The Shift to Agentic CX: Why Static Journeys Are Breaking and What Comes Next

The structure of most enterprise customer experiences today is fundamentally flawed.

Teams are siloed.
Journeys are linear.
Execution is fragmented across functions and tools.

In response, organizations layer on point solutions — onboarding flows, product tours, support portals, learning academies — hoping that more surface area will lead to better outcomes.

It rarely does.

The emerging answer isn’t more touchpoints. It’s coordinated intelligence.

We’re now seeing the rise of agentic systems — modular AI agents that operate with autonomy, context awareness, and coordination. These agents can perceive customer behavior, retrieve and apply knowledge, make decisions, trigger tools, and continuously adapt based on outcomes.

This shift has implications far beyond chatbot improvements or customer service automation. It points to a new CX operating model — one where intelligence is distributed across the journey, and action happens dynamically.

From Rigid Workflows to Modular Intelligence

The prevailing approach to customer experience is still anchored in sequential workflows:

• A triggered email campaign for onboarding

• An LMS path for post-sale education

• A CS health score check-in before renewal

Each of these touchpoints may be optimized individually, but they rarely work together. There’s no system-wide memory. No shared decision logic. No ability to replan when the customer deviates from the intended path.

Agentic CX orchestration introduces a different paradigm.

In this model:

• Each stage of the journey is supported by autonomous agents with clear roles (e.g., education, support, adoption)

• These agents can collaborate, share data, and hand off execution as needed

• They operate within defined guardrails but adapt based on customer signals and context

• Human roles shift from manual execution to oversight, escalation, and strategy

It’s not theory. Early enterprise use cases are emerging — particularly where onboarding, education, product engagement, and customer success must work in tandem. But the underlying architecture matters.

Anatomy of an Autonomous CX Stack

To move from one-off automation to orchestrated agentic CX, a new stack is taking shape:

1. Data and Signal Layer

Systems like CRMs, product analytics, customer feedback platforms, and support logs — all feeding real-time inputs into the orchestration layer.

2. Foundation Models + Memory

LLMs combined with vector databases, session memory, and knowledge indexing. This is what allows agents to reason, remember, and contextualize over time .

3. Modular Agent Layer

Agents assigned to discrete CX functions — onboarding, support, learning, product guidance, renewal. Each with task-specific capabilities and access to tools.

4. Orchestration and Collaboration Layer

This is where agents plan, delegate, and sequence work. A planner agent may coordinate multiple task-specific agents based on the goal or customer segment.

5. Human Escalation and Oversight Layer

Where CS, support, and operations teams intervene — either as a fallback mechanism or to add strategic guidance that agents can’t yet handle.

This structure enables not just automation, but adaptive execution across the entire journey.

Why Onboarding, Education and CS/Support must stop operating in isolation

The temptation is to pilot agentic AI in one narrow domain — e.g., deploy a learning agent to recommend help docs. That’s fine as a starting point.

But it’s not where the value is.

The real unlock comes when these components operate in coordination:

• The onboarding agent knows whether the customer engaged with key learning content

• The support agent has access to the customer’s recent usage patterns and known pain points

• The success agent can adjust renewal motion based on adoption and sentiment data, not just a generic timeline

CX orchestration only works if it’s systemic.

Agentic design isn’t about smarter point solutions. It’s about building interoperable systems that operate with a shared memory and shared objective: customer outcomes.

What to Watch

The space is early. Many vendors are now branding traditional workflow automations and scripted decision trees as “agentic.” But few tools on the market today meet the functional definition of true agentic AI — systems that demonstrate planning, reflection, memory, tool use, and collaborative reasoning .

At the same time, we’re clearly inside the hype phase of the adoption curve.

According to Snowflake’s Practical Guide to AI Agents, 37% of all venture capital funding in 2024 went to AI startups, with autonomous agents and digital coworkers representing the fastest-growing segment of deal activity .

The attention, funding, and marketing momentum are significant — but much of the underlying infrastructure remains immature. Most systems still rely heavily on human-built prompts, brittle workflows, or isolated capabilities that aren’t interoperable across the customer journey.

We should expect a correction. Many tools will underdeliver. Some will disappear. But the underlying shift is real — and the long-term value will come not from point solutions, but from integrated, agentic systems that coordinate action across the full customer lifecycle.

Organizations that begin building now — with a clear architectural vision and a systems-level approach — will be better positioned when the technology matures and the market stabilizes.

