Welcome to the Customer Experience News, an outlet for Support Leaders learn about products, updates, and releases from tools building solutions for Customer Support, Success, and Growth.
January kicked off with the Consumer Electronics Show 2026, primarily to showcase products while there were many agentic and generative AI advancements that could either benefit or affect your customer’s experience. Learn about the evolution of voice AI and how it relates to customer support.
The evolution of voice AI for Customer Support
At CES 2026, Voice AI was a support-driven focus, evolving from basic commands to agentic, context-aware companions that could redefine customer support.
Imagine support that’s not a helpline or chat window, but embedded in your car, TV, or glasses, anticipating needs, handling tasks autonomously, and responding with emotional intelligence. Here’s how these innovations signal a new era of “ambient support”:
- Agentic Actions in Everyday Devices: SoundHound’s Agentic Voice Commerce lets AI in vehicles or TVs order food, book reservations, or pay for parking without apps or screens.
This shifts support from reactive, like calling a bank for a payment, to proactive, your car could detect a low fuel warning and auto-schedule a service appointment, reducing customer effort. SoundHound is the same company that generated the drive-thru Dynamic AI ordering. - On-Device, Privacy-First Self-Service: Kardome’s Voice AI processes on-device in noisy environments, targeting self-service.
Think: you’re in a store wearing AI glasses and you ask about product details or comparisons, getting answers even if you’re in a crowded and noisy store. And, because it’s an on-device service, this reduces data leaks and cloud delays. Support becomes portable and offline. - Home & Health Integration: Transcarent introduces agentic AI that handles end-to-end tasks. Think: elderly family members are able to use this to schedule appointments, triaging health symptoms through conversational guidance, and even help them remember past interactions to prompt follow-up actions. They call the last one the “Total Recall Memory Engine” and I’m all for that. As a concerned son, I’d love to know exactly what the doctors said, and not the recap my parents thought they remembered.
While you may not be in the automotive, wearables, or health industry, what these agentic updates mean at a broader level is that people, young and old, are getting more comfortable with AI conversations. If your industry leverages phone support or has an audible component to it, agentic workflows will introduce a new layer of solutions that goes beyond your AI chat just repeating information from your knowledge base.
Voice AI is acting as an always-on advocate, blending self-service with human-like intuition. In SaaS terms, this could crush churn by making support invisible and effortless, embedded in the “third living space” (e.g., cars, homes, wearables).
The companies shipping agentic voice AI are asking “how do we practively support customers where support becomes invisible?”
What does “ambient support” look like in your industry?
SaaS Support Product News – January 15, 2026
HubSpot syncs with Zendesk users and organizations
For Zendesk users, there’s an update in HubSpot’s Q4 Marketplace releases that I found all the way at the bottom. They launched a two-way sync with Zendesk to maintain a realtime update of users and organizations.
This is important if your Sales team is operating within HubSpot and Support is in Zendesk. No more importing Zendesk contacts into HubSpot.
How this helps: Sales reps see support history without switching tools. When a prospect mentions an open ticket during a demo, your rep isn’t caught off guard. Support agents see deal stage and account value, helping them prioritize and personalize responses.
What to watch: This latest update in December is reported to not sync ticket replies or activities. You’ll see that a ticket exists, but you won’t get the conversation context. If your team needs full ticket threads visible in HubSpot, you’re still looking at manual work or a third-party connector.
Gorgias launches advanced automations with TikTok
TikTok Shops is gaining advanced automations with Gorgias. You can now incorporate TikTok Shops into your Rules and Macros. This means trigger actions, applied conditions, and automated responses.
How this helps: If you’re selling on TikTok Shop, you can now auto-tag orders by value, route refund requests to senior agents, or send tracking info without manual intervention. Think: a customer asks “where’s my order” and your macro pulls the TikTok Shop order status and replies in seconds.
What to watch: TikTok Shop’s audience skews younger and expects fast, casual responses. Your existing macros might sound too formal. Review your templates before flipping this on. Also, TikTok’s platform policies shift frequently, so keep an eye on what automations remain compliant.
