Every conversation with a customer contains valuable information about what they need, want and experience. A question about a late delivery can reveal friction in a journey. A request to cancel can signal a retention risk. A conversation with an agent can expose a product issue, an unmet need or an opportunity to improve the next experience.

For years, conversational analytics has helped organizations uncover those signals. But as AI advances, simply understanding what happened in a conversation is no longer enough. The bigger opportunity is to connect that intelligence with broader customer context — and use it to determine what should happen next.

That shift is increasingly important in the agentic era. And we believe it’s reflected in the new IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Conversational Intelligence and Analytics Software 2026 Vendor Assessment, which names Genesys a Leader for the second time.1

IDC MarketScape highlights “platform breadth and unification” and “pace of innovation” as Genesys strengths. But we believe the report also tells a broader story about how conversational intelligence and analytics (CI&A) is evolving — and what organizations should expect from it.

From understanding conversations to acting on intelligence

The first generation of conversational analytics largely focused on making interactions easier to understand at scale: transcribing conversations, identifying topics, detecting sentiment, summarizing interactions and surfacing trends.

Those capabilities remain valuable. But generative AI has changed the baseline.

Instead of primarily looking backward to explain an interaction, conversational intelligence can increasingly contribute to what happens during an experience and what happens next. Imagine a customer contacting a company about a billing problem. The conversation itself contains useful information, but it’s only one part of the picture. The organization might also know that the customer encountered a payment failure earlier that day, recently opened another support case and has a long history with the brand.

When those signals remain disconnected, each interaction risks becoming another isolated event. When they become part of shared context, they can help AI and employees make better decisions.

That’s the difference between collecting more intelligence and putting intelligence to work.

Context turns individual interactions into connected experiences

This is where conversational intelligence intersects with a much larger CX challenge. Organizations already hold enormous amounts of customer context across conversations, CRM systems, journey data, billing platforms and other enterprise applications. The problem is often not a lack of data. It’s that the pieces remain fragmented across systems.

As Tony Bates, Chairman and CEO of Genesys, and Peter Graf, SVP of Strategy, argue in “Winning in the Agentic Era,” every system can hold a fragment of customer context without any one of them owning the outcome. Their paper describes context as the asset that turns one-off experiences into connected experiences: Each interaction adds contextual intelligence that can inform the next decision rather than disappearing when the interaction ends.

Conversational intelligence has an important role in that cycle because conversations contain something many traditional data sources struggle to capture: intent.

What is the customer actually trying to accomplish? Why are they contacting the organization now? What is frustrating them? What changed? What outcome are they looking for?

Combine that intelligence with what the organization already knows, and analytics becomes more than a reporting layer. It becomes an input into orchestration.

The organization can understand intent, activate relevant context, determine the next best action and coordinate that action across AI, systems and people. And the resulting interaction creates new context that can improve the experience that follows. The conversation becomes part of a continuous learning loop, building contextual intelligence over time that allows for better, more effective and more personalized experiences.

Why a unified platform matters

Of course, turning that idea into an operating model is difficult when analytics, journey management, AI and workforce tools operate independently.

That makes platform unification increasingly consequential.

The IDC MarketScape report noted “platform breadth and unification” as a strength for Genesys, noting, “This continues to be a strength as Genesys Cloud CX combines conversational analytics, customer journey analytics, AI agent assistance, and workforce engagement management in a single platform, backed by substantial R&D investment and a weekly continuous-deployment cadence. Customers report selecting Genesys specifically for this platform unification aspect.” 

The practical value isn’t simply having more capabilities in one place. It’s being able to connect them so conversational intelligence can move beyond insight and into operational workflows. A signal identified in a conversation can inform journey understanding, guide the next decision, support an employee or trigger an appropriate action. The outcome then becomes new context for what happens next, creating a continuous learning loop.

AI raises the importance of a partnership, too

As AI capabilities advance rapidly — and some become more widely available —  the ability to operationalize the technology and realize value becomes increasingly important.

Organizations aren’t simply selecting analytics software anymore. They’re making decisions about how AI will interact with their customers and employees, access enterprise data, operate across systems and ultimately take action.

The questions therefore get bigger. Is the data ready? Can AI operate across the required systems? How will privacy, security and governance be maintained? How will humans and AI work together? And can the organization keep adapting as the technology evolves?

The right technology matters. So does having a partner that can help organizations navigate those questions and turn rapidly evolving capabilities into measurable value.

Put every conversation to work

The new IDC MarketScape CI&A recognition marks the second time Genesys has been positioned as a Leader in its worldwide CI&A assessment. The 2026 report specifically recognizes the breadth and unification of the Genesys platform and its pace of innovation as strengths.1

And this is part of a consistent pattern of recognition. Over the past three years, Genesys has been named a worldwide Leader in six AI IDC MarketScape evaluations spanning conversational intelligence and analytics and conversational AI. Genesys is the only vendor named a Leader in those six.2

Taken together, we believe these IDC MarketScape recognitions reflect the breadth of Genesys Cloud AI — from understanding customer interactions and uncovering insights to applying AI across experiences, decisions and actions. As AI becomes more agentic, the value of a conversation won’t end when the interaction does. Each interaction can contribute context to the next decision, the next action and the next experience.

The organizations that make that connection can move beyond asking, “What did our customers tell us?” They can start answering the more consequential question:

What should we do about it?

 

Download the IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Conversational Intelligence and Analytics Software 2026 Vendor Assessment excerpt. 

 

1IDC, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Conversational Intelligence and Analytics Software 2026 Vendor Assessment, Doc #US54117626, September 2026

2IDC, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General Purpose Conversational AI Software 2023 Vendor Assessment, Doc #US49988023, November 2023

IDC, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Front-Office Conversational AI Software 2024 Vendor Assessment, Doc #US51955724, March 2024 

IDC, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Conversational Intelligence and Analytics 2024 Vendor Assessment, Doc #US52047824, December 2024 

IDC, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide General-Purpose Conversational AI Platforms 2025 Vendor Assessment, Doc #US52972625, September 2025 

IDC, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Conversational AI Platforms for Front-Office Use Cases 2025-2026 Vendor Assessment, Doc #US53866226, December 2025 

IDC, IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Conversational Intelligence and Analytics Software 2026 Vendor Assessment, Doc #US54117626, September 2026