Join our editor-in-chief, Melanie Mingas, as she reveals key highlights from our latest report: CX Horizons. We surveyed over 350 network members from around the world to ask about key trends, consumer behaviours and how AI is impacting their roles. With plenty of opportunity to ask questions about the data, the session will be an exclusive launch of our latest research report.

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Generative AI has already changed how brands understand and interact with customers but the next leap is agentic AI, with Gartner predicting that agentic AI will resolve 80 percent of common customer service issues by 2029. These intelligent systems can autonomously process and act on customer interactions, creating faster, more personalized experiences.

In this session, Nitin Kumar, Director of Data Science at Marriott Hotels, will explore how organizations are using agentic architectures to transform customer care and automate complex workflows. We’ll also discuss the practical challenges of deploying these systems responsibly, from data security and consistency to governance and ethics.

Attendees will learn:

• How agentic AI is redefining customer care through human–AI collaboration rather than automation alone.
• The guardrails and governance frameworks required to deploy generative AI responsibly at scale.
• How unstructured data and real-time intelligence are powering more personalized, efficient, and empathetic customer experiences.

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AI has moved from novelty to accountability. In CX, the first wave of generative AI reset expectations for instant responses, personalized journeys, and seamless engagement. Now, developments in agentic AI are set to reset them again, with even more efficiency and speed. This session explores how CX leaders can move beyond pilots and incremental enhancements to operationalize AI across the enterprise.

Drawing on examples from Hyatt, The College of Healthcare Professionals (CHCP) and Lufthansa, Jennifer Wilson at NiCE will examine how AI is accelerating predictive engagement, autonomous resolution, and connected, intent-driven journeys. In this session, we will share how Hyatt, CHCP and Lufthansa moved beyond pilots to embed AI across their CX ecosystems, resulting in reduced workload and faster resolution times.

Expect to gain clarity on the difference between AI-augmented applications and agentic AI systems that act within defined goals and guardrails. Our discussion will focus on how to strategically embed AI into existing CX ecosystems and determine when autonomy creates greater value. We will also address the emerging hybrid workforce model, where AI agents and human teams operate together across the front and mid office. When designed effectively, this blended model reduces cost to serve and improves consistency ultimately strengthening customer outcomes.

Attendees will learn:

• How to establish AI initiatives that are directly tied to revenue, cost reduction, retention, and efficiency targets
• How to embed agentic capabilities into existing systems so AI can execute, not just assist
• How to manage AI agents and human teams together with clear governance, oversight, and performance control

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Across the industry, AI is positioned as the breakthrough that will automate service, eliminate friction, and solve the contact center’s biggest challenges. The promise is simple: more automation equals better outcomes.

Yet inside real organizations, the pressure on live agents has intensified. The interactions that reach them are increasingly complex and emotionally charged, while customers expect faster answers and deeper expertise than ever before. At the same time, rising costs and the push toward automation often leave the human workforce responsible for the most critical moments feeling under-supported.

This session offers a counterpoint. Rather than asking how far automation can go, Mike Egli explores why sustained CX success depends on reinvesting in the human core. Drawing on three decades of operational and transformation experience, he will examine how to curb frontline attrition, strengthen knowledge and performance, surface hidden friction across the agent journey, and use modern CX capabilities to improve retention of both employees and customers.

Attendees will learn:

• Why automation-first strategies can unintentionally increase frontline pressure
• The real drivers behind attrition in today’s CX environments
• How to elevate agent knowledge, confidence, and consistency
• Practical ways to strengthen both employee and customer retention

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Customers are engaging across an ever-growing array of channels – voice, chat, video, and in-person – and brands are increasingly challenged to deliver experiences that feel contextual and effortless. Voice AI and multimodal support are transforming CX by enabling interactions that understand intent and sentiment across channels. Some research indicates that by 2025, 50  percent of all searches are expected to be voice-based, and companies that leverage voice and multimodal AI effectively can reach customers more easily as well as increase customer engagement and satisfaction significantly.

Multimodal AI goes beyond single-channel interactions by combining visual, textual, and auditory signals to deliver more accurate and human-like responses. For example, a customer might start a query via voice, continue through chat, and on the app, all orchestrated seamlessly by AI. This session will cover the basics of voice and multimodal AI, explaining the benefits and risks, and discussing how it can be leveraged to improve CX.

