As enterprises move into 2026, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Agentic AI is the next major inflection point in customer experience.
Many enterprise organizations running Genesys Cloud CX are already investing heavily in AI, yet are finding that results often plateau well before they reach the containment and automation levels they expected.
This isn’t because Genesys Cloud AI is weak or ineffective. In fact, Genesys Cloud AI is very good at what it was designed to do.
The challenge is that true agentic experiences require a different class of intelligence than platform-native AI alone can deliver.
That is where platforms like Teneo.ai becomes essential.
Genesys Cloud AI Is the Foundation — Not the Finish Line
Genesys Cloud AI plays a critical role in the enterprise CX stack. It provides intent routing, conversational tooling, analytics, orchestration, and tight coupling with the broader Genesys ecosystem. For many organizations, it is the right place to start their AI journey. However, enterprise leaders quickly discover that starting AI and scaling AI are very different problems. According to an MIT study, 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to reach production.
At enterprise volumes, conversations are long, unpredictable, emotional, and often involve multiple intents. Customers interrupt themselves, change topics, and use industry-specific language that doesn’t conform to clean training data.
In these real-world conditions, understanding accuracy matters far more than feature breadth.
This is where outcomes begin to diverge.
Why Understanding Is the Gatekeeper to Agentic AI
Most embedded AI solutions — including platform-native AI — tend to plateau around 90% understanding in production.
That level may appear acceptable in isolation, but at enterprise scale it creates friction: higher fallback rates, unnecessary escalations, and customers who lose trust in self-service.
Agentic AI, by definition, requires confidence. The AI must understand well enough to act, not just respond.
Teneo has spent more than 25 years focused on solving this exact problem. Its near-human language understanding — consistently approaching 99% accuracy — enables the AI to handle 86+ languages, including its accents, dialects, jargon, and multi-intent dialogue without breaking the experience.
That level of understanding is not incremental. It is the prerequisite for real autonomy and real containment.
Containment Is Where the Difference Shows Up
Every enterprise eventually measures success the same way: How many customer issues were fully resolved without human involvement?
Genesys Cloud AI is effective at deflection and simple self-service. Teneo goes further by enabling resolution.
When Teneo is layered on top of Genesys Cloud:
- Customers remain in self-service because the AI truly understands them
- Tasks are completed end-to-end, not partially
- Escalations occur intentionally, not by failure
- Agents receive full conversational context when handoff occurs
The result is higher containment without sacrificing CX quality or trust.
Driving Value from Genesys AI Experience Tokens
An often-overlooked benefit of adding Teneo to Genesys Cloud is that Teneo directly drives consumption and value of Genesys AI Experience Tokens.
Because Teneo sustains longer, more successful automated conversations:
- More interactions remain AI-led
- AI sessions extend meaningfully rather than failing early
- Enterprises realize greater ROI from their existing Genesys AI token investment
In other words, Teneo does not compete with Genesys AI economics — it amplifies them by making AI interactions successful enough to persist.
Leveraging Genesys SST and TTS — Not Replacing Them
Equally important, Teneo is designed to leverage, not bypass, Genesys-native speech capabilities.
Teneo works seamlessly with:
- Genesys Speech-to-Text (STT/SST) for transcription
- Genesys Text-to-Speech (TTS) for voice output
This ensures:
- Consistent voice quality and branding
- Centralized speech governance within Genesys
- Alignment with existing Genesys licensing and architecture
Teneo focuses on understanding, reasoning, and action — while Genesys continues to provide the enterprise-grade speech and interaction layer.
What Makes the Experience Truly Agentic
True agentic AI is defined by action, not responses. With Teneo running alongside Genesys Cloud, the AI can authenticate users, retrieve and update records, execute backend workflows, apply policy logic, and adapt dynamically when conversations go off-script.
Just as critically, Teneo is built for enterprise governance. Auditability, explainable decisions, role-based controls, and data sovereignty are core design principles — enabling enterprises to trust AI with real responsibility.
Side-by-Side Perspective: Teneo.ai and Genesys Cloud AI
Genesys Cloud AI excels as a platform-native capability, providing orchestration, analytics, routing, speech services, and the AI consumption model enterprises rely on. It is the CX operating system.
Teneo.ai is purpose-built for deep understanding and autonomy. It delivers near-human comprehension, multi-intent reasoning, and agentic execution that enables real containment.
Together, they form a complementary architecture: Genesys Cloud runs the experience; Teneo makes it autonomous.
The Takeaway
Enterprises do not need more AI features — they need AI that actually works at scale.
Genesys Cloud AI provides the foundation, the tokens, and the speech layer. Teneo.ai delivers the understanding, autonomy, and containment that turn those investments into true agentic experiences.
That is why enterprises looking ahead to 2026 are choosing Teneo.ai on top of Genesys Cloud CX — not as a replacement, but as the missing layer that makes agentic AI real.
Lee Kayne
Lee Kayne is a 30-year sales and operations executive in the contact center and customer experience (CX) industries. He has led teams in solving complex CX challenges for major North American companies, focusing on modernizing engagement via cloud, AI, and communications platforms. As a consultant, he advised emerging CX technology firms on enterprise positioning and go-to-market strategies. He is currently an operating leader at Agentic AI leader Teneo, driving expansion and enterprise adoption across North America with a pragmatic, execution-driven approach.