Customer Experience delivers its greatest value when it shapes how an organi-zation thinks, prioritizes and operates. Discover how KeyBank has brought CX and Design together to create a strategic capability that informs business pri-orities, uncovers customer and employee insights and directs investment to-ward the initiatives measured to deliver the greatest impact aligned to C-Level priorities.
In this keynote, learn how KeyBank uses design thinking to strengthen cross-functional partnerships and build trusted relationships with business leaders, transforming customer insight into measurable business outcomes. Explore how embedding customer-centric principles across the enterprise is creating stronger operational performance, empowering employees, acting as a proven growth lever and laying the foundations for embedding AI responsibly as a revenue driver.
As AI becomes embedded in operations, financial services leaders face a defining question: how do you capture AI's productivity gains without undermining the human judgment your customers rely on?
This panel explores what it means in practice to calibrate the right level of human oversight as trust in AI matures. Panelists will share real-world case studies on how they've introduced AI into high-stakes operations while keeping agents empowered, customers protected and regulators satisfied.
Attendees will leave with:
● A clearer mental model for where AI should assist, where humans must lead, and where AI can own end-to-end
● Practical approaches to building trust in AI - both within your organization and with your customers
● Lessons learned from scaling AI in regulated, customer-sensitive environments
Large-scale transformation only delivers lasting value when it becomes cultural, not just procedural. This is as true for customer experience as it is for the rapid rise of AI. Organizations can invest in new models, tools, and technologies, but without shifts in behaviors and habits, impact will not sustain.
This session explores what it takes to move from traditional ways of working to a genuinely customer-centric organization, drawing on real-world transformation journeys and the lessons that translate directly to today's AI-driven change.
You will hear practical insights on:
• Leading change that endures - How leadership behaviors and everyday decisions shape outcomes more than strategy alone
• Embedding customer centricity across the enterprise - What it takes to move beyond pockets of progress to consistent, organization-wide adoption
• Supporting iterative transformation at scale - How to build momentum through cycles of learning, feedback, and adaptation rather than treating transformation as a one-time effort
• Measuring what matters - How to link customer and business outcomes to observable behavioral and cultural change
At its core, this keynote reinforces a simple truth: transformation is not something you implement. It is how you operate. The organizations that succeed are the ones that build the cultural muscle to continuously learn, adapt, and improve.
Most CX transformation playbooks were written for digital-first companies. They don't translate cleanly to a 125-year-old community bank where the customer relationship still runs through people, not portals. At First United Bank, our purpose – Spend Life Wisely – means we're transforming customer experience without losing what brought customers to a community bank in the first place.
This session is for senior leaders running real transformations inside complex institutions. We'll talk about what works, what fails, and what doesn't make it into the case studies.
What we'll cover:
• The vendor forcing function: when a platform end-of-life or core conversion sets your transformation timeline before you've built executive consensus
• Earning C-suite commitment beyond the slide deck – what it actually takes to keep a CEO and board funding a multi-year program through quarterly proof points
• Standing up a Transformation Management Office that drives outcomes instead of becoming another layer of governance – using hybrid operating models in a regulated environment
• The barrier most leaders avoid naming: peers who quietly disagree with the destination, and how to surface that before it stalls execution
• Knowing when to slow down for alignment or pull rank
You'll leave with a working framework for sequencing CX transformation in regulated, relationship-driven institutions. Not a checklist – a set of decisions you'll have to own.
Too many service organizations are structured around fixing problems after customers complain. This session examines how leaders are redesigning service models to anticipate need, reduce friction and lower avoidable contact.
• Identify opportunities to shift from reactive support to proactive customer care.
• Learn how peers use data, journey insight and early signals to prevent service failure.
• Share ideas for reallocating service effort toward higher value, customer critical moments.
Innovation rarely dies loudly…it's slowly suffocated by process, hesitation and competing priorities. This session investigates the silent forces that sabotage innovation and uncover how passionate changemakers can revive it within complex organizations at scale.
• Crack the Case of Bureaucracy Learn how to overcome 'death by 100 meetings,' navigate organizational resistance and implement real change by understanding the psychology behind risk aversion.
• Discover how persistence and ownership define true change agents, and why waiting for permission is often the real killer of progress.
• As AI accelerates execution, explore why empathy and action-oriented talent, matter more than ever in delivering meaningful & incremental innovation.
This keynote demonstrates how strengthening customer trust through secure, branded engagement transformed CX into a measurable, defensible and board level growth strategy.
By addressing spoofing and social engineering risk through branded calling and messaging, this session shows how trusted interactions directly improved engagement, reduced fraud and unlocked enterprise wide efficiency gains.
• Learn how to translate trust led CX investments into measurable business outcomes, including higher answer rates, reduced fraud losses and accelerated account growth
• Gain a framework for making CX measurable, and how to turn trust signals (answer rates, complaint volumes, handle time) into board ready performance metrics
Financial service leaders know ethical AI will shape trust, governance and brand reputation but few organizations are operationally prepared. This think tank explores how leaders are thinking beyond compliance toward principled, customer safe AI design.
• Understand where ethical risks emerge across CX, digital and service interactions.
• Compare how peers are defining internal AI "red lines" in the absence of clear regulation.
• Discuss practical steps to embed ethics into AI decisions without slowing innovation to a halt.
Quick automation wins can introduce invisible friction that frustrates customers and agents alike. This thinks tank focuses on the small experience breakdowns that disproportionately damage trust and how to fix them before they scale.
• Recognize where 'minor' UX and automation decisions create major customer irritation.
• Learn how leaders' pressure test journeys from the customer's perspective, not the systems.
• Exchange practical methods for ensuring automated experiences still feel transparent and respectful.
Join a roundtable for a deep dive into topics and themes deserving of discussion