The AI Journey – What a Key CCMA Data Source Tells Us

Tracking how UK contact centres are actually approaching their implementation of AI has been a key mandate for the CCMA for some time. It has also been the driving force behind our recent How To… events.

Between November 2025 and February 2026, 62 members contributed to four waves of survey data on AI adoption, while attending How To… events at contact centre headquarters for British Airways, Virgin Media, Worcester Bosch and Sky.

Across their responses, three questions were asked consistently: how advanced is your AI approach today, who owns it at the highest level and what’s the primary driver for investing in it? The answers, each scored out of five, tell a story of a sector that is finding its footing and starting to move with purpose.

From Testing to Doing

For most of the period covered the most common description of AI maturity was “initial pilots”. Organisations were trying things out, capturing early lessons and running proofs of concept in relative isolation. Average maturity scores across those waves sat in the low-to-mid range, reflecting progress without true momentum.

In February, at Sky’s contact centre in Livingston, this position shifted. The most frequently selected maturity level moved to “cautious staged deployment” and the average score jumped to its highest point across the entire period. That phrase – cautious staged deployment – is important. While not a dramatic leap, it does signal that organisations are moving beyond the pilot phase. They’re introducing governance, measuring return and expanding carefully into something that resembles a real operational commitment to AI, rather than an experiment running in the background.

Who’s Holding the Wheel

Ownership tells a parallel story. In the early waves, AI sat clearly with the C-suite. Through December and January it drifted toward specialist roles – AI leads, data professionals, technical heads taking the wheel during the exploratory phase. This si a familiar pattern in any emerging technology cycle – to hand it to those in the know to deliver progress through use cases.

However, by February, the C-suite re-emerged as the most common answer for who owns AI – an important development. When transformation sits at the top rather than in a technical team, the conditions for broader, faster change tend to follow.

The ‘Why’ Is Changing

Perhaps the most striking shift is in motivation. In November, customer experience and workforce productivity were roughly neck-and-neck as the primary drivers for AI adoption. By February, customer experience had pulled ahead – cited by over half of all respondents – while productivity dropped significantly as the headline reason.

That’s not a small change in emphasis and suggests a potential cultural shift in how organisations are framing AI’s purpose. The most compelling case for investing in these tools isn’t the internal efficiency gain – it’s for the betterment of customer journeys, faster resolutions and for supporting advisors in delivering the best service to customers.

It also aligns closely with what CCMA members have been saying through events and conversations across the same period – that AI should enhance rather than replace the human element of customer service, and that the organisations making real progress are the ones who started with that belief rather than arrived at it.

What It All Points To

Taken together, the data suggests a sector that is genuinely maturing in its approach to AI. Not rushing necessarily, but in no way standing still. Pilots are becoming programmes, specialists are handing back to leaders and the question of why AI is being adopted is being answered by contact centres being able to put the customer at the centre if their plans.

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