We’re entering a new wave of self-serviceability in CCM and CXM, one where AI accelerates outcomes both at design time and at runtime. In an environment that shifts faster than any quarterly roadmap, the future isn’t something you control; it’s something you prepare for. Success no longer belongs to those with the most detailed plans, but to those most able to adapt. Customer experience and communication strategies that thrive under these conditions are the ones built for readiness — the capacity to act, learn and pivot faster than the world around us.
Self-Serviceability: The Architecture of Readiness
The question of how to rapidly adapt communication flows to changing circumstances has, for decades, led to the same answer: self-serviceability. If you can do it yourself, you can do it better, maybe cheaper and above all, faster.
That is why companies have long searched for tools that allow them to independently create, manage, and refine customer communication flows without relying on scarce and expensive IT resources or external implementation teams. And those tools arrived, evolving across three major waves.
First came graphical interfaces. Anyone old enough remembers what software looked like before we saw Bill Gates awkwardly dancing to Start Me Up at the Windows 95 launch. The blinking command-line cursor gave way to dialog boxes and configuration screens, opening a completely new world for non-technical users.
Yet despite this leap, as much as it didn’t turn the geeks into dancers, it didn’t turn the dancers into geeks. There remained a huge gap between the limited set of configurable options and what was possible with real programming code. True self-reliance was still far out of reach.
The second wave was low-code, or the promise that configuration-screen users could elevate themselves into “citizen developers”. Customer engagement and communication systems evolved into platforms where users could create applications and define business logic simply by dragging blocks onto a canvas. Salesforce built Flow and acquired MuleSoft, Microsoft evolved from Dynamics into Power Platform, and everyone began to experiment.
But again, self-service didn’t deliver on all its promises. Many low-code projects never progressed beyond the conceptual phase. Enterprise-grade complexity, especially non-functional requirements around security and performance, rarely proved achievable for low-coders. As a result, many proofs of concept ended up in the recycle bin of real developers and consultants, who could rebuild the intended solution from scratch faster than they could clean up the well-intentioned low-code prototype.
The third wave of self-serviceability then. Fast-forward to today. “Low code (as we know it) is dead,” said Charles Lamanna, Microsoft’s VP for Business Apps & Platforms, during his keynote at the Power Platform Conference in Las Vegas in late October 2025.
On that bomb shell, we could safely state that a third wave of self-serviceability has emerged, and it is powered by artificial intelligence. Natural-language prompting is becoming the next interface that allows non-technical users to adapt communication flows and customer experience scenarios without help from pro developers.
Third Time’s a Charm?
Although you might think we’ve seen this film before, the sequel to low-code may be well worth watching. What’s different this time is that AI prompting doesn’t limit the non technical user like in the first wave or produces pseudo-code that doesn’t live up to enterprise standards like it did in the second wave.
Under the surface, CCM and CXM tools that integrate natural-language prompting capabilities in their user interface, generate professional code that is performant, secure, and when needed, directly editable by developers of flesh and blood.
A truly innovative self-service oriented CCM tool lets a business user write a prompt like “Build me a webform that gathers all information we need from a client to create a proposal for our new insurance product.” When given this prompt, not only does it understand the user’s intent well enough to create the form, it is also context-aware enough to
- Use the customer data already in your systems.- Enforce your company’s branding guidelines.- Apply governance and data-protection rules.- Generate clean, secure, production-grade code, not a POC that needs fixing.
It’s not hard to imagine you can follow up with a prompt like “Now create a policy template using only approved canned language, then build an automated onboarding workflow that sends the form, generates the policy, captures an eSignature, and stores the signed document in the customer record.”
That’s what third-wave self-serviceability looks like: tools that give business users the ability to act at the speed of intent — safely, securely and in line with corporate context.
Agentic Triggering
Self-serviceability doesn’t stop at design time. Innovative CCM and CXM tools let business users publish communication flows, templates and interaction logic that are immediately usable by both humans and artificial agents. They produce assets that runtime agents can understand and trigger safely.
Each flow becomes a clear, callable capability: it includes defined intent, inputs, outputs and permissions so the right agents can act on it at the right moment. In this model, business users aren’t just designing messages, they’re providing ready-to-use building blocks that intelligent agents can discover, interpret and orchestrate in real time.
In this new wave of DIY, AI-driven self-serviceability turns intent into action, shrinking the gap between idea and execution. As third-wave tooling ramps up quickly, organisations that are quick to embrace this shift stand a better chance to stay ahead of the pack and be ready — adaptable, and capable of evolving faster than the world around them.
Organizations that are quick to embrace this shift stand a better chance to succeed.
Erwin Buggenhout is a Product Manager at Experlogix. For more than a decade he has lead product teams that deliver convenience tools for the CCM and Enterprise Document Automation space.
