The event where CX leaders tackle AI's hardest questions

Sponsored by HireHoratio

For the first time in the history of commerce, your customer's AI is making the purchase decision before they ever get to your site. It did the research, narrowed the field, and sent them your way. They arrive closer to buying than any ad or search result has ever gotten them. But they also arrive having just had a conversation with something that knew them. The open question is whether your experience can close that gap. This year's keynote: AI that walks a customer from browse to checkout. Support that turns requests into revenue. Every channel, one conversation. A year of shipped product, live demos, and where we're taking it from here.

Joseph Ansanelli

Co-Founder at Gladly

AI doesn't arrive fully trained—but many teams still treat it like plug-and-play software. The result: stalled pilots, inconsistent experiences, and AI that underperforms. In this fireside chat, CX leaders from Condé Nast and Smith Optics share how they approached AI like a team member, not a tool. You'll hear how they operationalized onboarding through knowledge base optimization, designed conversations that preserve brand voice, built QA loops to catch issues early, and continuously trained AI to improve accuracy over time. They'll share what it really takes to move from pilot to production, including timelines, resourcing, and how they measured progress—so you can build AI that actually improves with use.

Julie McGinnis

Customer Care Supervisor at Smith Optics

Mike Beaubrun

Director, Global Head of Customer Experience at Condé Nast

Every customer conversation is a potential revenue moment—but most CX teams leave money on the table. Benjamin Devey, Sr. Director of Customer Experience at Ollie, shares how he transformed his team from cost center to growth driver, lowering CAC and increasing customer lifetime value. You'll hear how Ollie built a CX sales function that uses proactive chat to convert visitors, deployed SMS to retain at-risk customers, and gave team members the tools to turn cancellations into save opportunities. He'll cover how to align CX and ecommerce goals, coach teams for consultative revenue conversations, and use AI to free people for high-value moments. Leave with a practical framework to turn CX interactions into revenue.

Ben Devey

Sr. Director of Customer Experience at Ollie

Every CX organization faces the same decision: build your own AI, buy a platform, or modernize your existing system. But it's a business decision—the wrong choice can drain resources across technology, finance, and customer experience for years. This discussion provides a leadership framework for making that decision. You'll explore why modernization matters more than features, how architectural design impacts AI and CX metrics, and how to quantify total cost of ownership for each stakeholder. Leave with a path to cross-functional consensus on AI that actually engages customers.

Jim Rodden

Chief People Officer at MaryRuth's

Kimberly Spence

Manager, CX Tools & Enablement at Metropolis

As AI automates routine tasks, the human workday has gotten more challenging. Frontline teams are almost exclusively dealing with the most complex, emotionally taxing, and high-stakes human interactions. Without strong leadership, this workflow shift could turn into a crisis. To foster well-being and prevent attrition of top talent, leaders must actively architect resilience. In this session, Tracy Abzug, LCSW-S, TaskUs’ Senior Manager of Wellness & Resiliency, redefines operational leadership for the AI age. She’ll talk about the move beyond traditional KPIs to psychological safety becoming a leading indicator of ROI. You will learn how to implement a leadership framework that makes it easier to anticipate the unspoken needs of a high-pressure workforce, where sustained high performance is fueled by proactive, science-backed programs.

Tracy Abzug, LCSW-S

Senior Manager, Wellness and Resiliency at TaskUs

Most brands have a pilot. Almost nobody has a plan for what comes after — and that gap is where AI value either compounds or stalls. Christian Eberle shares the three-phase framework that separates brands that stay stuck at pilot from brands that scale and keep expanding. He covers the mistakes most teams make at each stage and what to do instead — so the audience leaves with something they can actually use on Monday.

Christian Eberle

Head of AI Solutions at Gladly

When AI automates the routine, your team's role fundamentally transforms—from handling high-volume conversations to solving complex problems and building relationships. This session explores how to redesign roles for the AI era: what skills to hire for, how training programs need to evolve, setting fair performance goals when case complexity rises, and emerging specialist roles like AI Trainers and Conversation Designers. Learn how Crate&Barrel is rethinking job descriptions, interview scorecards, and career pathing to retain and motivate their team. Learn change management strategies that help people embrace AI—and the more interesting work that comes with it.

Melissa Fye

Manager, Innovation and Improvement at Crate&Barrel

Every customer who contacts your AI goes on a journey. Most teams only measure one moment in that journey — and miss what's actually happening everywhere else. In this session, Lauren Giosa and Joe Scheip introduce a four-stage lifecycle framework for measuring AI performance end-to-end: from whether AI had a fair opportunity to engage, to whether the resolution actually held. Every stage has a metric in Gladly today. Reading them in sequence is what separates teams that understand their AI programs from teams that just have dashboards.

Lauren Giosa

Manager, AI Strategy and Solutions at Gladly

Support conversations are your most valuable, underutilized asset, yet most organizations extract that value too slowly and too late. Ryan Millner, CEO of Unwrap, joins Bryan Riter (Deckers) and Tim Wickes (Tecovas) to discuss how leading companies use AI-powered Customer Intelligence to surface emerging issues, resolution patterns, and churn drivers in near real time, requiring no manual processes. Attendees will leave with a framework for evaluating their CX analytics and practical guidance on deploying customer intelligence at scale.

