Agenda Day One

Agenda Day One Agenda Day Two

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6:30 pm - 8:30 pm PRE-EVENT NETWORKING DRINKS RECEPTION

1

7:30 am - 8:30 am REGISTRATION, BREAKFAST AND NETWORKING

8:30 am - 8:35 am PROGRAM DIRECTOR'S WELCOME

Callum O'Brien, Program Director, CX USA Exchange 2026

8:35 am - 8:45 am CHAIR'S OPENING REMARKS

Michela Brooks - Consultant, Temple & Theory

Michela Brooks

Consultant
Temple & Theory

See Bio

8:45 am - 9:15 am KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: AI THAT MATTERS: MOVING FROM EXPERIMENTS TO EVERYDAY IMPACT

AI is everywhere, but most implementations fail to deliver. This keynote will cut through the noise and show how organisations are successfully embedding AI into everyday customer experiences.

• Identifying the use cases that actually scale.

• Ensuring ROI is visible across the business.

• Keeping the human touch where it matters most.

9:15 am - 9:45 am PRESENTATION: ARCHITECTING A GLOBAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE OF AGENTIC AI

Heather Morgan Shoemaker - Chief Executive Officer, Language I/O

As AI becomes central to customer support, the real challenge is not automation, but preserving the human connection customers expect.

In this workshop, Heather Shoemaker explores how AI can reduce agent friction, prevent burnout and scale global support without replacing the people at the heart of the experience. While research from MIT shows the nearly 95 percent of AI initiatives fail to deliver real business value, this session focuses on how to be in the five percent that succeed by designing AI around what matters most: better customer experiences, more efficient and confident agents and measurable results. The session showcases the most effective AI enhances human connection rather than competes with it.

9:45 am - 10:15 am NETWORKING BINGO

This icebreaker activity aims to engage learners in adynamic networking session while encouraging themto discover commonalities and differences in their

career journeys. The bingo cards are designed to spark conversations, promote networking, and create a lively atmosphere for participants to learn more about each other

1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

10:20 am - 10:50 am 1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

THINK TANK: FROM DATA TO DECISIONS: CX THAT MOVES AT CUSTOMER SPEED

8:00 am - 8:30 am THINK TANK: FROM DATA TO DECISIONS: CX THAT MOVES AT CUSTOMER SPEED

Customers don’t wait and neither should your data. Learn how real-time behavioral insight turns fragmented journeys into decisive, human-centric experiences that drive measurable growth.

· Why lagging data creates missed moments, broken journeys, and slow CX decisions

· Moving from post-journey analysis to in-journey experience optimization

· Real examples of how brands accelerate growth by acting at customer speed

The fastest-growing brands aren’t guessing what customers want next, they’re responding while it still matters.

1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

10:50 am - 11:20 am 1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

10:50 am - 11:20 am COFFEE & NETWORKING

1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

11:25 am - 11:55 am 1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

THINK TANK: CALL TO ACTION: DESIGNING AN OPTIMIZED CALL ESCALATION STRATEGY

11:25 am - 11:55 am THINK TANK: CALL TO ACTION: DESIGNING AN OPTIMIZED CALL ESCALATION STRATEGY

Mike Pappas - Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder, Modulate

Every customer call carries unique levels of risk, urgency, and complexity; however, too often escalation decisions either overload senior staff or frustrate customers with long handle times. This interactive workshop will walk through three real-world call scenarios to explore how to balance caller context, agent expertise, and AI/IVR coverage when determining escalation paths.

Through group discussion and scenario mapping, attendees will examine the tradeoffs of escalating too early versus too late and learn how to tune systems for smarter, faster outcomes.

Takeaways: Learn how optimized escalation reduces costs, cuts call times, alleviates agent attrition, and boosts customer satisfaction. Walk away with actionable frameworks for building escalation strategies that connect the right callers with the right agents—quickly, accurately, and without unnecessary friction.

12:00 pm - 12:30 pm PRESENTATION: BREAKING THE RULES: SIMPLYFYING FRAGMENTED OPERATING MODELS TO FIX CX AT SCALE

Dave Ugan - Chief Technology Officer, AAA

As organizations grow through federated structures, complexity multiplies, conflicting rules, inconsistent processes, and fractured ownership quietly undermine customer experience and brand relevance.

