course. But do you think it’s getting easier to disrupt at this point? You know, because there’s some there’s some pretty entrenched players out there. But there it also it feels like it’s getting easier and easier to scale, you know, to to some of those those levels of of functionality and stuff like that.
[00:26:42] Bill Staikos: Look, I I vibe coded a CRM for myself, you know, two months ago, right? So like, You know, I don’t have to necessarily pay for that now. Um, I mean, I’ll do on some level, right? Um, you know, for for for for codex, but like, you know, I now, I think at the enterprise level, I think that there are going to be buyers in the market for these big kind of core systems. I I I mean, you know, again, I don’t want to mention names, but like the like the one of the bigger CRM players comes to mind, right? I don’t think they’re going to go away. Right. Yes, there are people out there saying, your business model is now fundamentally disrupted. I don’t think they’re going away anytime soon. It’s it would cost way too much to build something similar, way even even, you know, exponentially more to maintain that ongoing. It that doesn’t make sense to me. So I think like some of it is certainly overblown, but I think if you’re in like that mid market or, you know, upper small business, like let’s say 75, 100 employees, I think that you’re you’re trying to figure out, how do I bring my cost down, create solutions that are much more bespoke for my business? Um, yeah, and and that certainly is going to impact the, um, you know, the software space.
[00:28:53] Greg Kihlström: Well, yeah, I mean, it’s kind of the at that, you know, at that lower mid-market space, it’s at least from my standpoint, it feels like there’s a lot of artificial barriers being put in place in software to make you either upgrade to enterprise or you just don’t, you just don’t access it unless you have X X Y Z number of employees, seats, whatever the case may be. So, to me, that feels like the place that’s certainly ripe for disruption in in particular because, okay, cool. You know, if I have to pay ten times more for my CRM or whatever the whatever the platform is, I’ll just vibe code that feature and, you know, I’ll I’ll live with, um, you know, whether I love tech support, you know, or not, you know, it’s because it’s me, but like it’s it is what it is. And I, you know, I’ll I’ll solve my own problems, right? So, yeah.
[00:30:42] Bill Staikos: Look, even for myself, there’s free CRM solutions out there, or free levels of CRM solutions, right? I still vibe coded it because one, I wanted to challenge myself, can I do this? Two, could that help me? And then three, like, yeah, I don’t, you know, I don’t want to be constantly peppered with up, you know, upgrades, you know, sales pitches, um, you know, at some point. So, yeah, it’s pretty exciting.
[00:31:04] Greg Kihlström: So, um, you know, I I know we’ve talked a a bit about this already, but, you know, what what you talk with a lot of leaders, a lot of C-suites, leaders and and stuff. You know, what what are you, what what’s your advice to them over the next, um, you know, over the next six months, let’s say, to, you know, based on some of those things that you’re you’re seeing and hearing?
[00:31:26] Bill Staikos: I think there’s a couple of things. One, I think that, you know, stop looking AI as like a feature set. I think that you really need to be looking at this from an operating outcome perspective. So, every investment in AI needs to be tied to some small set of hard metrics, right? Like lower cost to serve, higher revenue per customer, faster resolution, retention, or, you know, lower churn, better conversion rates, better productivity among your employees, right? Like that’s all measurable stuff. You know, if the vendor can’t show you the economics very clearly or put you in touch with someone who’s non-competitive in your space that is using their tool to drive those results. I that’s a red flag for me, number one. Number two is, I think that you should simplify your tech stack before you scale the ambition. And I think, you know, back to the point of, you know, the data, the foundational elements being there. I think that’s really critical as well. Um, third, I’d say treat data and workflow as one problem, not two separate problems, right? Like I think, you know, I, I think the companies that really are starting to get this are the ones that connect data and action. Yeah. Um, and I frankly, that’s why like CDPs, orchestration, service automation, that’s why like these have A, started to blur and come together, but B, like have really grown as well. Um, I’d also start looking at like, how do we design the human role now? Right. I think like last year, there was way too much conversation around the term human in the loop, which is a term I personally do not like. I think this year, particularly as organizations start thinking about the operating model and how things work, I think people are going to start to design, like, where does the, where is the human, the whole loop, right? Like, what are the journeys that we fundamentally cannot put AI in the loop of? Right? And just keep sort of that human element. Um, and then what are those handoffs where they should exist, whether that’s machine to machine, machine to human or human to human. Um, really getting crystal clear on what those are. So I think, you know, those kind of things are are big management or leadership issues right now, um, that need to be solved, not at some point, you know, in the next 12 or 18 months.
