BLOG | Why AI4CX is the metric that matters most right now

At DTW Ignite 2026 in Copenhagen, Michel van Buitenen, Managing Vice President at Gartner, sat down with Willie Stegmann, EVP, Composable IT and Ecosystems at TM Forum, for a conversation about where the industry stands, what's holding it back, and why AI for customer experience (AI4CX) has moved to the very top of the CIO agenda.

It was also a conversation that marked a meaningful moment: Gartner's recent arrival as a TM Forum member. As Michel put it, "TM Forum is here to drive the industry forward and Gartner is here to support the leaders execute on that." Two organizations that have been orbiting each other for years have now formally joined forces — and the timing couldn't be more deliberate.

The race is already on

The backdrop to everything discussed is TM Forum's Race to 2030: a three-year journey to build the AI-native telco. Both TM Forum and Gartner have recently published research showing big momentum around AI, but also a sobering conclusion: only 5% of CSPs have autonomous agents in production today. That number will rise quickly as the industry moves from experimentation to scaling.

But scaling AI isn't just a technology problem. As Michel warned, there's a real risk that different departments recreate old silos by building agents everywhere. Instead, that needs to be an orchestrated effort, with CIOs setting the right priorities and ensuring business and IT alignment on where to start and how to scale.

The urgency is real. This was Michel's third DTW Ignite in his current role, and he noted a marked shift in the room from the “Code Red” of three years ago to something that looks a lot more like optimism. "Now we are talking about the Race to 2030 and the opportunity," he said — and rightly so, because building the agentic telco presents genuine opportunities to improve on delivering what customers actually need.

Customer experience is still top priority

The CIO Circle at DTW Ignite — a closed session with 17 CIOs from around the world — immediately identified AI for customer experience remaining as a top of mind topic for most of the leaders in the room.

It's easy to see why. The challenge is that knowing CX matters isn't the same as knowing how to move the needle on it.

Standard KPIs like NPS and CSAT are good in their own right — but they're fairly generic. If you want to know what you're doing better than your competition, and where you're falling behind, you need to go much deeper.

That's exactly what Gartner has been building. For more than 10 years, Gartner has been assessing telcos globally on customer experience through a mystery shopper approach. Now, they're bringing that intelligence, including over 200,000 data points, into TM Forum as part of this collaboration. Working with CSPs, Gartner developed a benchmark that shows in depth how operators compare not just with their telco peers, but with digital natives — companies front-running on customer experience from other industries like retail or banking.

That depth of insight is exactly what the AI4CX workstream, now part of TM Forum's Composable IT and Ecosystems mission, is designed to act on.

AI4CX: what it actually means

The AI4CX workstream is built to take everything the industry has learned over the last eight or so years in helping drive customer experience improvement — and carry it forward into the age of AI. That means making sure the way CSPs test, measure progress, and advance CX is ready for an agentic world, where agents may increasingly be both the providers and consumers of customer experience.

This is not a distant scenario. As Willie put it directly, there is “no doubt" that customers will interact differently with CSPs going forward, and the industry needs to move on that journey very quickly. Taking the next step in CX benchmarking to incorporate the agentic AI opportunity is where TM Forum and Gartner see the biggest openings for improvement. AI4CX is the joint work that will get them there.

Legacy is the drag that can't be ignored

None of this is easy when the foundations are weak. Legacy is the single biggest constraint facing CIOs today because as you scale AI on brittle foundations, problems are exposed. Dealing with that legacy drag while exploiting the AI opportunity is the critical challenge. At the same time, as Michel noted, AI gives CIOs the tools and the productivity improvements to modernize their IT estate, which means the constraint and the solution are arriving at the same moment. The question is whether leaders move fast enough to take advantage.

What comes next

Michel looks back at the CIO Circle as a strong first step, and the plan is to continue building that community with virtual sessions at The Gartner Symposium in Barcelona in November.

With Gartner now inside the TM Forum community, CIOs who are members of TM Forum will increasingly also benefit from Gartner's research and tools, while the combination of both organizations' assets will allow the industry to accelerate to the future, faster. The Race to 2030 is on. The question now is who's running.

Watch the full conversation. Why AI4CX is the metric that matters most right now