
Forrester's 2026 scorecard for customer-service AI crowns NiCE Cognigy, Kore.ai and Omilia as leaders, hands Bret Taylor's Sierra a breakout, and quietly leaves Google off the list entirely. The bots that used to answer questions now close tickets - and the whole industry is racing to prove it.

Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor built a customer-service company that bills per resolution, not per seat. Two years in, it is worth $15.8 billion and runs support for 40% of the Fortune 50.
Two AI customer service companies took very different exits from the same stretch of the agentic-AI boom. One raised nearly a billion dollars at a $15.8B valuation; the other got folded into a bigger machine. The split says a lot about where enterprise AI is heading.