For many digital teams, search and recommendations are foundational to the customer experience, yet they’re often built on fragmented, legacy systems that struggle to keep up with rising expectations. As shoppers become more specific and accustomed to personalized experiences, “no results found” is no longer acceptable.

In this session, Dianna Lyngholm, Director of Creative & Website at HalloweenCostumes.com (part of umbrella brand, Fun.com) will share how the online retailer modernized its digital search and discovery experience by rethinking how AI-powered recommendations and search work together. After years of relying on a combination of homegrown search and third-party recommendation tools, the team took a research-led approach to upgrading its stack, evaluating several solutions, A/B testing, and prioritizing relevance, personalization, and long-tail discovery over quick fixes.

The session will unpack what it takes to implement modern, AI-driven discovery on a highly customized platform. From handling cold-start search and seasonal demand to aligning internal teams, our discussion will take a look at the challenges involved in upgrading search and recommendations systems and reveal how Fun.com approached them. Attendees will also hear how better search and recommendation design can unlock measurable CX and revenue gains while maintaining internal trust and control.

Attendees will learn:

• How to modernize search and recommendations to support more personalized digital journeys.
• Lessons from implementing AI-driven discovery on a custom platform, including change management and internal adoption.
• How improving relevance and long-tail search can drive measurable CX improvements and commercial impact.

The way customers buy products online is on the brink of a radical transformation. While traditional e-commerce assumes that human beings will navigate websites and make online purchases, agentic shopping flips that model. Instead of browsing, customers will delegate much of the journey to intelligent AI agents that navigate digital storefronts, and complete tasks (and purchases!) on their behalf. This is already happening. Google announced “a new era of agentic commerce” earlier in the year, citing tools that act autonomously and brands that are preparing for them.

Research is predicting that customer interactions driven by AI agents will grow by 1000 percent by 2027. In this session, we’ll explore what this means for the future of digital CX. We’ll unpack how autonomous agents are poised to take over many elements of customer journeys, from discovery and personalization to purchase execution and post-purchase support.

We’ll delve into the implications for brands and CX leaders, looking at what it takes to prepare infrastructure for agentic interaction and how customer expectations around trust and control are likely to shift.

Attendees will learn:

• What agentic shopping is and how autonomous AI agents will reshape digital customer journeys.
• How agentic commerce changes the relationship between brands and customers, creating new expectations for trust and transparency.
• The strategic implications for digital CX infrastructure and leadership as online shopping evolves from user-driven to agent-assisted experiences.

The next few years are likely to see AI agents take over as the foundation for digital CX in many industries, with 70 percent of consumers seeing a widening performance gap between companies that excel with AI and those that dont. For CX leaders, this poses a challenge: how to innovate and deploy autonomous systems while maintaining trust and compliance.

As adoption accelerates, however, so too do questions around trust and transparency. CX Network research found that over one third of CX practitioners list “awareness of how AI works and uses their data” as a top consumer trend on 2026. In this session, we will unpack how organizations can strike the balance between innovation and responsibility in the age of autonomous AI. We’ll take a deep dive into what trust means in practice, from transparency and explainability to guardrails and data governance, and explore ways in which CX leaders can work these into overarching strategy.

Attendees will learn:

• Why trust matters more than ever and how AI agents impact it.
• How to build AI governance into innovation from the beginning to balance tech advancement with sustainable transparency and ethics.
• Practical approaches to compliance and human oversight, including human-in-the-loop design and explainability frameworks.

CX doesn’t happen in silos (even when organisations are structured that way), and customers don’t think in terms of channels or products. They come to businesses with needs and tasks they want to complete. In this session, a senior CX leader, from a leading European retailer will share how building experience maturity starts with reframing CX as an end-to-end journey, not a collection of touchpoints.

The session will explore how the retailer has invested in service design and journey architecture to create a shared “journey atlas” allowing teams to zoom out from workflows and see the experience through the customer’s eyes. Paired with strong UX validation and experimentation, this approach enables teams to test, measure, and evolve experiences based on real customer behaviour.

We’ll also look at how this foundation enables the next wave of digital CX: hyper-personalisation at scale. By combining modular design systems, data signals, and generative AI, the retailer is experimenting with adaptive experiences that respond to customer context in real time, delivering relevance without sacrificing ethics, trust, or creativity.

Attendees will learn:

• Why journey architecture is critical for moving from fragmented touchpoints to coherent digital experiences

• How modular design systems and experimentation enable scalable, customer-centric personalisation

• What it takes to balance AI-driven relevance with ethical data use and human-centred design

Digital and physical experiences are often blurred, but many organizations still measure CX through fragmented, product-centric lenses, missing the full picture.

In this session, a senior CX design leader from a major US homeware retailers will share how her team is moving towards a full-journey model. The focus is on centralizing insights from multiple sources and amalgamating it into a shared “journey atlas” that reflects how customers actually move across channels, not how teams are structured internally.

The session will explore the practicalities of making this shift: building shared language around journeys, mapping existing listening signals into a common framework, and pairing customer insight with frontline employee perspective to identify hotspots for innovation. You’ll hear how she approaches measuring journey health, defining journey-level OKRs, and working with product and store teams to prioritize CX improvements.

This is an honest look at what it takes to manage journeys in a complex and truly omnichannel environment.

Attendees will learn:

• How to move from product- and channel-centric insight to a journey-centric view of CX.
• Practical approaches to centralizing and comparing customer feedback across channels at scale.
• How journey-level measurement and shared language enable better prioritization and CX decision-making.
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