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.

Di Lyngholm

Director, Website & Creative Services
Fun.com & HalloweenCostumes.com

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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.

Your customers experience every interaction with your company as a single experience. They are rarely interested in how you organize yourself as a company or which teams, squads or verticals are working on different touchpoints. Only if your combined efforts are perceived as a single experience, will customers want to stay. Customers don’t think in channels or touchpoints, they approach your company touchpoints with needs and tasks they want to get done.

In this session, Eelko Lommers, Director Customer Experience Design at zooplus, will share how building experience maturity starts with reframing customer experience as multiple end-to-end journeys, not as a collection of individual touchpoints. The session will explore how zooplus invests in service design and journey architecture to create a shared “journey atlas” allowing teams to see the experience through the customer’s eyes. Paired with strong UX validation and experimentation, teams are enabled to test, measure, and evolve experiences based on real customer behavior.

We’ll also look at how this foundation enables the next wave of customer experiences: aiming for hyper-personalization at scale. By combining modular design systems, data signals, and generative AI, zooplus 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 achieving 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

Eelko Lommers

Director, Experience Design & Innovation
zooplus

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• How digital CX can be used to build trust in high-stakes, low-frequency purchase categories.
• Why consistency and customer control are key drivers of engagement in digital-first brands.
• How design and experience decisions can strengthen credibility and long-term loyalty not just conversion.

Luke Forshaw

Head of Brand & Marketing
Back Market UK

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• How to transition from a linear funnel mindset to fluid, multi-entry digital journeys that reflect real customer behaviour
• Where AI meaningfully enhances engagement and personalisation and where human connection must remain central
• How to balance innovation, privacy and trust while building differentiated digital experiences that make brands the first choice

Liliana Caimacan

Professor of Marketing, Innovation, Strategy, Business Transformation
Hult International Business School

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