Contact centre leaders face an unprecedented opportunity and imperative to step up. As AI transforms operations, the question isn’t whether leadership matters, but whether leaders will seize the moment before the opportunity disappears. The challenge is stark: leaders must prove they can deliver both cost reduction and quality improvement, or risk losing their ability to lead entirely.

This session explores what it takes to succeed when the old excuses no longer apply. You’ll discover how to break free from the self-imposed “no one listens to me” mindset and demonstrate the power to transform customer journeys whilst reducing costs. We’ll examine why this is fundamentally a people challenge, even as technology raises the stakes, and explore the critical dance between human capability and technological advancement. Through TUI’s journey, Ramón will reveal how seemingly impossible objectives (achieving both cost efficiency and scale) are entirely achievable when leaders master this balance and stand up to make the difference.

AI was meant to empty the contact centre. Instead, it’s creating new urgency and complexity. In this fireside chat, Dustin Laidsaar joins incoming Chief Operating Officer of Automic, Margot Birbeck to explore what’s really happening as AI collides with customer experience: from fast-shifting Gartner predictions to vendor chaos and a confronting truth that customers may already be more AI savvy than the teams supporting them.

Ahead of the session, attendees will test their AiQ through a candid AI-led conversation, with results shared live. Expect an honest discussion on navigating CX’s messiest transformation, one where the old playbook is fading and standing still is the biggest risk.

Leaders need new capabilities to organise teams and manage both AI systems and human agents effectively.

Join your peers to discuss:
How do you develop leaders who can manage both people and AI systems?
How do leaders support agents handling more complex work?
What role does AI-powered coaching play in leader development?
What capabilities do leaders need to support specialist agents?
How do you develop career pathways when leadership roles are shrinking?

Early attrition in contact centres is one of the most expensive problems in hiring. When hiring decisions rely on weak signals, candidates arrive without a realistic picture of what the role demands. Job shock sets in, performance suffers, and turnover follows.

Leading organisations are turning to AI to solve it and for good reason. AI can generate stronger hiring signals than any method that came before it. But the unlock is explainability: signals that hiring teams can see, understand and act on with confidence.

This session explores how organisations are putting this into practice, building more predictive hiring processes that reduce avoidable attrition and create frontline teams that actually stick.

Excellence in contact centre operations starts with three fundamentals: streamlined processes, empowered culture, and engaged leadership. Many organisations rush to implement AI expecting instant savings, only to discover that overlaying technology on broken processes amplifies existing problems. Knowledge management becomes complex, teams resist changes they don’t understand, and promised efficiencies never materialise. The difference between success and failure? Getting your human operating system right first; through persistent communication, constant reinforcement, and genuine frontline engagement.

This session reveals how to build contact centres that run faster and perform better by establishing the right foundations before adding AI. You’ll learn to identify the critical performance metrics that will drive improvement, create feedback systems that quickly spot and fix what’s broken and build cultural readiness that transforms technology fears into innovation enthusiasm. We’ll share practical strategies for managing uncertainty while moving forward with pilots and using early wins to gain momentum on the benefits of process improvement for both customers and our teams.

The most expensive minute in CX is the one spent waiting in a queue. The issue is not just adding AI. It is fixing rigid voice systems built on static IVRs, seat-based licensing, and cold-start transfers.

In this session, see how conversational orchestration resolves issues before they reach an agent. Surface intent in real time, automate verification, and guide smarter interactions from the first touchpoint. Learn how to build your own contact centre with vibe coding using Twilio. Design, test, and launch fast without legacy constraints.

We will also cover the Elastic Contact Centre model, where consumption-based pricing removes idle seat costs and scales with demand. The result is a flexible, intelligent contact centre where agents focus on the moments that matter.

Change management has become the defining challenge of modern contact centres, with employees experiencing constant, relentless transformation that tests trust and engagement at every turn. As AI reshapes the workforce and increases cognitive load for human-handled cases, creating a resilient culture isn’t optional, it’s essential for survival. With vicarious trauma reaching a tipping point and customer demands intensifying, contact centre workers face unprecedented pressure that demands proactive, comprehensive support.

This session examines how organisations are building winning contact centre cultures rooted in identity, purpose, and psychosocial safety. You’ll hear practical strategies for employee engagement and flexibility, including self-managed shifts and pre-approvals that deliver measurable reductions in turnover and unplanned absences. Ultimately, this is about creating environments where people feel safe to speak up, providing dedicated counselling access, and building non-judgemental support systems that address psychosocial challenges no industry can afford to ignore.

