AI continues to reshape the insights function, and the key question for many insights practitioners now is not whether to adopt it, but who controls it and how. As big CXM vendors embed LLMs into their platforms, synthetic data matures as a category and AI-native customer intelligence players deliver insights at scale, insights teams could either be the function leading how AI is used within the discipline, or could be recast as blockers as businesses seek to "democratize" data, or bypassed as buying shifts towards data functions. 

In this panel discussion, Jack Austin, Commercial Insights Lead at Virgin Media O2, and Bill Staikos, Chief Customer Officer of Be Customer Led and former Head of CX at BNY Mellon, JP Morgan and Credit Suisse, will come together to make the case that insights and CX teams should sit at the center of the AI agenda, not least because they own the vast corpus of survey data and customer context that makes AI systems are built on. The discussion will dig into the buy-vs-build dilemma with an honest look at the realities of easier building but significant maintenance and governance. We'll also tackle the synthetic data question, exploring where it can genuinely help and where over-reliance can be risky. 

Attendees will learn:

• Why insights and CX teams should own AI and how to stay central as buying power shifts towards data and IT functions.
• How to approach build-vs-buy realistically, with a view of where building in-house can make sense and where the maintenance can be prohibitive.
• Where synthetic data adds value versus where it's over-trusted, and how to balance AI testing with genuine customer contact and feedback.

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Most quality management programs still run on hindsight, based on a small sample of interactions, often reviewed days or weeks after the fact, long after the moment to course-correct has passed.

Agentic quality management (AQM) closes that gap: AI agents review member interactions as they happen, giving contact centers a real-time view of quality and emerging trends.

In this session, Five9's Suraj Khanna, Lead Product Manager, and Gautam Mourya, Senior Product Manager, will walk through how Advia Credit Union has put AQM into practice. Since moving from manual, sample-based reviews to AQM, Advia reports its quality score from 90 percent to 94.46 percent, gaining visibility into every member conversation rather than a small sample. We will look at what changed in the QA workflow, how supervisors spend coaching time now, and what it took to get there.

Attendees will learn:

• Where agentic QA changes the economics of quality management, and where sampling still holds up
• How Advia Credit Union used AQM to raise its quality score and strengthen coaching
• Practical steps for bringing agentic quality management into your own contact center

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Traditional research tells you what consumers declare but rarely about the context of those declarations, particularly on shifts. Meanwhile, a large, fast-moving signal sits untapped: what consumers say and do across social media and search behaviour, most importantly how those behaviours changed over time.

In this fireside chat, Narek Garit, Global Commercial Analytics Manager at The HEINEKEN Company, shares how to integrate real-time consumer voice into an internal conversational AI platform to give deeper insights to marketers quickly and in plain language. The goal is agility, equipping marketers to react to trends and shifts in sentiment and to understand the "why" behind the numbers.

This session will provide a practical walk through of Narek's approach at HEINEKEN. We'll explore why "rubbish in, rubbish out" makes content formatting and guardrails more important than the model itself and why the smartest teams reverse-engineer from the business objective rather than building a vast data lake and hoping for value. Narek will also share his approach to measuring consumer voice, making the case that, much like a focus group, its real worth lies in qualitative understanding rather than a manufactured ROI figure.

Attendees will learn:

• How to complement survey data with real-time "say and do" signals to uncover the "why" behind consumer behaviour and democratize insights.
• How to make an LLM useful for insights, including formatting content for retrieval, building guardrails to mitigate hallucinations, and keeping customer data secure.
• Why consumer voice should often be detached from hard ROI calculations, and how a focus-group mindset leads to more honest decision-making.

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• How to quantify the cost of getting CX and UX wrong, and the value of validating early.
• How to connect design maturity to meaurable business outcomes, using Hyatt's journey as the model.
• How to translate user research into the operational and revenue metrics leaders will act on.

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While many organizations may know how to map a journey, not many keep those maps alive once they've been drawn. As Louise Williams, Customer Lifecycle Management Lead at Lloyd's Bank says, many teams "map it, put it in a drawer and forget about it". True value, however, comes from treating journey management as a circular and ongoing process, layering key metrics and insights to expose pain points and regularly reviewing to monitor progress.

• How to move from one-off journey mapping to a live management loop, keeping maps current and tied to delivery.
• How to build a measurement framework that balances cross- and individual- journey metrics to prove the effectiveness of CX design
• Implementing journey management and live maps at scale across multiple brands and product lines

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• Why high-quality data and knowledge are the foundation of effective AI in insights and how to get there
• How to identify where human judgement is critical in the insights workflow, and which parts can safely be automated
• How to build a stronger business case for voice of customer by reframing it around the cost of uninformed decisions rather than programROI

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