The Next Wave: CX, AI, and Personalisation Transforming 2026 Marketing

The APAC region is seeing a rapidly shifting marketing landscape, where evolution in CX, personalisation and AI is opening up both challenges and opportunities for marketers. We speak to seven exceptional B2B and B2C marketing leaders to uncover ‘what’s next’ for the year ahead.

Geoff Main, Managing Director & Founder,
Passionberry Marketing

We will see ‘Human through AI’ as a service becoming the standard. Top CX teams will route high-emotion moments to humans, but move everything else to well-trained agents. This isn’t speed alone; it’s about appropriate escalation. Meanwhile expect to see AI agents move from ‘novelty’ to P&L. Agent projects require a business case: target minutes saved, error rates reduced, revenue created. 

I would also expect to see ‘unbundled journeys rebundle around context’. This means customers will move between chat, SMS, email and in-person seamlessly. Systems that can’t carry context forward create churn. Context-carry will become a board metric.

Iris Chan, Marketing and Growth Leader at MyPass Global

Expect to see more democratisation of agentic AI. The creation of custom AI agents will no longer be in the realm of software engineers and developers. With the success of no-code platforms, non-technical people can design, fully customise and create an AI agent. 

The proliferation of AI agents will lead to stronger yearning for authentic, humanised experiences. While people will love the convenience and speed of AI-powered transactional scenarios, they will crave for the presence of real humans and emotional connection in high-value, high-stakes exchanges. Human beings are innately gregarious so you can only defy human nature for so long. Covid has provided a strong proof point of this.

Meanwhile, the buying journey will continue to be consumerised. It is no longer enough to personalise buying experiences, the trend will be hyper-individualisation – being able to tailor experiences based on individual preferences and historical behaviours or patterns. 

Pip Stocks, Director, Pip Stocks Consulting 

CX has matured beyond convenience. What people want now is to feel understood. Emotion, not efficiency, is what keeps customers close. Brands that win will design for reassurance, excitement, trust and joy at every interaction blending empathy with tech to create experiences that feel alive and uniquely human.

The next era of CX will move from journey mapping to emotional mapping designing experiences that feel human, not just frictionless. 

At the same time, AI will no longer be the shiny toy; it’s the quiet force behind smarter, faster, more customer-led decisions. It’s what allows founders to move from overwhelm to focus on turning data into insight, chaos into clarity. In this next phase, AI becomes an enabler of creativity and compassion: a tool that helps us see customers more clearly, not just scale faster.

Dr Anna Harrison, Founder, RAMMP 

AI is not a tool, it’s a confidant – and we will see this shift in perception in the year ahead. Most people still treat AI like a productivity hack. But recent HBR research shows the most common uses of GenAI in 2025 were therapy, life planning, and personal growth.

We’re not just using AI. We’re confiding in it.

This means when ChatGPT recommends a product, it doesn’t feel like a search result.
It feels like advice from someone who knows you and has your best interests at heart. And with the updates in ChatGPT (InstantBuy), this is the space to watch in 2026 *I have a Forbes article in flight on this topic should be published next month

Marketers must understand: AI isn’t a channel. It’s a relationship. And it’s intimate.

Fabrizia Roberto, Fractional CMO & Founder of The Silva Spoon

Heading into 2026, the trends are clear: experience will lead, technology will support (not replace) human creativity, and fractional leadership will become a strategic norm.

People don’t need more content. I see that the brands that cut through are the ones that manage to create emotional, memorable touchpoints.

Brands that prioritise customer experience are seeing stronger engagement and trust than those focused on volume. Physical spaces, digital rituals, and service-led branding are all part of that.

AI is firmly embedded in the marketing stack now, but it’s no longer a differentiator. The real edge comes from how well it’s applied. A clear focus on understanding your customer and crafting your unique strategy to connect with them, not just automation, will drive results.

Satya Upadhyaya, Marketing Technology Leader at ANZ

Personalisation in 2026 isn’t a token merge variable anymore. The brand that can treat each customer interaction as a unique moment of connection wins. And the brand that treats consent, trust and value exchange as secondary loses. Hyper-personalisation powered by AI: The move from “segment of one” to “moment of one” — dynamic content, real-time context, micro-communities, linguistic/cultural/behavioural nuance. This will be powered by event-streaming and live decisioning – Data collected, processed, fed into the decision engine, triggers action immediately. The “journey” becomes fractal and adaptive.

Responsible personalisation will be the new trust currency. Brands that build transparent data practices, consent frameworks, zero-trust data design, minimise risk and earn deeper engagement. Creative & AI convergence: Generative AI will help scale creative personalisation, but marketers must guard against generic content. Authenticity, brand voice and context matter more than ever.

AI will not replace marketing; it will redefine it as a living, learning system powered by collaboration between human creativity and machine cognition. It will play a supporting role to central intelligence. It will design segments, pick channels, adjust spend, optimise creative, predict behaviour, and orchestrate experiences — all within the guardrails we set.

Stuart Matthewman, B2B Marketing leader & CMO at Monash IVF Group 

Most “CX issues” I hear about aren’t journey problems, they’re basic failures to deliver. Customers are chasing clarity, speed and follow-through. In 2026, the companies that win won’t have the nicest journey maps; they’ll be the ones who answer quickly, solve problems the first time, and stop hiding operational issues behind warm language. Fix the basics and CX improves.

When it comes to AI, boards won’t care about pilots, demos or clever use cases anymore. They’ll want to know what changed:

Did it speed something up?

Did it reduce waste?

Did it create revenue?

