Plus: How Genesys ranked across five critical CX Use Cases 

For the 12th consecutive year, Gartner has named Genesys a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS). Here’s what changed in the market this year — and why Genesys is again a Leader. 

When we look back at 2018, when Genesys was first recognized as a Leader, the contact center landscape looked very different — the focus was on omnichannel and cloud migration. Then came digital-first engagement and basic automation. AI entered the picture with forecasting and better routing. And then conversational AI came along to make automated experiences feel more human. The experience economy has evolved over the past twelve years. So has the technology that drives it.  

Fast forward to today, that evolution is taking a giant leap forward. Agentic AI has enabled a new model for the experience economy, where autonomous AI agents orchestrate the entire customer journey from hello to resolution. They serve customers directly, support the CX workforce in real time, initiate and complete workflows, and gather new intelligence for the enterprise. 

Throughout the past 12 years, through wave after wave of innovation, Genesys has been named a Leader again. That’s one thing that hasn’t changed. 

Where Genesys is recognized this year – and why 

This year, Gartner evaluated ten vendors for the Magic Quadrant. Genesys was named a Leader and is positioned highest in Ability to Execute. 

Alongside the Magic Quadrant, Gartner also published the companion 2026 Critical Capabilities for Contact Center as a Service (CCaaS) report, which evaluates CCaaS platforms against five Use Cases. Only Genesys ranked as one of the two highest-scoring vendors across all five Use Cases this year. It also received the highest score in two: Global Contact Center and Customer Engagement Center.

We believe that when read together, these reports send a clear message – Genesys is a long-term strategic bet.

Looking beyond the current state of the market 

Each year, these two reports from Gartner offer crucial analysis of the current state of the market for CCaaS. This year, they do more. With the changes to how Gartner is evaluating CCaaS providers, they’re pointing to where the market is headed next.

Gartner notes that the CCaaS market is entering a new phase of maturity, with more than half of all agent licenses expected to be cloud-based by the end of 2026. At the same time, buyers face a more complicated path to value: generative and agentic AI deployments have surged, but many organizations report poor experiences and unclear ROI. Meanwhile, data and cloud sovereignty concerns, along with a broadening field of vendors with varied AI roadmaps and levels of implementation support, are reshaping solution evaluation criteria and extending vendor selection cycles.

The trend that Gartner is pointing to becomes even clearer when you consider the Magic Quadrant and Critical Capabilities reports alongside the related Gartner research on CRM customer engagement and conversational AI platforms over the past year. There’s a consistent pattern across the reports. The big shift is that AI is no longer scored as part of the feature set. It’s now the lens through which the platforms are evaluated.

But that’s only the beginning of what we believe Gartner is pointing at. Here are the experience economy trends we see reflected in the Gartner  shifting approach to evaluating CCaaS platforms. 

Agentic AI is now a baseline requirement 

Just one year ago, asking a vendor if they had incorporated agentic AI into their platform as more than a bolt-on was a useful differentiating question. Today, agentic AI that can perceive, reason, act and optimize is now a baseline requirement for any platform to be taken seriously in this category. To stand out, the AI must be woven into the platform at every level to mine data, connect systems and people, and drive workflow automation across the entire customer journey. 

Orchestration and workflow automation are the new differentiators 

As vendors have incorporated more agentic AI capabilities into their platforms, the line of differentiation has moved — and it’s much higher. It doesn’t matter how many AI capabilities a platform has if they still operate as disconnected point solutions. In the platforms that stand out today, native AI capabilities work together to orchestrate customer and employee experiences and generate real-time analytics across core business systems. That’s more than an expanded AI feature list. It’s the basis of a new operating model for the experience economy. Going forward, the platforms that orchestrate people, AI, data, and other tools as a single cohesive ecosystem for end-to-end customer experience are the sure bets.

Intelligence integration is no longer optional 

The more orchestration and workflow automation define how the experience economy operates, the more everything depends on the intelligence behind them. And that intelligence depends on data that’s connected and analyzed in real time. 

But in most customer experience operations, data is a lot like the precious metals that sit in isolated pockets underground. So much of it is scattered across systems, unmined and unused. Connecting those data systems and repositories in a meaningful way has always been difficult. Agentic AI ecosystems are rapidly changing that reality. They’re integrating the customer experience operation with the broader data and BI fabric of the enterprise. That creates a multi-directional flow of intelligence, fueling better orchestration and surfacing new insight for the business. This is why Contextual Intelligence matters. 

A new operating model for the experience economy 

We believe when taken together, these trends that we see reflected in the Gartner reports point to a new operating model for the experience economy. This new model doesn’t just incorporate more AI capabilities. It actively orchestrates better end-to-end journeys for customers and employees. At the same time, it generates new intelligence and better business outcomes for the enterprise. In this model, an agentic orchestration platform is not merely infrastructure and a toolset. It’s an active partner in your customer experience operation. 

Not just talk. Infrastructure for the agentic era. 

For 12 consecutive years, Genesys has been recognized as a Leader. Across those 12 years, the experience economy has transformed — and so has the technology powering it. Through every shift, Genesys has continued to evolve, invest and innovate.

But this year feels different.

Genesys has been talking about orchestration for a number of years — not as a trend to follow, but as a fundamental shift in how experiences should work. We’ve also been building the infrastructure that makes agentic orchestration a reality. This year, that new reality is reflected in the Gartner reports. For us, that confirms that we’ve been building in the right direction all along — skating to where the puck is headed, not where it is. And now that the experience economy is ready for a new operating model, we’ve got the platform to power it.

Gartner, Magic Quadrant for Contact Center as a Service, 19 October 2026, Drew Kraus Et Al.

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