Zendesk's 2026 report names a gap in explaining AI decisions

The conversation

Zendesk publishes an annual CX Trends report built from its own survey and platform data. As retrieved on 16 September 2026, the current edition is CX Trends 2026, described on its own landing page as 'our flagship 30-page report, covering the 5 trends shaping the future of CX.' The five named trends are memory-rich personalization, instant resolution expectations, multimodal support, promptable analytics, and AI transparency, each framed around contextual intelligence in customer service.

What the documents show

Zendesk's own landing page states, among other figures, that '83% of CX leaders say that memory-rich AI agents are the key to truly personalized customer journeys,' that '74% of consumers now expect customer service to be available 24/7' because AI has become standard, and that '95% of consumers expect an explanation from AI-made decisions.' A companion reports page confirms the report is also published in industry- and business-size-specific versions. None of the publicly visible pages disclose a respondent count, country breakdown, or survey date; that detail sits inside the full report, which is offered only as a gated download this review did not submit a form to obtain.

The system boundary

One trend names a boundary directly: Zendesk states '80% of CX leaders agree transparency will be non-negotiable for customer-facing AI,' but 'only 37% currently offer any reasoning behind AI's decisions.' That gap, between leaders' stated intent to explain automated decisions and what their organizations currently do, is the clearest documented line in this material between an aspiration for human-legible AI and today's practice.

Where it fails

The landing page blends the opinions of two different groups — 'CX leaders' and 'consumers' — without stating each group's size or how they were sampled, so the headline percentages cannot be checked against a denominator. It also does not distinguish which figures come from a survey and which, if any, come from Zendesk's own platform usage data.

• How many CX leaders and how many consumers were surveyed, and in which countries?
• Which reported figures are survey responses and which are drawn from Zendesk's own product usage data?
• What specific reasoning do the 37% of transparent organizations actually show customers?

This is Zendesk's own promotional account of its research, useful for naming the questions it says matter to buyers, but the public pages alone do not support treating any single percentage as a rigorously sourced statistic.