CX under pressure: New tech, new threats, new mandate
How CX Leaders can carve a new niche in an ever-more challenging operating environment
August 18, 2026
| Free CX Network Webinar Series
Sabina Onwuka is a multi award winning customer experience consultant, strategist, international keynote speaker, and industry judge, with 25 years of hands on leadership across financial services and the public sector. Recognized among the Top 50 Women Shaping the Future of Customer Experience in 2024, a finalist for Women in CX Leader of the Year 2025, recognized amongst top 50 incredible people shaping CX in 2025 and recently recognized amongst top 50 CX leaders to follow, Sabina has built a reputation as a catalyst for transformative, people centric service delivery.
A passionate coach and mentor, Sabina brings creativity, operational rigor, and a genuine desire to exceed expectations. As the role of the manager is changing, Sabina recently launched The Future Ready Manager Masterclass series to help empower managers to use AI effectively while strengthening empathy, ethics, and leadership. Her ethos bridges technology and compassion, making her a standout voice in ethics driven CX.
Currently serving as Head Customer Services for the Barking and Dagenham Council, Sabina has led major operational transformations. Her most recent achievement involved implementing an inclusive speech analytics and AI platform. This innovation dramatically improved support for vulnerable residents, enabling the council to proactively identify individuals in need, respond with empathy and urgency, and enhance overall accessibility. This innovation won bronze at the esteemed European Contact Centre & Customer Services award in 2025.
Sabina's leadership is defined by combining digital innovation with deep human insight. She successfully transitioned her service teams from traditional office based setups to fully remote, cloud enabled operations, while embedding psychological safety, fostering motivation, and empowering employees to elevate customer interactions.
Day One
9:00 AM CX under pressure: New tech, new threats, new mandate
As a new generation of CX technology promises to deliver frictionless, hyper-efficient experiences, the specialists who have dedicated their careers to exceptional customer outcomes are finding themselves increasingly frozen out of the conversation.
In fact, whether by design or through restructure, many major organizations no longer have a senior executive assigned to advocate for the customer, or own outcomes and relationships at the highest level.
Those who are still able to do this work describe mounting pressure: to deliver more with less, to justify the cost of technologies that remain expensive and experimental, and to prove their value not annually or quarterly, but daily.
The timing is less than ideal. As consumers turn to their AI assistants to discover new brands, products and services, discoverability and relevance are dependent on having an undisputable public track record for superior CX. Operational excellence, outstanding reviews, and coherent, unconflicted knowledge are now the currency of success.
CX Network's editor-in-chief, Melanie Mingas, will host an engaging panel tackling how CX can thrive in an operating environment where business growth is the north star, but the route to it often bypasses the customer. Crucially, the panel will address the question on everybody's mind: Where does CX go from here?
The discussion will cover:
- How CX practitioners can confront emerging threats posed by new tech, global economic pressures and changing job roles.
- The challenges of maintaining relevance as AI transforms the operating environment for organizations and customers.
- The new job roles emerging, and the skills practitioners will need in future.
- Where the opportunities for career development and recognition lie moving forward.
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