This session explores how CX leaders are simplifying fragmented operating models to restore clarity, speed, and trust across customers, partners, and internal teams.

• Why fragmented rules and operating models create friction customers feel

immediately.

• How simplification and standardization unlock consistency without

sacrificing flexibility.

• What CX leaders must redesign to make data, personalization, and loyalty

actually work at scale.

Dave Ugan

Chief Technology Officer
AAA

See Bio

12:30 pm - 1:00 pm PRESENTATION: CUSTOMER JOURNEYS ARE SHIFTING MAKE EVERY INTERACTION COUNT

Allyson Morena - Director of Client Insights & Strategy, Verint
Brendan D - VP of Customer Experience, BJC Healthcare

Customer journeys are no longer linear, their starting point is continuouslyshifting. Every interaction matters. This session explores how AI and Voice of the Customer (VoC) insights help organizations orchestrate journeys and anticipate friction before it becomes a struggle, ensuring seamless conversions at critical moments.

• Emerging Trend: AI + VoC combine to eliminate friction and boost conversions.

• Best Practice: Anticipate and prevent friction through real-time orchestration.

• CX Tools: Modern platforms turn feedback into immediate action across channels.

1:40 pm - 2:30 pm NETWORKING LUNCH BREAK

2:30 pm - 3:00 pm 1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

2:30 pm - 3:00 pm THINK TANK: SCALING AI IN CUSTOMER CARE: FROM CONTAINMENT TO CONFIDENCE

Tom Trozzo - Enterprise Data Leader, IBM
Richard Theodore - AI, Analytics & Business Automation Leader, IBM

AI has been in the contact center for years, yet results remain limited: low containment, frustrated customers, overwhelmed agents, and stalled adoption due to trust and security concerns. The problem isn’t AI, it’s the absence of orchestration.

This Think Tank examines how multi-agent orchestration transforms fragmented AI into a coordinated CX system, powering intuitive multimodal interactions, augmenting human agents, and driving real resolution at scale. It also addresses the critical barrier to adoption: trust. By embedding governance, security, and traceability at the core, orchestrated AI enables leaders to move decisively from pilots to enterprise impact. After this session, you’ll clearly see how to:

Drive real AI impact across customer care, not just pilots

Shift CX from reactive to predictive while empowering human agents

Scale agentic AI with governance and trust by design

3:05 pm - 3:35 pm PRESENTATION: PROVING CX ROI INSIDE THE ORGANISATION

Matthew Wilson - Vice President, Customer Experience & Operations Excellence, Hotwire Communications

Boards want evidence that CX is a growth driver, not just a cost. This discussion will focus on building the internal business case and proving ROI

in financial terms stakeholder’s respect.

• Moving from “soft” metrics to hard financial KPIs.

• Building ROI frameworks that resonate with CFOs and investors.

• Sharing how peers are winning internal buy-in with data

Matthew Wilson

Vice President, Customer Experience & Operations Excellence
Hotwire Communications

See Bio

3:35 pm - 4:05 pm PRESENTATION: CLOSING THE CRITICAL INSIGHTS GAP BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR CUSTOMERS

Skai Kang - VP of Customer Success, unitQ
Dana Infante - Chief of Staff, DraftKings

Customers experience your products and services in real-time, yet most organizations learn about issues weeks or even months later. This critical insights gap allows problems to escalate into major customer escalations, revenue loss, operational strain, and brand damage. While customers encounter friction instantly, internal teams remain a step behind, relying on delayed signals and incomplete dashboards.

This session shows how leading companies are closing that gap by detecting problems earlier, surfacing friction traditional tools miss, and aligning Product, Engineering, CX, and Operations around a shared, real- time view of the customer experience.

4:10 pm - 4:40 pm 1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

4:45 pm - 5:15 pm 1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

5:25 pm - 5:55 pm PRESENTATION: HOW TO BUILD VOICE AGENTS THAT ACTUALLY WORK

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: from getting started and writing effective evaluation frameworks to QAing conversations and cloning lifelike voices that align with a brand. You’ll learn practical techniques and hard-won lessons from deploying production agents at scale that sound realistic and drive measurable business results.