Guru sunsets features and adds new integrations
Between December and January, Guru launched a number of partner updates and sunset specific features. If you’re a Guru user, you’ll want to hear this.
- Salesforce Knowledge and Pylon can be used as sources in Guru.
- Asana permissions are inherited rather than establishing in Guru.
- The Guru mobile app was sunset on December 19th.
- Public cards were sunset on December 1st.
How this helps: The Salesforce Knowledge integration means your support team doesn’t need to maintain duplicate content. Pylon users can pull B2B support context directly into Guru. Inherited Asana permissions reduce admin overhead when onboarding new team members.
What to watch: If you used Guru to manage both public-facing content and internal knowledge, you’ve lost that capability. Audit your marketing site for links to public Guru cards. Check your support macros for any that reference Guru knowledge meant for customers. You might need to migrate public content to a dedicated help center or docs platform.
Notion’s AI-powered Forms
Notion Agent can now build forms in seconds. If you’re managing internal knowledge or your public articles in Notion, think about how you can develop forms for bug reports, feature requests, customer feedback, product surveys, employee surveys, or offsite location requests.
How this helps: Your support team can spin up intake forms without waiting on engineering or ops. A customer reports a bug via chat? Send them a Notion form that captures structured data: steps to reproduce, browser version, screenshots. That data flows directly into your Notion workspace for triage.
What to watch: Notion forms are simple by design. If you need conditional logic, payment collection, or deep integrations with your ticketing system, you’ll hit limitations quickly. This works best for internal use cases or lightweight customer feedback, not complex support workflows.
Pluno’s QA tooling for Support Teams
Pluno, AI support agents for complex and technical tickets, launched AI-powered Support Quality Assurance in December. Configure your QA criteria and the Agent Comparison view offers performance overview for each person.
How this helps: Instead of manually reviewing a sample of tickets, you can set QA criteria and let Pluno score every interaction. The Agent Comparison view shows who’s excelling and who needs coaching. For teams handling technical tickets, this surfaces patterns like “Agent A resolves faster but skips verification steps.”
What to watch: AI-powered QA is only as good as your criteria. If your rubric is vague, scores will be inconsistent. Spend time defining what “good” looks like before rolling this out. Also, be transparent with your team that AI is scoring their work. Surprises here damage trust.
Dixa’s image-understanding AI agent
Dixa, a platform for consumer brands, recently launched Mim, an AI agent that can understand images. If users are complaining about bugs, Mim can prompt them to provide an image. It’ll also gather data from images, such as serial numbers.
How this helps: A customer says “my product arrived damaged.” Mim asks for a photo, analyzes it, and can confirm visible damage or extract the serial number to check warranty status. This cuts back-and-forth and speeds up resolution for returns, damage claims, or troubleshooting.
What to watch: Image analysis isn’t perfect. Poor lighting, blurry photos, or unusual product packaging can trip it up. Build fallback flows for when Mim can’t parse an image. Also, consider privacy implications if customers upload images containing personal information in the background.
Intercom users saw a similar release with Fin Vision around mid-2025.
HappyFox AutoPilot Launch
HappyFox launched Autopilot, a library of AI Agents for customer service and support that take actions across your workflows.
How this helps: If your current AI can answer questions but can’t take action, Autopilot fills that gap. Think: an AI agent that doesn’t just tell a customer how to reset their password but initiates the reset and confirms completion. For teams hitting limitations with their current stack, this adds an execution layer.
What to watch: “Library of AI Agents” is broad. Before committing, get specific on which actions Autopilot supports for your integrations. Also, any AI that takes action needs guardrails. Understand what approvals or human-in-the-loop checks exist before an agent processes a refund or modifies an account.
Rush to Resolution offers professional development for Customer Support Leaders. If you are looking for an advisor to guide you towards a scalable Support strategy, connect with me and let’s talk.
This no-pressure meeting is your chance to explore how you can meet your 2026 targets and scale Support operations.
CX-NEWS.com
Please send the URL of the LinkedIn post, headline, or changelog update.
We appreciate you taking the time to share this info with CX-News.com.