If the answer isn’t clear within 3-6 months, budgets will dry up. Not because AI failed, but because the business finally expects it to act like real technology, not a promise.

Geoff Main has over 20 years of marketing and commercial experience managing creative agencies, leading multiple global projects and working with large scale budgets to deliver client results. Geoff’s experience and consulting work engages him with businesses across FMCG, Manufacturing, Services, Startups, Marketplaces, Sport and Tourism. Geoff has created and restructured brands by integrating existing business models and creating NPD and large scale marketing campaigns. Geoff’s creative communication method allows brands to create authentic connections and share their story across a range of platforms.

Dr. Anna Harrison is Australia’s foremost consumer interaction specialist and ‘Brand Relationships Therapist’. She is a qualified Architect and digital technologist who has spent a lifetime navigating how humans respond to the dynamics surrounding them. An Author, Speaker and Academic, Dr Anna pioneered the evidence-based and patented ADORE Process TM .

Stuart Matthewman, B2B Marketing Leader & CMO, has extensive experience leading global teams across ASX-listed companies in technology, telecommunications, government, non-profit and transport/logistics. He has launched disruptive product offerings, driven transformational change and even established his own charity—bringing a holistic, whole-of-business perspective shaped by deep experience across the full value chain.

Stuart is known for his entrepreneurial and integrated approach to marketing and business, most recently demonstrated in his role as CMO at IR, where he has driven substantial revenue growth and rebuilt the marketing function from the ground up.

Pip Stocks is a seasoned entrepreneur, brand strategist and board director known for her relentless curiosity and ability to turn customer insight into business growth.

With a background in marketing and psychology from Monash University and a decade in London refining her brand and consumer expertise, Pip built and scaled BrandHook into a three-city consultancy helping Australia’s biggest brands rediscover their customers and reignite growth. She then moved into the tech and startup world as founder of Hearsay, an AI platform designed to capture and operationalise customer conversations, an experience that fuelled her transition from consultancy to product innovation and deepened her understanding of how technology can amplify human connection.

Today, Pip leads as both founder and CEO, building The Startup Muse, an AI-powered platform that bridges the gap between female founder ideas and real-life businesses. The Startup Muse empowers the next generation of women to move from concept to company by combining AI mentorship, practical education and community support. Her sweet spots lie in brand strategy creation and revitalisation, CX operationalisation and transforming founder-led ideas into scalable, insight-driven brands. A passionate advocate for gender equity, neurodiversity and innovation, Pip mentors first-time entrepreneurs especially women in tech and AI helping them launch with clarity, confidence, and courage.

Fabrizia Roberto, Fractional CMO & Founder of The Silva Spoon, brings over 15 years of experience leading marketing, communications and innovation across agency, media, insurance and insurtech. She has built teams, raised capital, launched products and delivered measurable commercial results—most notably leading a 30+ marketing team at a major insurer before co-founding and scaling an insurtech startup.

Iris Chan is an AI-fluent marketing and revenue enablement leader with over 20 years’ experience in B2B technology marketing, including 12 years in SaaS. She has driven demand generation, revenue growth and brand recognition in Asia Pacific across a spectrum of organisations, from iconic technology brands like IBM, Cisco and Autodesk, high-growth scale-ups to early-stage startups. Most recently, Iris was the Director of Marketing at MyPass, an Australian workforce compliance software startup.

Her past leadership roles include: Head of Demand Generation, APAC at Autodesk, Head of Marketing at IBM Digital Business Group, APAC Head of Sales Enablement, Cisco and APAC Marketing Director at Seismic. As an innovation champion, Iris has helped organisations transform legacy systems into AI-powered processes. Drawing upon her expertise working across the diverse APAC region, Iris specialises in helping organisations expanding into international markets establish regional marketing functions. Throughout her career, Iris has led successful go-to-market transformation programs and architected scalable, repeatable marketing engines in Asia Pacific. She is passionate about building and coaching high-performing teams. Iris has in-depth knowledge of construction, mining, energy, financial services and the public sector.

Iris was recognised as Australia’s Top 300 CMOs by B&T for two consecutive years in 2024 and 2025. In 2023, Iris was honoured as one of Asia’s Most Admired Marketing Leaders by CMO Asia. A strong DEI advocate, Iris was a finalist in the Women Leading Tech awards in Australia in 2021 and a four-time finalist in the ARN Women in ICT Awards in Australia. As a highly regarded thought leader, she is a regular speaker at industry events, webinars and podcasts on B2B industry trends and best practices, focusing on Marketing Technology (martech), AI in B2B Marketing and Sales, demand generation and go-to-market alignment. Based in Sydney, Iris holds a Bachelor of Arts degree in Mass Communications from the National University of Singapore.

Satya has an extensive and impactful career in marketing data and enablement, He is a seasoned professional with 15 plus years experience whose contributions have significantly advanced organisational capabilities in leveraging technology to foster data-driven strategies, demand generation, and revenue growth holding leadership roles with brands like ANZ Bank, nab, Citibank, HSBC, Bankest, The NRMA, The Star Casino, Tabcorp.

His expertise spans the entire lifecycle of customer experience and digital transformation from leading development and delivery of vision and roadmap, business case validation, simplifying technology adoption through capability assessment and putting in place utilisation goals to operating under risk compliance and control guardrails for design, implementation, execution, and monitoring with continuous improvements across platforms and channels.

As a recognised thought leader, Satya has taken the stage as a keynote speaker and has enriched the marketing community by authoring the MarTech Certificate Course at ADMA.

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