CX Innovation Summit

In this opening keynote, Michelle Buckley shares a defining moment in her leadership journey - one customer interaction that revealed a hard truth: great customer care cannot be scripted. What followed was a shift from control to clarity, and from compliance to trust. Through lived experience in high stakes customer environments, Michelle explores how replacing scripts with a clear decision making framework empowered employees to act with confidence, empathy, and accountability. The session sets the tone for the summit by challenging traditional notions of consistency, redefining empowerment, and inviting leaders to rethink how trust, judgment, and customer experience are designed at scale.

AI is no longer experimental in CX, but many organizations are still struggling to translate adoption into consistent performance. In 2026, the conversation shifts from “Can AI help?” to “Where does AI materially improve the experience — and where does it fall short?” This theme explores how CX leaders are scaling AI responsibly, defining success metrics that matter to the business, and embedding intelligence where it improves outcomes.

Discussion Points:

- Moving AI from isolated use cases to end-to-end CX impact
- Measuring CX ROI beyond cost reduction and containment
- Knowing where automation adds value — and where it erodes trust

CX leaders are moving beyond static journey maps toward experience orchestration — where data, automation, and human decisions work together dynamically. This theme explores how organizations are responding to customer behavior as it happens, not after the fact, and what it takes to operationalize CX across fragmented stacks and teams.

Discussion Points:

- Moving beyond journey mapping to real-time orchestration
- Breaking down platform and data silos that disrupt CX continuity
- Redefining ownership across digital, contact center, and frontline teams

In 2026, personalization is less about novelty and more about credibility. CX leaders are balancing predictive insight with governance, relevance with restraint, and automation with accountability. This theme focuses on how organizations are earning trust while still delivering experiences that feel timely, contextual, and genuinely useful.

Discussion Points:

- Designing personalization strategies customers actually trust
- Using predictive insights to anticipate needs, not overwhelm users
- Aligning data governance with CX agility and responsiveness

As AI takes on more frontline CX tasks, the role of human agents is becoming more strategic, not less important. This theme explores how CX leaders are redesigning roles, escalation models, and decision frameworks so that human judgment is applied where it matters most — complex issues, emotional moments, and trust-defining interactions.

Discussion Points:

- Determining when AI should act and when humans must lead
- Redesigning contact center roles for judgment, not repetition
- Sustaining experience quality without burning out teams

We are living through the first technological transformation in history, moving faster than people can adapt to meet it. The risk isn't the technology, it's the choices leaders make right now about sequencing, investment, and people.

In this thought provoking, story-driven keynote, Wyndham Hotels & Resorts SVP Michael Mahar draws real deployment learnings across the world's largest franchise hotel company to challenge how leaders think about AI, what to invest in, what to avoid, and why the human side of this transformation isn't the soft part. It's the whole game.

AI will net more jobs than it eliminates. But only if we lead it that way. Life will never be the same. What kind of leader you choose to be right now isn't a future question — it's already being answered.

As a continuation of the Catalyst Mission track, these sessions will establish a strategic blueprint to chart the pathway toward identifying a solution.

Track 1: From AI Pilots to CX Performance
Track 2: Experience Orchestration at Scale
Track 3: Impactful Trust-Drive Personalization
Track 4: The Human Role in an Intelligent CX

Crafting a successful customer experience (and as leaders, our employees are also our customers) requires the utilization of effective communication. This is not as easy as it sounds. Every interaction provides an opportunity to delight or destroy the customer experience, Together, we will identify and illustrate the keys to success, which include listening skills, verbal and non-verbal language, empathy and compassion. We will also explore cultural competency and communicating with customers who come from other countries and/or speak languages other than English.

Continuing your mission tracks, having built the blueprint we now enter the reckoning – a decisive phase where insights are rigorously challenged and crystallised into solution-led outcomes.

Track 1: From AI Pilots to CX Performance
Track 2: Experience Orchestration at Scale
Track 3: Impactful Trust-Drive Personalization
Track 4: The Human Role in an Intelligent CX