Agenda Day 1
7:30 am - 8:30 am
Registration & Coffee
8:30 am - 8:35 am
Welcome From The Producer
8:35 am - 8:45 am
Chair's Opening Remarks
Bill Staikos -
Chief Customer Officer,
Be Customer Led
8:45 am - 9:15 am
Presentation: The Next Era of Customer Experience: Why Everything You Know About CX Is Changing and What Leaders Must Become Next
Zack Hamilton -
CX Thought Leader & Author,
Author of the Experience Performance System™
Customer Experience is at an inflection point. As emerging technologies rapidly reshape how organizations operate, many leaders are asking the question: How do we adopt AI? The better question is: How must Customer Experience evolve?
9:15 am - 9:45 am
Sponsor Presentation: Turning Customer Feedback into Actionable Product Insights with AI Agents
Christopher Bryan -
Director of Product Marketing,
unitQ
Eric Carr - Director of CX & CS, iHerb
Discover how AI agents unify customer feedback from support tickets, app reviews, social media and surveys, combining it with product usage data to deliver real-time, actionable insights that drive better product decisions.
• Best practises for collecting, categorizing and analyzing thousands of customer feedback signals across multiple channels in real time
• Connecting feedback with behavioral product data to uncover root causes and identify emerging issues faster
• Prioritizing product improvements based on what matters most to customers, enabling more informed and impactful decision-making.
Sponsored by: unitQ
In today's environment of shifting expectations and tighter budgets, the key question is: what's actually worth it in CX? This interactive think tank will:
• Challenge assumptions and explore what truly drives customer value in 2026
• Explore which experiences matter most to which metrics still hold up
• Discuss trade-offs, ROI, and where to invest (or pull back) to make the
biggest impact.
Sponsored by: Parloa
11:35 am - 12:05 pm
Panel Discussion: From Omnichannel to Omniconversation: Creating Continuous Customer Engagement Across Every Touchpoint
Deepak Maheshwari -
Senior Director of Engineering - Customer, Marketing & Loyalty Technology,
Macy's
Suri Mishra - Group Director of Omnichannel Insights & AI Acceleration, Walmart
Hemanth Kumar - SVP - Intelligent Retail & CPG platforms, JK Tech
Today's retailers have largely achieved omnichannel connectivity, yet many customer interactions remain fragmented. Consumers expect brands to remember their preferences, understand their intent, and provide consistent, personalized experiences whether they're shopping online, in-store, through mobile apps, social channels, or customer service.
This panel explores the evolution from omnichannel to omniconversation where every customer interaction becomes part of a continuous, context-aware conversation powered by AI, customer data, and intelligent automation.
• Learn how conversational commerce, AI assistants, and unified customer intelligence are transforming discovery, purchasing, service, and loyalty while delivering measurable business outcomes.
• Harness the knowledge to move beyond disconnected touchpoints to create seamless, personalized experiences that strengthen customer relationships, increase conversion, and build long-term loyalty.
Sponsored by: JK Tech
Deepak Maheshwari
Senior Director of Engineering - Customer, Marketing & Loyalty TechnologyMacy's
12:05 pm - 12:35 pm
Sponsor Presentation: How to Build Voice AI Agents That Actually Work
Matt Modawell -
Strategic Accounts,
Simple AI
Matt Modawell of Simple AI, shares how his team designs, builds, and deploys enterprise-grade AI phone agents for iconic businesses like DoorDash and Omaha Steaks. In this masterclass, he'll walk through the real-world process:
• Getting started and writing effective evaluation frameworks to QAing conversations and cloning lifelike voices that align with your brand brand.
• Uncovering practical techniques and hard-won lessons from deploying production agents at scale that sound realistic and drive measurable business results.
Sponsored by: Simple AI
In a world where AI drives the conversation around cost efficiency, many board rooms view customer care as the low hanging fruit.
1:10 pm - 2:05 pm
Networking Lunch
2:40 pm - 3:10 pm
Panel Discussion: Empowering Frontline Teams with the Right Tools & Training to Achieve Service Quality Excellence
Laura Prideaux -
Director, Retail Performance,
David Yurman
Debra Sell - Vice President of Store Experience, Meijer, Inc.
As frontline roles grow more demanding and customer expectations continue to rise, physical store teams need tools and training that can reduce strain whilst elevating the service they can deliver.
3:10 pm - 3:40 pm
Sponsor Presentation: The AI Agent Scale Gap: Why 89% Never Make It Beyond the Pilot
Ben Page -
RVP of AI Sales,
NiCE Cognigy
AI agent experimentation is accelerating across retail, yet 89% of pilots never make it to production. The challenge isn't access to AI, it's building the operational foundation to deploy agents securely, govern them effectively, and scale them across complex retail environments.
What can retailers learn from organizations already running AI agents across millions of customer interactions? This session explores what separates pilots from production, the governance models that build trust, and how leading organizations are turning agentic AI into measurable gains in customer experience, productivity, and business performance.
Sponsored by: NICE Cognigy
Sponsored by: Amazon Web Services (AWS)
4:55 pm - 5:25 pm
Presentation: Turning First-Party Data into Action Points That Drive Seamless Omnichannel Journeys
Allegra Pedretti -
Executive Director, Customer Experience Measurement,
CVS Health
Retailers are rich in first-party data but poor in customer intelligence. Signals from surveys, reviews, service interactions, and social channels often sit in siloes - analyzed in isolation and rarely translated into action.
This session explores how brands can unify fragmented feedback into a single intelligence layer that reveals real customer needs, exposes friction across the journey, strengthening loyalty and making retention faster and more cost-effective.
• Uncovering how to consolidate and automate feedback from multiple first party sources to create a unified view of customer needs and friction points
• Leveraging categorization, tagging and pattern recognition to separate noise from high-impact issues at an individual and cohort level
• Turning customer intelligence into clear, cross-functional actions that improve experiences, reduce friction, deepen loyalty and drive measurable change - with defined ownership and accountability to ensure those actions are implemented and deliver real impact
The real hallmark of customer experience is one that is overlooked: post-purchase management.
5:55 pm - 6:25 pm
Presentation: Bricks, Mortar & Their Foundations: Revisiting the Fundamentals of Customer Excellence in Physical Retail
Stuart Slomberg -
Chief Retail Officer,
Road Runner Sports
Customers don't visit stores to analyze the tech stacks and AI capabilities of their favorite brands – they come for memorable experiences which
leave them satisfied and excited to return.
By revisiting the oft overlooked fundamentals of customer excellence brands can tap into what customers truly care about and answer the question that every retailer is asking: How does physical retail keep itself relevant and converting in an age of AI?
• Getting the fundamentals right: delivering consistent, high-quality in-store experiences that drive conversion and loyalty
• Moving beyond products and price to compete on emotion and loyalty
• Enabling store staff to better identify customer intent and tailor interactions to drive conversion and loyalty
• Leveraging in-store technology to anticipate needs, personalize experiences in real time, and capture customer data that drives repeat visits
