Comprehensive study reveals population perspectives on the personal, societal, and economic impacts of AI as the technology becomes a mainstay in daily life
MARCH 31, 2026 – Metrigy has released its inaugural AI Sentiment Index – 1Q 2026, exploring the complex relationship between the public and rapidly evolving AI technologies. Although many users feel AI has already made them “better off,” there is a significant fracture in expectations for the next decade, with nearly 35% of respondents anticipating a period of widespread instability and problems.
Sentiment around AI is defined by a generational divide. The 35-44 age group has emerged as the technology’s “power users”—with 65.5% using these tools daily or weekly. Meanwhile the 65+ demographic remains largely untouched, with more than half reporting that the technology has had no effect on their lives.
Furthermore, almost half of the total population views generative AI as a fundamental shift akin to the invention of the smartphone, yet nearly 48% feel the current pace of development is moving too fast.
“AI is reaching its ‘smartphone moment,’ but the public is still deciding if that’s a promise or a threat,” says Matt Craig, Sr. Director of Product Marketing at Metrigy. “While 35-to-44-year-olds are optimistic and diving in as daily power users, the youngest cohort is cautiously fearing a decade of instability.”
Artificial Intelligence Sentiment Index – 1Q 2026 research study explores how various demographics are integrating AI into their lives and careers. Key coverage areas include:
- Generational Sentiment: Age is highly correlated with adoption, with the youngest cohort showing more long-term pessimism, those in their 30s and 40s extremely optimistic, and older generations expressing the highest levels of skepticism.
- Emotional Complexity: There is no single dominant emotion toward AI; instead, the public is balanced between skepticism, curiosity, and hope, with a direct correlation between higher education levels and positive outlooks. Gender, however, plays a role here: Women index higher on skepticism and fear and men display higher levels of excitement and hope.
- Primary Use Cases: Consumers are primarily utilizing AI for research and personal tasks, though a significant portion now uses it for creative and professional work.
- Workplace Adoption: A significant gap exists in corporate oversight, as more than 60% of employees using AI at work began doing so on their own, with only 28% doing so with employer consent. Meanwhile, job security is a significant point of contention
“AI is changing our lives almost daily, so it’s vital to track how consumer sentiment is changing over time,” says Metrigy CEO Robin Gareiss. “Understanding people’s perspectives on how they use AI, what they fear or like about it, how it affects them emotionally, and what it means for their livelihood are paramount to any business, educational institution, or government agency moving forward–and this research will provide that crucial information.”
The study involves a representative sampling of 1,000 U.S.-based consumers and will be conducted quarterly. Now that the baseline index is set, subsequent quarters will identify areas that are changing and in which direction.
The full Artificial Intelligence Sentiment Index – 1Q 2026 release is available now. To download a copy, please visit www.metrigy.com.
Collect, dissect and act on customer interaction data. Integrate it with different company departments, especially the C-suite. And watch out for privacy issues.
First, organizations should gather raw and unstructured customer interaction data, such as text and audio. This includes transcripts of customer service calls, text messages from chatbot interactions, email, social media direct messages, video and screen-sharing sessions and call recordings. Next, make that data available for analysis, with the goal of understanding what was said, how it was said and why it was said.
This is where conversation analytics, the use of software and machine learning, including natural language processing, comes in. Applying conversation analytics enables companies to derive business value from their conversation data; they analyze it to extract meaning, insights and quantitative metrics.
Gather, analyze and act on customer data
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Companies plan on improving agent desktop interfaces to foster customer experience.
CRM has long been a staple in sales interactions, marketing campaigns, and customer records. But now it is growing in prominence in the contact center as the agents’ primary desktop interface. Agents are distracted when they must toggle between multiple applications that may or may not be integrated. The transformation projects can take many forms, but some CX leaders see one of the top strategies for improving and streamlining the agent desktop is to designate CRM as the interface for contact center employees.
More than 44% of companies cited plans to improve the agent desktop interface as one of their CX transformation projects, according to Metrigy’s Customer Experience Optimization (CXO) 2025-26 global study of 656 companies.
In 2025, 47.9% of companies used the contact center platform as the primary interface for agents, and 43.2% used the CRM platform’s interface. By the end of 2027, those figures drastically shift to 32.4% and 53.4%, respectively, according to the same CXO study.
What’s driving this change in the contact center? In general, companies prefer a CRM desktop for contact center agents in the following circumstances:
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Customer context matters more than call handling
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Revenue and customer retention drive the most value
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AI, analytics, and workflow automation must continue beyond the interaction
Other triggers also resulted in CRM’s growing role, including improved integrations; the use of digital channels from CRM platforms; the need for context for personalized, proactive outreach; and the role of sales in customer service interactions.
Improved Integrations Between System of Record and Interaction Platforms
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Customer interaction analytics, autonomous agents and AI-driven upsells are some of the CX trends that could boost revenue, cut costs and improve customer service.
The pace of change in customer experience has never been faster, as technological innovation and customer expectations create competitive pressure on every business technology leader.
For business leaders who pivot correctly, however, the transformations ahead of them hold significant promise. In Metrigy’s “Customer Experience Optimization 2025-26” global study of 656 companies, several key points emerged to help IT and CX leaders navigate this rapidly changing era.
The report highlighted seven key trends that CX leaders should watch out for in 2026. CX tech buyers should evaluate these data-backed shifts for their strategic planning in the new year.
1. Interaction analytics improve business decisions.
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In the contact center, the trend has long been clear: Cloud is the way forward.
