CX Today's Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Wayne Butterfield, Founder of STX, to unpack one of the most talked-about analyst reports of the year.

Wayne sparked a firestorm on LinkedIn when Gartner's 2026 Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI dropped, and his criticisms resonated. With hundreds of comments and close to 100,000 views on his post, it was clear he wasn't alone.

In this conversation, Wayne goes beyond the LinkedIn hot takes to explain exactly what he thinks went wrong, why the methodology deserves scrutiny, and what enterprise buyers should actually be doing when they go to market for conversational AI.

The 2026 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Conversational AI generated more debate than most, and Wayne Butterfield was at the center of it.

In this interview, he gets into the specifics.

The acquisition double standard: Wayne argues that Salesforce and SoundHound were elevated in the quadrant largely on the back of acquisitions, while NiCE Cognigy was effectively demoted for the same reason. He calls the inconsistency out directly and questions whether Gartner's criteria are being applied evenly.

Why methodology alone isn't the problem: Wayne doesn't just blame the framework. He points to a lack of transparency around the "what, why, and how" of vendor inclusion, and suggests that reports skewed toward big-budget names risk losing credibility with the practitioners who use them daily.

What buyers should actually do: Forget one-size-fits-all rankings. Wayne makes the case for shortlisting based on people, commercial flexibility, and skin in the game from the vendor — and argues that implementation quality will always matter more than which tool you buy.

His advice to Gartner: Test the report with the market before publishing. Not vendors with something to gain, but practitioners with nothing to lose. "You need other people tasting your vintage," he says — and it's hard to argue with that.

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