Ryan Millner

Co-founder & CEO at Unwrap

Bryan Riter

Director, Customer Care at Deckers

Tim Wickes

Director, Customer Service at Tecovas

Adam Seede

Senior Director, Guest Services / Customer Care at Ulta Beauty

What's actually happening when Gladly AI handles a customer conversation? In this session, engineering leaders Matt Baker and Gerad Suyderhoud walk through the Gladly AI architecture — how intent classification works, how guide routing decisions get made, how quality checks run before a response ever reaches a customer. They'll share what separates teams that get strong results from teams that struggle, take your questions live, and go as deep as the room wants to go. If you're running Gladly AI and want to understand it better, this is the session for you.

Matt Baker

VP Engineering at Gladly

What does efficient scaling actually look like? Not 1:1—where doubling volume means doubling costs—but compounding efficiency, where each improvement enables the next. In this fireside chat, Thomas Harden, Sr. Director of Customer Care at The Black Tux, shares how his team built an operating model for sustainable growth. You'll hear how they achieved 58% AI resolution while maintaining industry high CSAT, reduced tool spend, and shifted team members from order-takers to consultants who handle high-value moments. Come away with practical ideas for automation sequencing, workforce planning, and operating models that scale.

Thomas Harden

Sr. Director Customer Care at The Black Tux

Customer experience is being reshaped by AI—but for executive leaders, the real challenge is proving that investments deliver business impact. Lauren made the same CX AI investment twice. In this session, she shares why. Drawing on her experience evaluating, purchasing, and scaling AI-powered platforms across enterprise and SMB environments, Lauren unpacks how she assessed AI readiness, built executive-aligned success metrics, and tied CX investments to efficiency, growth, and retention. You'll hear what separates AI initiatives that build momentum from those that stall—and the leadership frameworks that gave her confidence to invest again.

Lauren Inman-Semerau

VP Customer Experience at Pact

Retail is entering a new era where customer experience is driven by intelligent systems, not service teams. Narvar is leading this shift with an AI-powered brand hospitality platform that transforms post-purchase into a proactive, one-to-one concierge experience. At the center is NAVI, a real-time digital concierge guiding customers through delivery, issues, and returns with immediate resolution. Powered by IRIS™, Narvar’s intelligence network, it continuously evaluates intent, risk, and value to act autonomously. This enables a new model of risk-free customer experience. With capabilities like Instant Refunds, retailers can issue refunds at the start of a return—removing friction for trusted customers while maintaining control through real-time trust and fraud detection. The result: higher conversion, stronger loyalty, reduced fraud, and new revenue from moments once seen as cost. This session will show how leading brands are using agentic AI to turn post-purchase into a hospitality-driven, risk-managed growth engine.

Mike Barnlund

Sr. Director of Product at Narvar

Your metrics were designed for a pre-AI world—and they're not telling the full story. When AI handles simple, high-volume conversations and humans inherit complex edge cases, traditional KPIs become misleading. Lower handle time might mean you're rushing conversations that need more attention. Higher FCR might just reflect that AI already captured the easy wins. It's time to rebuild your measurement framework for the AI era. You'll learn how to adjust CSAT by case complexity, redefine productivity when volume and effort decouple, evaluate escalation quality, and measure resolution path efficiency—not just whether it resolved, but how many turns it took. Expect to leave equipped with metrics that improve both efficiency and customer outcomes.

Andy Lisk

Vice President, Global Head of Customer Service at StockX

Jesse Wilkinson

Director, Customer Service Platform & Insights at StockX

Voice is AI's toughest channel—the most complex, but also the most personal. Today, 67% of customers still have to repeat themselves when they call. That's fixable. Sasha Borog, Senior Product Manager at Gladly, separates what's ready from what's still maturing. You'll learn which use cases work well today—routine inquiries that represent 30-50% of call volume—and where voice AI still struggles with nuance and complexity. She'll share Gladly's four-lens evaluation framework, realistic resolution targets, cost savings benchmarks, and what's on the roadmap. Leave with a clear approach to assess readiness and design pilots that prove value without overpromising.

Sasha Borog

Senior Product Manager at Gladly

Most companies treat CX as a service function. The best ones treat it as a growth engine. This session moves beyond the service department and into the executive suite—examining the leadership mandates, structural overhauls, and operational infrastructure required to make Customer Experience a company-wide advantage. Learn how to unify data flows across product, revenue, and CX teams, and connect those initiatives directly to the metrics that matter.

Kat Cooper

Head of Marketing at Solidroad

Mark Hughes

Co-Founder & CEO at Solidroad

Kelsey Nash

Sr Director Ops & Systems at Split Pay

Adam C

Head of Customer Experience at Split Pay

Jason Nelson

VP Growth at Gladly

Join us for an unforgettable Gala dinner filled with great food, drinks, live music, and entertainment. We encourage guests to dress in Southern Gala style, or business casual is perfectly welcome too!

Two big things are hitting retail tech leaders at once. AI agents are starting to shop, book, and solve problems on behalf of customers. And AI surfaces like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity are becoming discovery channels where your brand might not even show up. In this panel, CTOs and CDOs from leading retail brands discuss how they're thinking about both. Where does agentic AI actually make sense across discovery, conversion, service, and loyalty? How do you show up when customers ask AI instead of Google? A strategic conversation about what's worth building for and what's worth waiting on.