CX Forum East

Drive Growth With An AI-Powered Total Experience

Profitable growth is the primary strategic imperative for marketing, CX, and digital business leaders. Organizations that outperform align brand and customer experience into a unified total experience, powered by AI to strengthen acquisition and retention strategies. In this session, you will learn to:

Use total experience competitive growth grids to reveal high-impact strategies
Employ five actionable growth levers that drive customer acquisition and retention
Amplify business performance across every growth lever by using AI, responsibly

Speakers:
Dipanjan Chatterjee, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Measure Twice: Lead Change With Better Change Metrics

Leaders are navigating continuous change as they respond to dynamic customers that is being compounded by a profusion of AI tools. The leadership imperative is to embrace and gracefully navigate the opportunity these technologies present, adjusting the new processes, team structures, and strategic objectives that will guide progress. One thing that is holding leaders back is their change leadership and how change is measured. Join us to learn:

What mistakes many organizations make in measuring change and why it harms them
The connection between your CX metrics and how you measure change
How to use three types of metrics as a change leader to understand the progress of continuous transformation

Speakers:
Katy Tynan, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Built For Growth In A Zero-Click World

AI-integrated search transforms how consumers discover, evaluate, and buy — often serving answers, recommendations, and inspiration without a single click. As discovery and shopping behaviors shift, search and social practices must evolve with them. In this fireside chat, we’ll break down what a zero-click world really means for marketing and CX leaders and why social and creator content now plays an outsized role in shaping demand, trust, and expectations. Join us to discover:

How AI-integrated search is disrupting discovery and shopping behavior
Why creator and social content increasingly influence visibility in a zero-click environment
What leaders must do to evolve content strategies for answer engine visibility

Speakers:
Emily Collins, VP, Research Director, Forrester

11:10 am – 12:10 pm EDT

Workshop: Build Your CX ROI Story

CX’s staying power in an organization, whether as a function or a concept, relies on its connection to business value. Executives are more likely to provide real support for CX when you can demonstrate its ROI. Unfortunately, few CX programs can connect their work to business results. In this interactive workshop, you will:

Learn about the business case levers that anchor CX to business outcomes
Get an introduction to Forrester’s tools for crafting a CX ROI story
Draft and test your own CX ROI story

Speakers:
Judy Weader, Principal Analyst, Forrester

11:50 am – 12:20 pm EDT

Breakout Sessions

Prepare For AI Agents As Your New Target Audience

AI agents are becoming an influential persona in customer journeys. This means business leaders have a new audience to target — from brand awareness in answer engines to purchase and loyalty moments in agentic commerce. But to reach these agent audiences requires a strategy that combines both human emotions and machine logic to create a compelling total experience. Attend this session to:

Understand the implications of the AI agent persona and how to target it
Explore opportunities in human-to-agent and agent-to-agent CX and marketing
Develop practical steps to optimize experiences that appeal to humans and AI

Speakers:
Chuck Gahun, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Stakeholder Academy: How To turn Skeptics Into Sponsors

Figure out why some leaders seem to form collaborative coalitions more than others through stakeholder management. Learn the stakeholder mapping and influence tactics that match motivations, and deploy high‑gain questions that surface hidden constraints. Through real client examples, you’ll practice reframing conversations to earn access, advance decisions, and convert skeptics into sponsors. In this session, you will:

Consider new influencing and communication tricks to try
Identify templates and approaches that help organize your stakeholder efforts
Learn from examples of people who have done this already

Speakers:
Betsy Summers, Principal Analyst, Forrester

What Great Customer Self-Service Looks Like

Imagine a world where you don’t hate chatbots or IVRs, and generative AI, LLMs, and agentic frameworks have the potential to deliver useful (even pleasant) self-service. Data readiness, fear of hallucinations, and IT infrastructure are just a few of the hurdles that keep brands from taking advantage of this game-changing technology. In this session, we will review winning deployments of self-service solutions that make a good impression and get the job done for customers. Learn:

What it takes to deliver useful customer self-service
How to get past the hurdles to deliver useful solutions that customers appreciate
How to quickly get to ROI for the deployment while building for expanded future capabilities

Speakers:
Max Ball, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Dror Avieli, Managing Director & Vice President, Customer Success, ConsenSys

12:20 pm – 1:50 pm EDT

Networking Lunch

12:20 pm – 1:50 pm EDT

Government Lunch

Speakers:
Colleen Fazio, Senior Analyst, Forrester
Rick Parrish, VP, Research Director, Forrester

12:30 pm – 1:15 pm EDT

Lunch & Learn Case Study

Dialpad: Everyone Has AI. Does Yours Coach And Learn?

