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.

Bill Staikos

Chief Customer Officer
Be Customer Led

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Jack Austin

Commercial Insight Lead - Consumer Strategy and Insight
Virgin Media O2

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The emergence of agentic commerce since the beginning on 2026 marks a change in how products and services are discovered and purchased, with AI agents doing the whole process on behalf of customers who no longer have to interact with the businesses they're buying from at all. McKinsey has predicted that AI agents could execute $3 to $5 trillion of commerce by 2030. AI agents, though, will not recommend – or purchase from – businesses they cannot understand or trust: they depend on structured, real-time data. Businesses that don't have this will be left behind. 

• What agentic commerce actually means for CX and insights teams and what customer data you need to ensure discoverability.
• Practical principles for building a data foundation that AI agents can access and act on.
• How to measure your current data readiness, identifying where customer data may fall short and how to plug the gaps.

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.

Narek Garit

Global Commercial Analytics Manager
HEINEKEN

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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.

Paul Weaver

VP, Digital Design
Hyatt Hotels

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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

Louise Williams

Customer Lifecycle Management Lead
Lloyd's Banking Group

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