Tim Banting
Enterprises have spent the last few years layering AI capabilities across customer experience (CX) platforms – agent assist tools, chatbots, analytics, and automation. While each component delivers value in isolation, the result has often been a tangled “Frankenstack” of disconnected systems.
This over-engineering adds cost, complexity, and opacity rather than clarity.
What’s now emerging is a corrective shift toward journey orchestration – a unifying layer that connects these systems, coordinates handoffs, and ensures that customer interactions flow seamlessly across channels.
Rethinking Vendor & Buyer Strategy: Focusing on Best-of-Workflow
The future lies in designing around workflows, not just tools.
Orchestration is becoming this new integration layer. Instead of best of suites, enterprises will design around best of workflow.
Vendors positioning themselves around interoperability and composability – with modular intelligence and open integration – will thrive. My prediction is that selling siloed AI features will start to fade out.
Buyers should also be pragmatic. They should look at platforms that have a good set of raw APIs, a good set of webhooks that allow them to take these triggers and build actions into them.
What to ask vendors:
- How open and extensible is your platform (APIs, webhooks)?
- How do you support workflow orchestration across third-party systems?
- What is your roadmap for workflow automation and data unification?
- Can we integrate without replatforming in future?
The Key Takeaway for Buyers
Avoid being locked into proprietary ecosystems that may limit future adaptability. Orchestration is not about “one platform to rule them all”; it’s about ensuring every component in your CX stack plays in harmony.
As enterprises move from best-of-suite to best-of-workflow thinking, orchestration becomes the essential conductor ensuring that AI delivers measurable business outcomes – not just technological noise.
Find out more
Explore my full analysis on how enterprises can move from AI overload to orchestration clarity, in this week’s interview for CX Today.
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