CX Today

In this interview from CCW Vegas 2026, Mike Begala, General Manager for the Americas at Casio, shares how the company is transforming its customer service operation from a traditional, transactional support model into a relationship-driven customer experience strategy.

Mike discusses the challenges of modernising long-standing systems, why empowering frontline agents is the foundation of great customer service, and how Casio is using RingCentral's cloud communications and AI capabilities to improve quality, efficiency, and customer satisfaction. Rather than rushing into AI, he advocates a measured approach—"crawl, walk, then run"—focusing on clear objectives, strong partnerships, and bringing employees along on the journey.

The conversation explores the realities of digital transformation, the importance of integrating AI with existing knowledge and business systems, and why the biggest competitive advantage still comes from engaged people delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Whether you're planning your own AI roadmap or looking to modernise your contact centre, Mike offers practical insights on balancing technology, process, and people to create lasting value for both customers and organisations.

Rob Scott sits down with Pasquale DeMaio (VP, Amazon Connect), Deepak Nair (SVP, AI Transformation, Citizens Bank), and Justin Robbins (Founder and Principal Analyst, Metric Sherpa) fresh off the main stage at CCW 2026 in Las Vegas.

Pasquale made a deliberate statement on stage: deflection is dead. In this debrief, the three unpack what killed it, what replaces it, and why half of all agentic AI pilots never reach production.

They cover the governance conversations that have to happen before AI touches a customer, where agentic AI works in financial services and where it doesn't, and whether CX leaders are even asking the right questions when evaluating this technology.

Plus: Justin delivers his verdict on three days at CCW — genuinely different, or the same story told better?

The full CCW 2026 coverage is at cxtoday.com.

What happens when a critical AI model suddenly becomes unavailable, and your customer-facing workflows depend on it?
In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with Ashish Nagar, Founder and CEO of Level AI, about the enterprise risks behind AI vendor dependency, model availability, and data control. Following reports of Anthropic withdrawing frontier models after U.S. export control requirements, Nagar explains why CX leaders need to look beyond surface-level AI performance and ask harder questions about resilience.
The discussion explores why public large language model (LLM) dependency can create operational, financial, and customer experience risks, especially when AI is embedded into high-volume workflows such as voice agents, customer service automation and contact center analytics.
For customer experience leaders evaluating AI vendors, the interview highlights the procurement questions that matter most: who controls the model, how data is used, whether performance is reliable at scale and what happens if an underlying AI provider changes access, pricing, or availability.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

TikTok Go is collapsing the travel booking journey into a single app, and it's raising urgent questions for travel brands about customer ownership, loyalty, and digital experience. In this episode, Francesca Roche sits down with Danielle Harvey, VP of Industries for Partnerships and Emerging Products at Quantum Metric, to unpack what TikTok Go really means for travel CX. Drawing on her background at Wyndham Hotels and Avis Budget Group, Danielle shares why fragmentation in the booking journey still exists, why removing friction isn't the same as removing research, and how travel brands can use social platforms for acquisition without handing over their most valuable customer relationships. Plus, Quantum Metric data reveals that customers are two times more likely to abandon when they arrive from AI search, and 81% say they would not return after a poor digital experience.

Three months ago at Enterprise Connect, Salesforce launched Agentforce Contact Center and made a bold claim: native voice, digital channels, AI agents, and CRM data in a single platform. Analysts were impressed. They were also watching for one thing.

The WEM piece was missing.

Last week at CCW Las Vegas, Salesforce answered that. The company has launched Agentforce Contact Center Workforce Engagement Management — a native, AI-powered WEM solution built directly into the Agentforce platform. Workforce management, quality management, and operational insights, all in the same system that already holds your customer data, your AI agents, and your service workflows.

It is, by any measure, the announcement that completes the suite argument.

I sat down with Annie Weinberger, CMO of Agentforce Service at Salesforce, on the CCW show floor to get into what this actually means — not the press release version, but the honest operational version that contact center leaders evaluating their stack right now need to hear.

The conversation covers ground that goes well beyond the product announcement. We get into why Salesforce made the supervisor — not the customer, not the agent — the focal point of this launch. The answer is more strategic than it first appears. Supervisors in most contact centers today are reviewing around 5% of calls and managing their teams across disconnected systems with no unified view of what their AI agents and human agents are doing at the same time. That is not a workflow problem. It is a visibility problem at the heart of how modern contact centers are run.

We also get into the competitive question that every CX leader in the room at CCW is quietly asking: NICE, Verint, and Calabrio have spent fifteen-plus years building WEM depth. Where does a platform-native solution sit on that maturity curve at launch — and what is the honest answer for an enterprise with complex forecasting requirements or regulated quality workflows?

Annie doesn't dodge it. And the answer matters for anyone currently mid-evaluation.