Most CX AI conversations start in one place: cost reduction. This session starts somewhere different – to reframe AI entirely: from Efficiency AI to Opportunity AI and doing things that were never before possible. The presentation moves through four shifts:

1. How AI transforms what you already have through proactive care at scale, deeper resolution quality, true personalisation, instant knowledge amplification, not by replacing processes, but by making them unrecognisable in quality.

2. What becomes possible for the first time: relationship-based care for every customer, emotional continuity across every interaction.

3. What this means for your people; the skills that require investment and the ones AI can support, and why human agents become more important, not less.

4. How to design a system where human and AI make each other better, anchored by one clear principle: ROI = Trust.

It’s what you would build for customers if constraints disappeared entirely.

Sustaining your energy and vitality in the face of burnout requires some diligent routines and habits which we will explore in this workshop.

In this highly interactive session, we will learn various tools and techniques to help you stay energised and consistently perform at your best, without compromising your wellbeing!

You’ll also learn ways to stay calm and focused when in high-pressure environments and how to optimise your productivity and performance every-day.

Come along, have some fun and learn some valuable tips to stay energised!

AI has moved from experimentation to expectation in customer experience. Business leaders are under pressure to deliver impact fast while navigating complex systems, fragmented data, and competing priorities. The upside is clear: smarter automation, more productive agents, and better customer outcomes. The reality is often more uneven.

In this workshop presentation, Cresta’s Chief Customer Officer & Field CTO Sai Vivek will share candid perspectives on what it really takes to deploy AI for CX in large enterprises. Drawing from real-world Fortune 500 implementations, we will explore where initiatives go off track and why. From early decisions to execution, small missteps can compound into stalled rollouts or solutions that never scale.

From a contact centre perspective, where do you start from an AI space? Most companies recognise they need to do something, yet many aren’t getting what they expected. AI doesn’t always deliver promised savings, knowledge management is complex, and AHT often goes up rather than down because agents handle more complex issues. Crucially, it’s human component piece becomes the critical factor for success; how overcommunication, constant reinforcement of messaging, and explaining the ‘why’ to frontline teams determines whether transformation thrives or fails.

In this keynote presentation, Aymen Ismail, Customer Services Director at smart Europe, will share his experience leading innovation and transformation to build an award-winning customer service strategy, one powered by the harmony of human and technological. He will highlight how the integration of technology and data-driven insights has shaped his approach. Aymen will also explore how embracing a disruptive mindset has driven business growth and delivered measurable ROI on the time and resources invested.

As the industry shifts toward agent-to-agent interactions, true personalisation requires owning your AI architecture. Gemini Enterprise for Customer Experience is Google Cloud’s agentic solution that unifies search, shopping, and service into a single intelligent solution. By leveraging Google’s latest Gemini models, businesses can deploy and own both prebuilt and configurable agents.

Acting as a proactive digital concierge, the platform uses complex reasoning to understand intent and execute multi-step tasks while honouring customer preferences and consent. Join us to learn how to build and deploy transformational signature AI agents with breakthrough speed.

Leaders need new capabilities to organise teams and manage both AI systems and human agents effectively.

Join your peers to discuss:
How do you develop leaders who can manage both people and AI systems?
How do leaders support agents handling more complex work?
What role does AI-powered coaching play in leader development?
What capabilities do leaders need to support specialist agents?
How do you develop career pathways when leadership roles are shrinking?

As the hype around AI reaches a fever pitch, organisations are left asking: what is the real state of the market, and how do we actually deliver? This session provides a pragmatic perspective on the journey toward agentic AI in the call centre. We’ll start by examining the current landscape, honestly assessing technology uptake beyond the hype and noise.

The key learns you’ll walk away with are: a market reality check at how organisations are actually implementing AI today and where “the pack” really stands; understanding the anatomy of a conversation by deconstructing interactions on how to deliver Governed AI and derive real ROI from every part of the dialogue; an ROI roadmap to minimise time-to-value and deliver wins from day one; an automation vision for achieving immediate results while keeping a strategic eye on the goal of agentic automation.

This is a session for leaders to move past the theory and implement a roadmap with long-term vision.

As AI and automation take on routine enquiries, the real challenge is helping people thrive in a changing world. Technology is reshaping customer service – but its true power lies in how it enables our teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

In this session, we’ll explore the human side of Contact Centre transformation: how we’ve brought our people on the journey, supported them through uncertainty, and built resilience in an era of rapid disruption. We’ll share what worked, what didn’t, and how we navigated ambiguity when plans went off track. Discover how tech-driven innovation has strengthened our people’s ability to solve complex problems and embody our brand, creating better outcomes for customers and more empowered teams.