5:55 pm - 6:25 pm PANEL DISCUSSION: SIMPLYFYING COMPLEXITY: PERSONALIZATION THAT WORKS ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Matt Prainito - Managing Director - Airport Operations, Alaska Airlines
Sree Sreedhararaj - Chief Technology Officer, Ipsy
Natalie Barnes - VP of Product Management & Product Design, Zumba

Personalization often becomes overcomplicated, leading to inconsistency. This closing session explores how to focus on what works and make it

sustainable.

• Removing unnecessary friction from delivery.

• Choosing automation vs. humanization wisely.

• Building models that scale across industries.

Matt Prainito

Managing Director - Airport Operations
Alaska Airlines

See Bio

Sree Sreedhararaj

Chief Technology Officer
Ipsy

See Bio

Natalie Barnes

VP of Product Management & Product Design
Zumba

See Bio

6:25 pm - 6:30 pm CHAIR'S CLOSING REMARKS

Michela Brooks - Consultant, Temple & Theory

Michela Brooks

Consultant
Temple & Theory

See Bio

Agenda Day One

6:30 pm - 8:30 pm PRE-EVENT NETWORKING DRINKS RECEPTION

1

7:30 am - 8:30 am REGISTRATION, BREAKFAST AND NETWORKING

8:30 am - 8:35 am PROGRAM DIRECTOR'S WELCOME

8:35 am - 8:45 am CHAIR'S OPENING REMARKS

Michela Brooks

8:45 am - 9:15 am KEYNOTE PRESENTATION: AI THAT MATTERS: MOVING FROM EXPERIMENTS TO EVERYDAY IMPACT

9:15 am - 9:45 am PRESENTATION: ARCHITECTING A GLOBAL CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE IN THE AGE OF AGENTIC AI

Sponsored by: Language IO

Heather Morgan Shoemaker

9:45 am - 10:15 am NETWORKING BINGO

1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

THINK TANK: FROM DATA TO DECISIONS: CX THAT MOVES AT CUSTOMER SPEED

Sponsored by: Celebrus

1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

THINK TANK: CALL TO ACTION: DESIGNING AN OPTIMIZED CALL ESCALATION STRATEGY

Sponsored by: Modulate

Mike Pappas

12:00 pm - 12:30 pm PRESENTATION: BREAKING THE RULES: SIMPLYFYING FRAGMENTED OPERATING MODELS TO FIX CX AT SCALE

Dave Ugan

12:30 pm - 1:00 pm PRESENTATION: CUSTOMER JOURNEYS ARE SHIFTING MAKE EVERY INTERACTION COUNT

Sponsored by: VERINT

Allyson Morena

Brendan D

Sponsored by: Gate One

Suzi Bentley-Tanner

1:40 pm - 2:30 pm NETWORKING LUNCH BREAK

Sponsored by: IBM

Tom Trozzo

Richard Theodore

3:05 pm - 3:35 pm PRESENTATION: PROVING CX ROI INSIDE THE ORGANISATION

Matthew Wilson

3:35 pm - 4:05 pm PRESENTATION: CLOSING THE CRITICAL INSIGHTS GAP BETWEEN YOU AND YOUR CUSTOMERS

Sponsored by: unitQ

Skai Kang

Dana Infante

4:10 pm - 4:40 pm 1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

4:45 pm - 5:15 pm 1:1 BUSINESS MEETINGS

5:25 pm - 5:55 pm PRESENTATION: HOW TO BUILD VOICE AGENTS THAT ACTUALLY WORK

Sponsored by: Simple AI

5:55 pm - 6:25 pm PANEL DISCUSSION: SIMPLYFYING COMPLEXITY: PERSONALIZATION THAT WORKS ACROSS INDUSTRIES

Matt Prainito

Sree Sreedhararaj

Natalie Barnes

6:25 pm - 6:30 pm CHAIR'S CLOSING REMARKS

Michela Brooks

6:30 pm - 10:00 pm PUTT & CONNECT: A CX SOCIAL - JOIN US FOR OUR OFFSITE DRINKS RECEPTION AT PUTTSHACK DANIA BEACH

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