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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Everyone wants to implement AI, but many teams overestimate their readiness, costing months of implementation delays and missed ROI. AI agents require aligned stakeholders, well-governed data, clear workflows and established measurement metrics. Without this, what may look promising in demos breaks down in practice.

In this session, Shailesh Nalawadi, AI Transformation Architect at delight.ai, will give a practical introduction to AI readiness, breaking down what businesses actually need for successful deployments. We'll uncover the secrets to 90-day implementation schedules and identify key challenges to help attendees pinpoint readiness gaps and come out with a "readiness score" to take to stakeholder conversations.

Attendees will learn:

• The three central elements of AI readiness: organizational, infrastructure and strategic – and why the three must be connected.
• What it looks like to be "AI ready" from people to systems to operations, with real-world examples of successful deployments
• Where to get started based on your own organizational maturity, resources and business goals.

Sponsored by: delight.ai

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Shailesh Nalawadi

Head of Product, Customer Success & Forward Deployment
delight.ai

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Digital CX leaders are navigating a major shift in the zeitgeist. Customers are no longer interacting solely within brand-owned channels, and brands no longer fully control customer journeys. Customers don't move predictably from awareness to purchase, they enter (and exit) at multiple touchpoints, influenced by social content, communities, video commerce and peer engagement. Many organizations, however, still design around outdated funnel models, focusing heavily on point of sale while overlooking the wider ecosystem of interaction and influence shaping customer decisions.

LLMs, predictive modelling and emerging agentic commerce infrastructure are reshaping how and why decisions are made, sometimes before customers even reach a website or app. This introduces both opportunity and complexity because, while AI enables greater relevance and efficiency, it can also reduce transparency and explainability while amplifying poor data and making experience outcomes harder to interpret.

In this session, Anne-Kathrine Nissen, Experience Design Lead at H&M, and Liliana Caimacan, drawing on her background in marketing, transformation and innovation, as well as her work in academia and consulting, to explore what it means to lead digital CX in this new environment.

Attendees will learn:

• How to design and manage digital journeys when AI systems increasingly influence or mediate customer decisions
• Where AI meaningfully enhances engagement and personalisation and where human connection must remain central
• How to align tech, commercial and design stakeholders around a journey-led, future-ready digital CX strategy

Liliana Caimacan

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

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Anne-Kathrine Nissen

Experience Design Lead
H&M

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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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