Perhaps the most forward-looking part of the conversation is around something the industry has simply never had to think about before. When you can manage AI agents and human agents in the same workforce planning console, the rules of capacity planning change fundamentally. A human agent's availability is fixed, predictable, and subject to fatigue. An AI agent's capacity scales dynamically and doesn't degrade under volume. Forecasting, scheduling, and performance measurement look different when part of your workforce behaves in a structurally different way to the other part. We ask Annie what that new operating model actually looks like — and what contact center leaders need to start thinking about now before the hybrid workforce becomes the norm.

The broader narrative running through all of it is the integration tax. Most contact centers today are running separate platforms for CCaaS, WEM, CRM, and AI — and paying a cost in complexity, context loss, and operational friction on every single one of them. With WEM now native inside Agentforce, the question for buyers is no longer whether Salesforce has a WEM answer. It does. The question is whether bringing all of that into one platform changes the architecture decision they have been putting off.

For contact center leaders who have been watching the Agentforce story develop since March, this is the conversation you have been waiting for.

eannie Walters and Dr. Alyona Medelyan reveal what nearly 2,000 unfiltered airline reviews say about the chasm between brand promise and operational reality, and what CX leaders must do about it. 

In this CX Today discussion, host Rhys Fisher, Associate Editor, sits down with two leading voices in customer experience: Jeannie Walters, CX expert and author, and Dr. Alyona Medelyan, CEO of Thematic. Together, they've co-authored Experience Is The Promise, a data-driven report analyzing nearly 2,000 App Store reviews across six US airlines using Thematic's AI scoring agent. 

If you lead a CX, contact center, or service team, this one is unmissable. The findings cut through the brand-speak and get to what customers are actually experiencing at the moments that matter most. 

When things go wrong, a cancelled flight, an app that won't load, a support line nobody answers, that's the moment a brand either earns loyalty or loses it for good. This conversation, backed by real customer data, explores exactly why so many airlines are falling short at those critical touchpoints. 

Key discussion points: 
🔴 Recovery beats reliability – Delta's Empathy score outpaced the group average not because it never fails, but because its people, processes, and tools are designed for disruption moments. Jeannie unpacks what that strategic commitment actually looks like on the ground. 
🔴 The compounding failure problem – Alyona's data shows 60% of negative reviews cited inability to reach support during disruptions. When the flight fails and the service fails, the brand takes a double hit, and customers don't forget it. 
🔴 Your app is your frontline – App crashes drove 9.5% of Breeze's negative Ease score. Alyona draws a direct parallel to banking data from Asia, where app instability alone triggered switching intent in 5% of users.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

AI-powered discovery is changing how consumers find businesses, and 37% are already starting their searches with AI tools rather than traditional search engines. But as ChatGPT ads emerge as a new marketing channel, most businesses still can't measure whether they're working.

CallRail's Chief Product Officer Ryan Johnson joins CX Today to discuss the company's new attribution solution for ChatGPT ads, what early lead quality data is revealing, and why SMBs and agencies can't afford to treat AI advertising as just another channel.

Ryan draws on lessons from the early days of social media advertising to explain what's coming, and what smart marketers should be doing right now to build the attribution foundation they'll need.

Are enterprise CX teams ready for the next phase of AI in customer service?

In this CX Today interview, Nicole Willing speaks with John Kim, Co-Founder and CEO of delight.ai, about Salesforce’s acquisition of Fin (formerly Intercom) and what it signals for the future of customer experience.

Kim explains why the deal reflects a wider shift in the market, as established customer service platforms look to acquire AI-native capabilities rather than build everything internally. Kim also explores the difference between legacy helpdesk platforms, AI-native providers, and older chatbot vendors trying to adapt to the large language model era.
Kim outlines the questions buyers should ask vendors around AI readiness, data use, production rollout, privacy, compliance, and trust.

For enterprises weighing their next move in AI-powered customer service, the discussion offers a timely look at where the market is heading and what leaders need to prepare for.

For more Customer Experience tech news visit https://www.cxtoday.com

Why static survey forms are failing CX leaders—and how context-aware listening is replacing them.

Are traditional survey links dead? With response rates at historic lows, the answer might be yes.

In this episode, Rob Scott sits down with Sprinklr’s Sonal Singhal and Valarie Grant to explore why relying on static, post-interaction forms leaves CX leaders with delayed insights, blind spots, and a fractured view of the customer experience.

When you force a customer out of their natural channel just to leave feedback, you disrupt the journey and lose the context. The solution? Conversational listening. Sonal and Valarie break down how context-aware tools allow brands to capture sentiment natively within the channel the customer is already using—reducing friction and dramatically improving the richness of the data.

If you are struggling with survey fatigue or looking for a practical way to innovate your feedback strategy this quarter, this conversation is for you. Learn how to stop asking generic questions and start listening in the moment.

🔥 What to expect from this exclusive interview