Here's a question worth sitting with: what happens when the thing that was supposed to save you money starts costing you more than the problem it solved?
That's exactly where a lot of companies are headed with AI, according to new predictions out of Forrester. The research firm just published its 2027 B2C marketing, customer experience, and digital predictions, and the headline is blunt: rising AI costs will force brands to scale back a third of their AI initiatives.
Let me unpack why.
A lot of AI tools used to come with flat pricing. You paid a subscription, you used it as much as you wanted. That's changing. Martech vendors are shifting toward usage-based pricing, which means every time an AI agent handles a customer interaction, generates an image or a line of copy, or runs an automated workflow, somebody gets billed. Do that across millions of customer touchpoints, and the costs stack up fast.
I've run businesses long enough to know this story. Something looks cheap until you scale it. Then the real price shows up.
So Forrester says 2027 is the year leaders stop chasing every shiny AI feature and start asking a harder question: does this actually move the needle? A third of current AI initiatives apparently won't survive that question.
But cutting isn't the whole story. Forrester also predicts CX staffing will climb by 20%, right after two years of brutal layoffs across customer experience teams. The twist is who gets hired. Not call-center generalists. Think natural language processing engineers, data scientists, AI experience designers — people who can figure out where AI actually earns its keep and where it's just expensive noise.
That's a pattern I notice everywhere, not just in corporate boardrooms. The companies, and honestly the people, who do best with new technology aren't the ones who adopt everything blindly. They're the ones who experiment, watch what works, and aren't afraid to pull back when something isn't delivering. I've done the same thing with gear and tools on the road for years. Try it. If it doesn't earn its space in the bag, it goes.
There's another prediction in here that I think matters more than it first appears: human-generated content is about to become a priority again for half of all brands. Why? Because AI-generated content is flooding every feed, every search result, every inbox. When everything starts sounding the same, authenticity becomes rare. And rare things get valuable.
Forrester expects brands to lean harder on real customers, real experts, documented evidence — actual proof, not polished AI copy — to earn trust back. Makes sense to me. I'd rather read one honest sentence from someone who's actually been somewhere than a paragraph of generated fluff that sounds impressive and says nothing.
Then there's the one that genuinely surprised me: Forrester predicts one in 20 consumers in the US and UK will ditch traditional shopping altogether in favor of conversations. Instead of browsing a website, they'll just talk to an AI agent and let it handle the purchase. Agentic commerce, they're calling it.
Brands that build trust, not just automation, will be the ones people hand their routine purchases to. That's a big shift in how commerce works, and it's coming faster than most retailers are ready for.
Sharyn Leaver, Forrester's chief research officer, put it simply: the real challenge in 2027 is gaining control without choking off growth. Figuring out where AI creates value, where human judgment still matters, and where the money is actually best spent.
So what does this mean for you, even if you're not running a marketing department?
It's a reminder that new technology always looks free at first. The real cost, and the real value, shows up later, once you've actually lived with it. Same with travel, same with gear, same with any new way of doing things. You don't know what's worth keeping until you try it, watch the bill, and adjust.
The companies willing to ask "is this actually working?" instead of just assuming AI equals progress are the ones who'll come out ahead in 2027. Maybe that's a question worth asking in your own life too, about any tool, habit, or shiny new thing you've adopted without checking if it's still earning its keep.
Source: PR Newswire
Catch up on our earlier post: Salesforce Just Paid $5.7 Billion to Get Better at Reading Your Mind