Attendees will learn:

• How Voice AI and multimodal support enable more natural and context-aware customer interactions across channels.
• Strategies for implementing seamless handoffs between channels and AI systems while maintaining consistent CX
• How to measure the impact of voice and multimodal solutions on key metrics such as first-contact resolution and customer satisfaction.

Moving AI from prototype to production is where the promise of better CX meets reality. In regulated industries especially,u that journey is littered with hard constraints. In this session, Mrunal Gangrade, VP at JPMorgan Chase, will walk us through what it takes to deploy and govern AI in customer-facing environments where data privacy and cybersecurity aren’t afterthoughts but non-negotiables. Drawing on two decades of engineering experience in financial services and hands-on work moving systems to cloud and into production, we will focus on real operational challenges such as training, choosing build vs buy, spotting data drift, and putting transparency and ethics at the centre of AI deployments.

You’ll hear practical guidance on starting small, proving value, and scaling safely, including how to identify what to automate, how to embed explainability into your models, and why continuous monitoring is essential to prevent models from silently degrading.

Attendees will learn:

• How to move from development to operationalization in a regulated environment.
• Practical guardrails for safe AI, including explainability, continuous monitoring for data drift, and integrating ethics and security into governance.
• How to make build vs buy decisions and prepare teams (training, tools, cross-functional governance) so AI delivers real, sustainable CX improvements.

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AI is proliferating across customer experience, and many organizations are discovering that with efficiency gains come new risks.

In this session, Taylor Johnson, Director of CX at Nathan James, will reveal how the digitally-native furniture store used AI as a single source of truth, unifying very customer interaction. In conversation with Sam Chandler, Director of Customer Success, Commercial at Kustomer, she’ll go into how this transformation led to the support team handling double the number of customer interactions per hour, with CSAT increasing by two points.

Through this case study, we’ll explore how CX leaders can deploy AI without destroying trust internally or externally. Rather than framing AI as a replacement for humans, we’ll advocate for a “Human + AI” model grounded in transparency and intelligent handoffs.

Attendees will learn why trust is not merely a UX challenge, but an architectural one. This session will examine how confidence scoring and human-in-the-loop workflows can dramatically reduce common CX risks while improving customer outcomes. The discussion will also explore emerging AI agent team models, where specialized AI roles outperform monolithic “one bot to rule them all” approaches.

Attendees will learn:

• Why trust failures in AI are architectural problems, not interface problems
• How human-in-the-loop design, confidence scoring, and escalation logic reduce brand risk
• How to deploy AI in CX using collaborative Human + AI models instead of replacement narratives

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Personalized experiences are now a baseline customer expectation, with research showing that 67 percent of consumers expect personalized online shopping experiences. It is no surprise, then, that personalization has been found to create between 5 – 25 percent uplift in revenue. This session brings together leaders from Apple and Walmart to explore how advanced recommendation systems, powered by LLMs and behavioral data, shape customer journeys from discovery to purchase, and how to balance relevance with trust and control.

Scaling personalization across millions of users introduces unique challenges: managing huge data volumes, keeping models functional under enormous loads, and ensuring recommendations remain relevant rather than generic or intrusive. Attendees will get a practitioner’s view into these trade offs and how intent driven systems (like app store ads or ecommerce discoverability layers) are evolving to meet them.

Attendees will learn:

• Key strategies for building and evolving LLM powered recommendation systems that boost engagement and revenue.
• How to maintain relevance and measure success at enterprise scale.
• Best practices for aligning personalization technologies with brand experience and customer trust.

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AI investment, adoption, and hype have reached unprecedented levels but so have questions about sustainability, ROI, and expectations. Global investment in AI continues to rise, and yet Gartner has suggested that, due to lack of good data, 60 percent of organizations will abandon AI projects in 2026. As economic pressure mounts and boards scrutinize spend, CX leaders are increasingly asking whether we’re in an AI bubble, and what will happen to the discipline if (or when) that bubble bursts.

This interactive roundtable, open to all attendees, will close the conference by cutting through the hype to explore what the current AI moment really means for CX. Participants are invited to discuss where AI is genuinely transforming customer outcomes and where it may be over-engineered, under-measured, or misaligned with customer needs. The conversation will focus on how CX leaders can separate long-term, beneficial capabilities from short-term trend, and make smarter bets going forward.

Participants will explore:

• Whether current AI adoption patterns in CX signal a bubble or a necessary but somewhat messy transition phase.

• What an AI correction could mean for CX priorities, budgets, vendors, and customer trust.

• How to future-proof CX strategies by focusing on measurable value, customer outcomes, and long-term capability rather than hype.