Agenda Day 1

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?

Zack Hamilton

CX Thought Leader & Author
Author of the Experience Performance System™

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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

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Jon Bratton

Senior Director of Sales
unitQ

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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

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Deepak Maheshwari

Senior Director of Engineering - Customer, Marketing & Loyalty Technology
Macy's

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Suri Mishra

Group Director of Omnichannel Insights & AI Acceleration
Walmart

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Hemanth Kumar

SVP - Intelligent Retail & CPG platforms
JK Tech

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Catheryn Li, Co-Founder & CEO of Simple AI, shares how her team designs, builds, and deploys enterprise-grade AI phone agents for iconic businesses like DoorDash and Omaha Steaks. In this masterclass, she'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

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Catheryn Li

CEO
Simple AI

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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. 

Laura Prideaux

Director, Retail Performance
David Yurman

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Debra Sell

Vice President of Store Experience
Meijer, Inc.

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Most retailers in 2026 use AI for customer service to handle simple, repetitive queries. But in an era where customers expect 24/7, efficient and accurate customer service, an evolution towards more robust, context-aware AI agents is no longer a choice, but a necessity.

• What does a truly proactive AI agent look like in retail?

• Evolving AI agent capabilities to predict and prevent issues before customers reach out

• Are most organizations architecturally ready for context-aware AI? How is legacy tech holding you back?

• Establishing monitoring and feedback loops to continuously refine AI accuracy and prevent hallucinations at scale

• Building employee trust in AI through transparency and predictable behavior

Sponsored by: NICE Cognigy

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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

Allegra Pedretti

Executive Director, Customer Experience Measurement
CVS Health

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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

Stuart Slomberg

Chief Retail Officer
Road Runner Sports

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