Skip to main content

      Total Experience: Redefining excellence in the age of agentic AI

      Customer expectations are accelerating faster than companies can adapt. They now demand seamless, anticipatory, and personalized interactions across every channel and every moment of engagement.

      This year’s Global Customer Experience Excellence (CEE) research highlights how leading organizations are responding. Drawing on a global sample of over 80,000 consumers, the findings show that organizations are moving beyond reactive service to orchestrate proactive, predictive experience powered by agentic AI.

      At the core of this shift is Total Experience, aligning customer, employee, partner, and ecosystem interaction around outcomes that build loyalty, advocacy, and growth.

      Organizations in the Middle East are operating in a rapidly digitizing, experience-driven economy where customer loyalty is increasingly shaped by speed, personalization, and trust. As digital channels and AI capabilities advance across the region, customer experience has become a strategic growth lever rather than a support function. In this context, Agentic AI is emerging as a key enabler of next-generation customer experience and Total Experience, helping organizations shift from reactive service models to proactive, intelligent engagement at scale.

      Total Experience (TX) integrates customer, employee, partner, and ecosystem interactions into a unified model of engagement, aligning technology, data, processes, and people around shared outcomes of trust, efficiency, and long-term value creation. Across the Middle East, national digital strategies, cloud investments, and growing emphasis on data sovereignty are shaping how organizations approach AI adoption, laying a strong foundation for responsible, scalable deployment of advanced AI capabilities.

      Key insights from this year’s report

      Customer experience is undergoing a profound transformation

      Across the Middle East, Agentic AI has rapidly evolved from experimental concept to strategic priority. Unlike traditional generative AI tools that respond reactively, agentic systems can plan, reason, and execute multi-step actions autonomously. As governments and enterprises accelerate digital transformation under national agendas such as Saudi Vision 2030 and the UAE’s AI ambitions, customer experience is increasingly being redefined through systems that sense intent, act in real time, and continuously learn from outcomes.

      Total Experience is the new standard

      Leading organizations across the region are recognizing that sustainable differentiation requires unifying customer, employee, partner, and ecosystem interactions into one adaptive engagement model. High digital adoption rates, rising service expectations, and strong government investment in digital infrastructure are accelerating this shift. In service-centric sectors such as financial services, aviation, hospitality, retail, energy, and government, Total Experience provides a framework for integrating AI, data, and operations to deliver seamless, contextual journeys across touchpoints.

      Excellence drives growth and resilience

      AI adoption across the Middle East has surged, with approximately 60 percent of organizations reporting fast or very fast AI adoption by late 2024, although fewer than a third have scaled these initiatives enterprise-wide. This highlights a critical regional inflection point: while ambition is high, governance maturity, infrastructure readiness, and talent capabilities remain uneven. Organizations that embed strong AI governance, prioritize data sovereignty, invest in local talent, and adopt a phased, value-led approach are better positioned to unlock competitive advantage. Those that move without sufficient controls risk operational, regulatory, and reputational exposure.


      Customer experience around the globe

      The report highlights both global themes and local nuances, showing how cultural expectations and market dynamics are shaping experience delivery.

      Explore the findings driving customer experience at a local level. Select the country or territory below for more information.

       

      Customer experience in the Middle East

      The Middle East presents a distinctive landscape for customer experience transformation. Rapid digital infrastructure investment, supportive regulatory environments, and national AI strategies have positioned the UAE and Saudi Arabia at the forefront of advanced AI adoption. In the UAE, adoption of agentic AI is already ahead of many global markets, particularly in cybersecurity and operational automation, while in Saudi Arabia AI deployment is closely aligned with Vision 2030 objectives around productivity, public sector modernization, and economic diversification.

      Service-intensive industries across the Gulf — including hospitality, aviation, retail, and financial services — are especially well suited to agentic systems due to high transaction volumes, multilingual customer bases, and complex real-time journeys. Agentic AI enables contextual, hyper-personalized interactions by orchestrating workflows across channels, anticipating customer needs, and reducing friction. At the same time, it enhances employee experience by providing real-time guidance and automating repetitive tasks, allowing human talent to focus on judgment-driven, high-value activities.

      However, successful adoption requires disciplined governance. Agentic systems demand stronger oversight frameworks, secure data architectures, clear permission controls, and transparent audit mechanisms — particularly in a region placing increasing emphasis on data localization and digital trust. Infrastructure gaps, legacy systems, and uneven cloud maturity can also slow deployment if not addressed strategically.

      Looking ahead, the Middle East has the opportunity not only to adopt agentic AI but to define responsible best practices globally. With strong national strategies, growing AI ecosystems, and substantial investment in cloud and data capabilities, the region can transform customer experience from transactional to predictive and relational — provided organizations balance innovation with trust, transparency, and measurable value creation.


      Sector performance highlighted

      Customer experience and performance often varies by sector. This year’s results highlight both progress and ongoing challenges:

      real_estate_agent

      Retail

      outperforms the global average by 2.4%, showing that operational efficiency and ease directly translate into stronger advocacy.

      account_balance

      Banking

      improved in empathy (+1.4%) and expectations (+1.3%), demonstrating progress in building emotional trust with customers.

      bolt

      Utilities

      rose by 2.2%, driven by gains in integrity and empathy, though gaps in time and effort remain. 


      health_and_safety

      Healthcare

      stands out with empathy (+3.4%) and resolution (+1.1%), reinforcing its position as a benchmark for trust-based service.

      assured_workload

      Public sector

      continues to lag, scoring 9.4% below the global average, underlining the urgent need to reimagine personalization at scale.

      Explore detailed sector insights in the full report. Discover the full story behind these insights and explore what it takes to deliver Total Experience at scale.

      Global Customer Experience Excellence (CEE) 2025-2026

      A benchmark study now in its 16th year, CEE captures perspectives from over 80,000 consumers across 16 markets worldwide.


      Sector insights

      Driving innovation in Telecommunications

      Moving beyond bots to agentic AI

      From transaction to relationship

      Modernization, the new priority

      Technology, inequality, and the human touch

      From rooms to experiences — building ecosystems of personalized loyalty

      Raising the bar for the next generation of customer experience

      Our people