As Metrigy has tracked year-over-year in its annual buyer-side Customer Experience MetriCast study, contact center-as-a-service (CCaaS) is the fastest-growing contact center platform option. Its value lies in enabling companies to improve flexibility and scalability, move to an operational expense, and get access more quickly to enhanced capabilities, deep analytics, and customer insights across digital channels. Our 2025 study, conducted with 1,397 companies globally, model shows nearly 53% have UCaaS in use or planned for implementation by year’s end. An additional 22.4% have UCaaS on their deployment roadmap for as early as 2026 or are evaluating a move to cloud contact center architecture.
But the question for many companies is with which provider to make the move to CCaaS. For that matter, the same can be said of companies already using CCaaS but planning to move to another platform. In the above-cited CX MetriCast study, 44.6% of companies using CCaaS plan or are evaluating whether to swap out their primary provider, as early as this year. After all, this is a crowded market with plentiful options, and cloud offers the agility of migrating when necessary.
There are many considerations that factor into CCaaS selection, but among the most important is customer sentiment and customer business success. For independent guidance on these customer metrics, Metrigy asks IT, CX, and other business leaders participating in the CX MetriCast study to rate their CX vendors and share business metric improvements based on the technology’s use.
MetriStar Results
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AI has now made proactive outreach timelier and more personalized—and consumers welcome the updates, within reason.
Remember the days when a text message ping generated momentary excitement about which friend or family member had something important or funny to say? It was sort of like receiving a card or letter in the mail (I know. I’m aging myself!) – that little zip of surprise and delight.
Things have changed. Now, businesses are reaching out almost as much as a best friend group. We’ve gone from the occasional proactive text (or email or phone call, etc.) from a business, to confirm appointments or announce a sale, to frequent outreach that is more customized—not only that you have a doctor’s appointment, but the purpose and expected timeframe of the appointment; not only to alert about a sale but specifically what about that sale will appeal to you based on buying history.
AI has now made proactive outreach timelier and more personalized—and consumers welcome the updates, within reason, according to Metrigy’s AI for Business Success 2025-26 – Consumer Views research study of 503 consumers.
The evolution from reactive customer service to proactive engagement is a strategic shift for nearly 60% of businesses—and one that requires operational focus as CX teams must anticipate customer needs, deliver value before it’s asked for, and do so in a way that aligns with customer preferences and business goals.
Metrigy’s research documents business and consumer perspectives on proactive outreach and where the gaps lie. Companies are investing significantly in AI and automation for their CX strategies (84% of companies increased spending by an average of 25% this year alone). But it’s crucial to understand consumer preferences. For now, many businesses remain cautious because they don’t have or aren’t appropriately applying the analytics tools to give them granular data about each customer’s expectations. Rather, they may have overall figures showing general customer preferences. Yes, Sue loves a sale on clothing but may not know the specific type of clothing to promote to her. Moving forward, CX leaders must bridge the gaps between business use of AI-powered proactive outreach and consumer preferences, ultimately delivering tangible benefits.
Why Companies Are Leaning Into Proactivity
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IT and CX leaders do their best to establish and execute on a sound CX strategy, but many are missing some key steps that result in consumer dissatisfaction. Through five consecutive studies, Metrigy has been tracking consumer satisfaction of customer experience and the technologies supporting it—identifying gaps and alignments between what businesses are delivering and what consumers want. This series covers:
- Real-world data and analysis on consumer concerns of customer experience, along with mismatched business perspectives
- How consumers feel about chatbots, voicebots, AI agents, AI assistants, and more
- What interaction channels are preferred and most successful
- Guidance from key providers on how to use technology to delight and not dismay consumers
- How conversation analytics and VoC programs are vital to delivering successful customer interactions
CX Expert Insights Series 3 – How to Map CX Delivery to Consumer Expectations
Presented by: Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst, Metrigy
Oana Lungu Polanco, Sr. Director, Product Management, Salesforce
Fabrice Della Mea, VP of Product Management, Contact Center, Dialpad
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Before organizations migrate their existing phone systems into Microsoft Teams, they need to select the right telephony architecture that fits their business needs.
Microsoft Teams Phone is an add-on to Teams that provides a fully capable business phone system with the ability to make internal calls, as well as calls to and from the PSTN, or public switched telephone network. IT leaders looking to squeeze more out of their Teams investments can consider a Teams Phone integration with their existing telephony system.
Let’s learn more about Microsoft Teams Phone and walk through a checklist of deployment tasks and options that must be considered before a migration.
Why integrate Teams with your phone system?
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Differences in agent performance can negatively impact customer ratings, but AI can help identify and guide low performers on how to improve.
A company’s contact center workforce comprises a range of skills and capabilities. Good supervisors strive to create balance across a shift, so they can optimize the customer experience for any interaction with the agents they have on hand.
Doing this well means understanding and accounting for variability in agent performance. That is, supervisors must be able to assess the differences in performance—as well as efficiency—among agents who have similar roles and are working under the same conditions. With this analysis, they can discover which are the top performers and which are the low performers. The next step is using workforce engagement management (WEM) tools to reduce the gap so that all agents perform at an equally high level.
Metrigy explored this challenge in a recent global study on WEM, conducted with 316 companies. In the study, we asked participants to tell us how they’re measuring agent performance, whether they’re analyzing the differences between top and low performers, and, if so, what they’re doing to close the gap. What follows are some of our findings.
Measuring Agent Performance
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A critique of AI as part of the CX journey is that it will eliminate a customer-friendly human touch. But not every customer ask needs human attention.
There’s something to be said about the “human touch” and personalization during conversations with sales or service representatives helping customers make a purchase or solve a problem.
Creating a short-term bond makes customers walk away happier, refer a business to a friend, and even spend more money—all items for the “plus” side of customer relationship management.
But what happens when an AI agent enters the picture? One of the criticisms of the technology is that companies will lose the human touch in their customer interactions if they start using AI agents or even go too far with automation.
If AI is deployed properly, this is a nonissue.
Is Human Touch Needed all the Time?
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