[00:37:47] Greg Kihlström: Well, and I think to that last point, it’s I I think there’s a, um, an important point to be made as far as, you know, we we do want, I know the robots are listening right now as I say this, but, um, you know, we want them to be working for us and not vice versa. I I try to, um, keep that in mind. I I’m forgetting the name of the author right now, but somebody wrote a a great article about this a few months back and it just, you know, I think I I think about it often as far as, you know, am I am I doing work so that AI can do something, or is AI doing work so that I can do something? And I think, you know, there there’s probably in the in the middle of of things, there’s going to have to be a little bit of of each or whatever, but like, what’s our goal? You know, is our is our goal just to for us to be feeding AI more information and instructions or or ideally the other, right? Is to make our jobs easy, be more strategic, so on and so forth, right?
[00:39:45] Bill Staikos: When I think about, you know, I’ve worked with someone on this and in in the past is when I think about efficacy of AI, you need to look at three levers. One is financial impact for sure. Two is operational levers. So like, am I reducing friction for my customer, team to team, employee to employee? And then third, and this is a big one, is, am I amplifying human capabilities inside my organization? If I just employ AI and take the cost save, I’ve basically, I’m basically telegraphing to the world that I’ve run out of ideas, right? Like, don’t dig a hole, like fill it with something productive. Right? That could be more AI for like, whatever that might look like. Um, but you want some level of production, um, filling that void too. And I think that’s a that’s a big thing that I think some are still missing or many frankly are still missing, but, um, but yeah, I I I think that that conversation, I’m starting to see kind of bubble up more and more, which is encouraging.
[00:42:43] Greg Kihlström: I love that. Well, so, uh, looking ahead, we’ll, you know, talk talk again in a in a few months here. What do you, uh, you know, what what are we going to be talking about in a in a few months, like what’s what’s on your mind as far as, uh, you know, months ahead?
[00:42:55] Bill Staikos: I’m going to put a um, a prediction out there, but before I get there, I think there’s a couple of things. One is, I think the market is going to, um, tolerate less and less for like your standalone, you know, point solutions. Um, I think that people are going to want to see the capabilities they invest in just do more. Number one. Um, I also think we’re going to start to see, you know, category collapse, right? Old labels are becoming less useful, right? It’s kind of old legacy buyers, legacy capabilities, a lot of AI native players kind of bubbling up. Um, so entire categories are being disrupted. And I think we’re going to see sort of this, you know, the market still kind of splintering or separating into three groups. One, I think you’re going to have sort of your core platforms, distribution and install base. And I think, you know, like the that big CRM name that we were talking about before, certainly in that category. I think second, you’re going to find some point solutions with genuinely differentiated capability. And then third, like everyone in that messy middle, and I think that’s where the danger zone is. Um, and finally, I think, you know, I’m going to put something out there. I think we’re going to have particularly given all the the private capital issues going on in the marketplace right now. We are going to have a major category player disappear. And I think, you know, I won’t again, I won’t mention any names, obviously, there are a couple that I’m I’m looking at pretty closely. Um, but, um, but nonetheless, I think we’re going to see a a major player disappear from the market this year.
[00:46:26] Greg Kihlström: All right. Well, yeah, we’ll uh, we’ll we’ll have to keep uh, keep talking here. So, definitely interesting things ahead. Well, Bill, uh, thanks so much for joining today. Last question for you. I know I asked it to you last time, but, um, what do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
[00:46:43] Bill Staikos: I think it’s just having a system in place, right? And I’m always adding tools and plugging those tools into the system. But, you know, whether it’s thinking about, you know, content generation and putting sort of my voice out there in the marketplace, whether it’s, you know, developing thinking or ideas around, you know, potential clients that, you know, I want to be working with or, you know, clients that want to be working with me, um, you got to have a system in place and that’s really critical. Otherwise, you know, it’s tough to scale otherwise, so.