Learn how Dialpad and a customer leader built a real-time conversation intelligence layer that augments people, not replaces them.

* Turn every call, message, and meeting into actionable signals.

* Deliver live guidance and coaching to improve frontline performance.

* Build a unified AI platform that compounds insight over time.

Speakers:
Mike Hayes, AVP of Strategic Sales, Dialpad

WhatsApp: Lunch & Learn

1:55 pm – 2:15 pm EDT

Keynote: Five9 Case Study

Session details coming soon.

2:15 pm – 2:35 pm EDT

Keynote: Distrust In The Age Of AI

Consumers are getting duped by the onslaught of AI-generated content filling their social media feeds or messaging apps. The line between what’s real and what’s fake nears undecipherable levels. Gone are the days when seeing was, simply, believing. And forget the adage “Trust but verify.” Why? Distrust is now consumers’ default, as failing to question means falling prey to deepfakes and bots. As algorithms reshape trust, CX, marketing, and digital business leaders need to reassess their customer strategy.

Speakers:
Jess Lloyd, Principal Analyst, Forrester

2:50 pm – 4:40 pm EDT

The Total Forrester Experience: Executive Challenge (Automotive Scenario)

Expect the unexpected during this immersive experience. Upon arrival, you’ll choose to join either the Brand Experience or Customer Experience team—no prior experience required.

Important: Please only register if you can arrive at the start of the challenge. Every decision made (and missed) counts.

2:55 pm – 3:55 pm EDT

Workshop: Activate Your CX Ecosystem With Stakeholder Relationships

CX transformation is a team sport. Success hinges on maintaining strong relationships with internal stakeholders across the organization. In this hands-on workshop for CX, marketing, and digital pros, you’ll use proven strategies to:

Identify and prioritize internal stakeholders to collaborate with
Articulate CX value based on stakeholder needs
Draft and test your stakeholder approach plan

Speakers:
Su Doyle, Principal Analyst, Forrester

2:55 pm – 3:40 pm EDT

Breakout Sessions

See Inside A Total Experience Leader’s AI Playbook

Forrester’s Total Experience Score measures how well a company aligns its brand promise with the experiences it actually delivers. But in the age of AI, does that alignment still matter? More than ever. Hear how a Total Experience Score leader uses AI to strengthen brand experience (BX), customer experience (CX), and employee experience (EX) alignment — deciding where automation amplifies the brand, where it erodes trust, and how a human‑led strategy unmistakably drives acquisition and loyalty. During this fireside chat, you’ll learn how to:

Embody a total experience mindset to bolster your growth strategy
Pair humans and AI to reinforce your brand promise and experience delivery
Employ AI to create advantages across customer and noncustomer targets

Speakers:
Mike Proulx, VP, Research Director, Forrester

Dive Deep Into The EX Index: Insights To Boost Your Total Experience Score

Data from 10,000 companies tells us about how employee experience (EX) can shape your total experience, creating a direct connection between your employees and customer experience outcomes. Unlock your team’s motivation by using insight derived from our EX Index drivers and your own deep listening efforts to guide your people to do the most for customers, current and future alike. In this session, you will:

Go deep on the key drivers of high-scoring EX firms
Consider your own EX blueprint for your organization or team based on real data and insights
Develop your path to being a high-EX leader who leads people to success

Speakers:
David Johnson, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Ready, Set, Agentic: How Real Companies Deploy AI With Intent

Agentic AI hype is at a fever pitch, even though agentic capabilities are still nascent. But developments are accelerating, and organizations must start preparing now for when agentic AI becomes indispensable to internal operations and customer-facing experiences. Organizations must plan today to evaluate and adopt agentic technologies tomorrow. A focused strategy considers how AI affects day-to-day work and the long-term impact on customers. Attend this panel to:

Learn where peers in marketing, digital, and CX are prioritizing agentic AI use cases
Gain clarity on how agentic AI will affect internal processes, roles, and CX
Apply learnings to help your organization prepare for agentic AI and its offspring, AI agents

Speakers:
Gina Bhawalkar, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Amy Hu, Chief Marketing and Experience Officer, New York Life
Nancy Flowers, Vice President of Customer Experience Strategy and Design, Voya Financial
Santosh Gunaseelan, Director of Creative Personalization, Optimization, and Design, Amazon Ads

3:40 pm – 4:10 pm EDT

Coffee Break & Networking

Enjoy coffee and snacks while networking with peers in the Partner Lounge.

3:45 pm – 4:10 pm EDT

Analyst-Led Roundtables

Please Note: Due to limited availability, each attendee may register for one Workshop, and one Roundtable. Registration will open one month prior to the event via the Events Mobile App.

Attend one session:

AI & Digital Banking: Innovating Through Subtraction

Research shows we default to adding, even when subtraction delivers better outcomes. This roundtable discussion brings digital banking leaders together to explore an AI‑first future—where customer interaction begins with a single, AI‑mediated prompt that interprets intent, not navigation. How do we subtract our way into the future of banking?

Speakers:
David Hoffman, VP, Research Director, Forrester

The Power Of Total Experience

Discover how Forrester’s Total Experience Score reveals new paths to growth and explore how your organization can benefit.

Speakers:
Pete Jacques, Principal Analyst, Forrester

A Culture-First Mindset For AI Adoption

Discuss how leaders assess, inspire, and energize organizational culture in the AI adoption journey.

Speakers:
Betsy Summers, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Preparing Your Business For Agentic Commerce

Learn from your peers and discuss how your businesses are planning for answer engine selling and what’s to come in agentic commerce.

Speakers:
Emily Pfeiffer, Principal Analyst, Forrester

4:05 pm – 5:05 pm EDT

Workshop: Successfully Deploy AI-Powered Customer Self-Service

Modern AI (LLMs, generative, agentic) promises a new level of customer self-service that will deliver significant value to organizations and customers. Explore modern AI capabilities for customer self-service, challenges in deploying AI properly, and best-practice deployments to learn from. In this session, we will work on a bot planning exercise to:

Identify stakeholders to approve and deliver your application
Create a phase-one chatbot deployment proposal
Plan your approach for bot design, development, and rollout

Speakers:
Max Ball, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Chuck Gahun, Principal Analyst, Forrester

4:10 pm – 4:55 pm EDT

Breakout Sessions

Build A CX Strategy That’s Unmistakably Yours

Your customer experience (CX) is an expression of your brand, so it should reflect what makes your company unique. That means crafting an actionable CX strategy that delivers experiences your competitors simply can’t or won’t. How? It starts with having a clear understanding of your customers and their needs and culminates in ensuring a measurable set of business outcomes — with the strategy to connect the dots in between. In this session, you will learn how to:

Use key differentiators in your CX strategy to drive customer loyalty
Make a compelling CX strategy to convince company leadership to fund it
Use Forrester’s tools to develop, assess, measure, and refine your CX strategy

Speakers:
Judy Weader, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Build Better Experiences With An AI-Enabled Design Workflow

Your people are under pressure to accelerate experience development with AI; to aid design workflows, this means accelerating everything from insights generation to prototyping. But speed doesn’t guarantee better experiences. Design, digital, and CX leaders must hold the reins, using AI to craft the right experiences — not just produce more of them. This requires pairing the technology with human-led, intentional decision models that elevate experience quality, reduce friction, and unlock customer and business value at scale. Attend this session to:

Learn how people in teams achieve measurable ROI with intentional use of AI end to end
Understand the critical role of your human-led design system in scaling intentional, consistent, AI-powered experiences
Apply a practical prioritization framework to identify high-value AI use cases for experience design while considering responsible design practices that build trust

Speakers:
Gina Bhawalkar, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Caleb Schmidt, Senior Vice President & Head of Enterprise Experience Design, U.S. Bank