Why Gainsight’s Acquisition of Skilljar Is a Big Deal for CX

Yesterday, Gainsight announced their acquisition of Skilljar—and this is big news for anyone working in customer education, community, customer success, or the broader customer experience space.

I’ve been operating in and around this space for over seven years now. I’m Sam—founder of AlignedCX, an end-to-end customer experience optimization agency. Before that, I was the Senior Director of Go-to-Market Strategy at Docebo, and I led customer education at Shopify.

Not only have I been a buyer of this kind of technology, I’ve studied the market deeply. And from where I sit, this acquisition matters. A lot.

A Step Closer to the Seamless Customer Experience We’ve All Been Talking About

Even just on the surface level—what the customer actually sees—this acquisition gets us one step closer to the kind of cohesive experience we’ve been dreaming about (and customers have come to expect).

For years, we’ve been talking about the need to unify:

• The customer academy

• The community

• The knowledge base

• The in-product experience

And now we’re finally seeing momentum.

When education, community, knowledge, and support strategies are better integrated, we unlock some pretty compelling use cases:

• CSMs can assign personalized learning journeys

• We gain visibility into how customers are engaging across properties

• CSMs get the data they need to be more strategic and deliver more value

But even that isn’t the full story.

The Real Unlock Is the Data Infrastructure

This is the part most people don’t see—but it’s the piece that makes hyper-personalized customer experiences possible at scale.

When I was at Shopify, I led global customer education across 2M+ merchants. (That little thing on my shelf? It’s from the day we hit that milestone.)

And even back then—before the AI boom—I had a vision for what was possible: Hyper-personalized customer experiences, driven by behavioral data.

We were already tracking so much:

• Platform usage

• Feature adoption

• Where users got stuck

• Content engagement

• Conversion pathways

• Emails opened

• Courses taken

• Community activity

• Support tickets

• CSAT, NPS, login frequency...

The amount of data was insane. But it was fragmented. Siloed across systems and teams.

And even though I knew machine learning or AI could make personalization at scale possible, I couldn’t get it to happen. Not without the right infrastructure.

Fast forward to today, and most companies still haven’t figured this out.

That’s Why This Acquisition Matters

The core issue remains: the systems are still disconnected.

You’ve got your academy over here.
Your community over there.
Your product data in some other stack.

No unified view. No backend infrastructure connecting the dots.

That’s what makes this acquisition such a power move.

Skilljar is one of the best customer education platforms on the market.
Gainsight, meanwhile, has been quietly evolving into a full-blown customer experience optimization engine.

They’re already pulling in:

• Product telemetry

• CS automation

• Community data

• Digital CS motion

Now add Skilljar to the mix and you get incredibly close to a system where product usage, learner behavior, content engagement, and success interactions live together in one place.

But Let’s Be Real...

This kind of integration won’t happen overnight.

Someone commented on Adam Avramescu’s LinkedIn post saying, “Just because Gainsight made this acquisition doesn’t mean the data will suddenly be visible across the stack.” That’s totally right.

The silos still exist.

The real unlock will come when Gainsight connects the data on the backend—when it becomes interoperable and actionable. And yes, that will take time.

But the intention is there.
The foundation is being built.

And once the data becomes visible and actionable? That’s when we officially move from reactive enablement to personalized, intelligent customer experiences at scale.

The Buyer Is Evolving—and the Tech Needs to Evolve With Them

It used to be:

• Customer Education bought the LMS

• Community teams bought their own tool

• CS had its own platform

• Product owned product analytics

Everything—and everyone—was siloed.

But that’s changing.

We’re seeing the rise of the Chief Customer Officer—a cross-functional leader asking bigger questions like:

• How does our product deliver value against jobs to be done?

• What experiences are we layering on top to reinforce and expand that value?

• How do we connect education, marketing, CS, and product across the customer journey?

• How do we align around shared outcomes and OKRs?

This Is Bigger Than Customer Education Maturing

If we’re serious about delivering proactive, value-led, digital-first experiences across the post-sale journey, then this acquisition puts Gainsight and Skilljar in a completely different category.

This isn’t about stitching together point solutions.
It’s about building an integrated foundation for orchestrated, connected, and data-informed experiences.

This is Customer Experience becoming a strategic function—
A lever for growth.

We’re seeing:

• Team structures evolve under the Chief Customer Officer

• New frameworks like service design gaining traction

• And now? The tech finally catching up

We’re on the brink of something big. And this acquisition is a signal of where the industry is heading next.