CX Today

At CCW Las Vegas, CX Today's Rob Scott sat down with Hannah Bloking (Head of Applied AI Acceleration Solutions Architecture, Amazon Connect Customer), Andrei Papancea (Head of AI Engineering, AWS), and Nate Brown (Co-Founder, CX Accelerator) right after their session on why AI pilots fail — and what the 5% who succeed do differently.
Three questions. Three perspectives. Fifteen minutes of the most practical AI deployment advice from the conference floor.
What CX leaders are really afraid of when it comes to AI 
What actually kills a pilot before it ships 
What the organisations that succeed do differently 
Key takeaways:
Speed is a differentiator 
Iterate — don't aim for perfection 
Minimise confusion for customers, agents, and teams 
Reported live from CCW Las Vegas 2026
See Amazon's playbook here

A packed Academy Ballroom at Caesars Forum. Thousands of contact center leaders on their feet. And a conversation about what AI-first service actually looks like when it is no longer a roadmap — it is running, right now, inside one of Europe's most recognised travel brands.
The moment the session closed, Rob Scott pulled three of the people who built that story into a room and kept the cameras rolling.
What followed was something the main stage format simply does not allow. No moderated talking points. No polished announcements. Just the airline, the transformation partner, and the Microsoft product leader behind the platform — talking honestly about what it took, what broke, what surprised them, and what they would do differently.
This is not the version you heard on stage.
easyJet handles millions of customer contacts at the most pressurised moments in travel — and John Leighton, Head of Customer Experience, shared how the expectations on their service team have never been higher. Aggie Pulawski, Executive Vice President at Concentrix, came in not as a vendor, but as a partner sitting inside a genuinely complex three-way relationship — customer, implementer, and ecosystem ally all at once. And Darya Mazandarany, Microsoft's Head of Product for Dynamics 365 Contact Center, was there to answer the questions that do not get asked when a moderator is managing four thousand people and a 30-minute clock.
The result is one of the most candid contact center transformation conversations CX Today has produced — and one of the most relevant for any leader who is serious about what comes next.
The transformation drivers. The partnership dynamics no one talks about publicly. The reality of building a modern contact center when the pressure is live and the margin for error is low. The point at which automation goes too far. The lessons that never make it into a business case. And where all three of them believe this is heading.

In this interview, recorded live at NiCE World London, CX Today's Rob Wilkinson sits down with Dorothy Copeland, Chief Partner Officer at NiCE, to unpack why businesses struggle to move from isolated AI pilots to meaningful, scalable transformation — and why the right partner ecosystem may now be the biggest factor in making AI work at scale.
Dorothy shares her priorities for partner growth at NiCE, breaks down the newly announced NiCE AI Specialization Program, and explains why the shift from point solutions to connected systems spanning AI, data, workflows, and people is becoming the new standard for enterprise transformation.
00:00 Introduction
00:44 Dorothy's key priorities for partner growth at NiCE
01:59 Building a vibrant AI partner ecosystem
02:43 What is the NiCE AI Specialization Program?
04:13 The shift from point solutions to integrated systems
07:07 Why formalizing AI capability in the partner ecosystem matters now
11:01 Closing thoughts
Guest: Dorothy Copeland, Chief Partner Officer, NiCE
Host: Rob Wilkinson, CX Today
#CXToday #NiCE #AIPartnerships #CustomerExperience #NiCEWorld #ArtificialIntelligence

In this CX Today discussion, host and Associate Editor Rhys Fisher sits down with Claudio Rodrigues, Chief Product Officer at Omilia, to cut through the AI hype and get real about why so many contact centers are underperforming despite significant investment.
If your AI deployment isn't delivering, Claudio argues the problem started long before you went live, and he's got the framework to fix it. This is a must-watch for any CX leader tired of chasing metrics that don't tell the full story.
The contact center AI gold rush has left a lot of organizations holding fool's gold. Claudio Rodrigues has seen it firsthand... and he's not mincing words.
Key discussion points:
The root cause of AI failure: Most deployments collapse at the problem definition stage. Organizations chase “agentic AI” as a strategy rather than a solution, with no clear metric to measure success against
Containment rate isn't enough anymore: It's still a valid metric, but Claudio makes a compelling case for shifting the language from containment to resolution – and expanding the lens to include upsell, churn reduction, and revenue growth
Static vs. dynamic AI assets: A contact center frozen at a point in time will depreciate in value. Omilia's Self-Learning Agentic CX platform is built to continuously learn from real interactions, removing the need for armies of manual annotators
What CX leaders aren't getting but should be: Faster time-to-value, deployment-ready data pipelines, and a clear line of sight between their AI investment and company growth metrics.
Audit your current AI deployment against a clearly defined problem statement and explore whether your metrics capture resolution, upsell, and growth – not just containment.

How can CX leaders scale AI without creating more risk than value?
That is the central question in this CX Today interview with Rebecca Wettemann, Principal at Valoir, as she joins Rob Wilkinson to unpack how enterprise thinking around AI in customer experience is changing. The conversation shows how many organizations have moved beyond early enthusiasm and are now under pressure to prove that AI can deliver measurable business outcomes without harming trust, increasing costs, or disrupting operations.
Wettemann explains that the market has shifted from fear of missing out to what she describes as fear of messing up. In practice, that means leaders are no longer satisfied with experimentation for its own sake. They want AI initiatives that improve workflows, support customers effectively, and justify the spend. According to Wettemann, one of the biggest barriers remains trust, especially when teams still associate AI with hallucinations, weak chatbot experiences, and unpredictable costs.
The interview also highlights why data integration continues to hold back progress. Wettemann argues that AI needs consistent, current, and correct data to perform well, especially in customer-facing use cases. Rather than trying to build one system that handles everything, she advises organizations to break work into smaller skills and tasks, then apply AI where the business case is clear.
Workforce design is another major theme. Wettemann notes that AI is changing the role of the human agent, with more people taking on higher-value work, supervising AI-driven interactions, and helping refine AI agents. That shift, she says, requires leaders to rethink metrics, compensation, onboarding, and support structures.
For CX leaders wondering where to begin, Wettemann’s advice is practical: experiment broadly, keep pilots small, learn what your data and workflows can support, and use those findings to build the right path into production.