Over the years, “the future is now” is an expression that’s often been applied to one wave of technology innovation after another—but perhaps never as appropriately as in recent years, with the rise of generative AI. Since then, the pace of innovation in AI has been so rapid, the line between what’s here now and what’s coming seems to be constantly shrinking.
It’s exciting to look ahead, knowing that change is happening so fast. So, what might the future bring, thanks to rapid evolution of AI? Here are a few ideas of what enterprises are expecting, based on Metrigy’s recently published AI for Business Success: 2025-26 research study with more than 1,100 companies globally.
Rise of Industry-specific Agents
As companies evolve their strategies around AI and scope out new use cases, we see growing demand for industry-specific AI agents. This makes perfect sense—after all, agents trained on industry-specific data and knowledge should be better able to understand terminology, detect nuances of an engagement, or identify trends that general AI agents might not pick up on, thus delivering more accurate responses, more quickly.
There’s almost no question here: Most companies studied said they see value in having AI agents tuned for their specific industries: 78.8% of all companies believe so, and an even higher percentage, 89.7%, of this study’s success group, as determined by measured improvements in a number of key business metrics.
By vertical, industry-specific agents are of greatest interest to high-tech, followed by financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, and retail.
Extension of Sales Role
We already know that AI is playing a key role in sales initiatives, from identifying trends to predicting revenue growth or shortfall, coaching to improve performance, rooting out promising opportunities, and more. Use of AI is proving highly beneficial; already, three quarters of companies say they see AI helping generate enough sales to cover the costs of the contact center.
From our Customer Experience Optimization: 2024-25 research study with 544 companies globally, we see nearly 40% of companies using AI to help agents and sales teams meet their sales quotas. AI agent assist is particularly helpful in helping agents with upselling and cross-selling based on customer preferences.
Indeed, in the AI for Business Success study, most companies (68.0%) said they believe AI can make anybody a salesperson by effectively guiding them through a conversation.
AI Gains More and More Autonomy
Today, 64.5% of companies place more value today on AI’s ability to respond to functional, task-specific prompts than they do in its ability to adapt and act autonomously, a la agentic AI. But we may see a leveling out fairly quickly, based on expectations that companies have around general availability of AI automation. By the end of 2026, most companies expect the following:
- AI assistants calling a company on behalf of a human
- AI assistants attending meetings and automatically creating follow-up tasks
- AI executing and completing tasks on a human’s task list
- AI assistants writing requests for proposals
- AI assistants negotiating with vendors on behalf of procurement
- AI master agents assigning tasks to sub-agents
Of course, whether adoption aligns with expectation remains to be seen… but the future does seem to be now!
