As leadership teams wrap up annual planning and look ahead to 2026, this provides a rare moment in the corporate calendar for those occupying the heady heights of the C-Suite to step back and reassess which trends will actually matter as the next year unfolds.
Dimitri Masin, Co-Founder and CEO of Gradient Labs — an AI-native fintech working with leading financial institutions across Europe and recently launched in the U.S. — believes the next phase of customer experience will look fundamentally different. Based on what his team is seeing in live, regulated deployments, Masin has told Digital Journal about three customer experience shifts that will define CX in 2026.
Dmitri Masin previously served as Sales Finance Analyst at Google and VP Data Science, Financial Crime and Fraud at Monzo (UK’s Venmo Bank), joining as one of the early employees and scaling a 120+ person team. With a background in financial engineering and AI, he specialises in risk-compliant automation for regulated industries. With two partners, he established Gradient Labs, the conversational AI platform purpose-built for financial services.
This year, the startup secured a $13 million investment in just one week, and the platform can now reach over 32 million end-users.
1. Voice AI becomes trusted and safe
According to Masin: “Voice will shift from being the most unpredictable customer-support channel to the most trusted one. Financial institutions will begin adopting voice AI that can reason through complex procedures, follow multi-step compliance workflows, and guarantee audit-ready accuracy in real time.”
This means, as AI transitions: “Voice is becoming a core part of the AI-powered operating system for financial firms – resolving issues end-to-end, not just answering calls. The global voice banking market is projected to grow to nearly $18 billion by 2032, so this is the future the industry is heading.”
2. Outbound predictive communication
Masin also sees predictive analytics increasing in scope: “The next evolution of customer service is outbound predictive communication – moving from reactive responses to proactive engagement. AI agents will anticipate customer needs before they surface, reaching out with solutions, not apologies. Imagine a system that alerts a customer before a payment fails, or offers guidance before a compliance issue even occurs.”
As to the significance? “This shift from reactive to predictive service will redefine what trust and satisfaction mean in financial experiences.”
3. The shift to 360° autonomous customer experience
Attracting and keeping customers remains essential to any business seeking to grow, and here autonomous AI becomes a necessary tool: “We’re moving beyond hyper-personalisation toward truly agentic AI – systems that don’t just tailor experiences, but act on behalf of customers to resolve their needs autonomously. Gartner predicts that by 2029, agentic AI will autonomously resolve 80% of common customer service issues without human intervention, leading to a 30% reduction in operational costs, but the market demonstrates it can happen sooner.”
As to what this means in practice, Masin explains: “AI systems will not just personalise customer experiences but autonomously act on behalf of users across inbound requests, proactive outreach, and back office operations – everything executing payments, resolving disputes, and managing compliance checks in real time. Intelligent agents manage entire customer journeys and compliance workflows end-to-end. The shift from “hyper-personalised” to “hands-on, proactive AI” will redefine what trust and efficiency mean in customer operations.”
