Agenda & Speakers

Beat the rush and join us early for complimentary barista-made coffee and breakfast.

Kick off the day with a welcome from your MC and a look at what's ahead.

UK brands across retail, financial services, healthcare, and the public sector are racing to unify digital, marketing, and customer experience into a single connected discipline. This keynote opens the day by naming the gap between how customers experience a brand and how most UK organisations are still structured to deliver it, and sets the questions the day's sessions will return to again and again.

• From omnichannel retail to digital-first banking and government services, UK consumers now expect seamless, personalised, real-time interactions regardless of channel, and the organisations closing that expectation gap fastest are the ones treating digital, marketing, and CX as one connected capability, not three competing budgets.
• What UK leaders across retail, insurance, banking, and the public sector are learning as they consolidate legacy platforms, unify customer data, and redesign journeys around real behaviour rather than tidy funnels.
• As AI-driven personalisation and decisioning become standard practice, UK organisations face particular scrutiny given the market's growing sensitivity to data use and algorithmic decision-making, making trust a genuine competitive differentiator rather than a compliance checkbox.

As AI-powered service, personalisation, and self-service become table stakes rather than differentiators, this keynote examines where genuine customer experience advantage still exists once the technology itself is no longer a competitive edge.

• Why baseline AI-driven service is rapidly becoming an expectation rather than a differentiator, and what that means for where brands should focus instead.
• Identifying the specific moments in the customer journey where human interaction continues to build loyalty in ways AI hasn't replicated.
• How leading brands are deliberately investing in experience moments that create emotional connection, even where efficiency alone would argue for full automation.

As digital, marketing, and customer experience functions converge around shared data and shared customers, unresolved questions about ownership, budget, and decision rights are creating friction that slows execution.

• Concrete examples of how unclear accountability between teams leads to duplicated effort, conflicting customer messaging, or stalled initiatives.
• What leading organisations are trying — shared KPIs, unified customer councils, merged teams — and what's actually holding up under pressure.
• How resolving ownership questions is directly tied to unlocking sustained investment, since finance teams hesitate to fund initiatives without a clear accountable owner.

After years of acquisitions and disconnected platforms left customer data scattered across dozens of systems, one digital leader built a unified customer data foundation that finally let marketing, digital, and CX teams see the same customer at the same time, without a multi-year rip-and-replace project.

• How the team prioritised which data sources genuinely mattered for near-term use cases, rather than attempting a complete data unification upfront.
• Why the solution connected and normalised existing systems rather than requiring their retirement, dramatically shortening time to value.
• How access to the same customer view changed daily workflows across marketing, digital, and CX teams that had previously operated on different assumptions about the same customer.

Recharge with refreshments and structured networking with your peers.

A hands-on, interactive session working through a real customer technology scenario as a room. Details announced soon.

Facing budget pressure and a sprawling, overlapping technology stack built up over years of incremental tool adoption, one marketing operations leader led a consolidation effort that significantly cut costs while maintaining, and in some cases improving, the team's actual capability.

• How the team discovered significant overlap and underused licences across the stack before making any cutting decisions.
• The framework used to distinguish tools that could be eliminated outright from those that needed to be merged into a single platform.
• How the team navigated internal resistance from colleagues attached to specific tools, and got alignment on the new, leaner stack.

After discovering frontline staff were routinely working around a newly deployed AI-assisted service platform rather than using it, one operations leader rebuilt the tool around actual frontline workflows, turning adoption resistance into genuine usage and measurable customer experience improvement.

• How direct observation and frontline feedback revealed the platform had been designed around management reporting needs rather than the realities of a live customer interaction.
• The specific redesign choices made to fit the tool into how frontline staff actually worked, rather than requiring them to adapt to the system's original design.
• How the team tracked genuine tool usage as an early signal of the customer experience improvements that followed.

With cookie deprecation, privacy regulation, and fragmented customer journeys making precise attribution increasingly impossible, this panel explores how marketing leaders are adapting measurement practices and rebuilding credibility with finance in an environment of permanent data uncertainty.

• Comparing the practical strengths and limitations of media mix modelling, incrementality testing, and first-party data strategies as attribution alternatives.
• How marketing leaders are communicating confidence and uncertainty honestly to finance stakeholders who are used to exact attribution numbers.
• What it's actually taking, organisationally and technically, to build first-party data capability robust enough to reduce dependence on third-party signals going forward.

Small-group, discussion-based sessions where you'll work through real customer technology challenges with peers in similar roles. Roundtable topics announced soon.

Enjoy a complimentary lunch while connecting with fellow attendees.

Put your knowledge to the test in this fast-paced quiz covering real-world trivia, key concepts and emerging trends. Compete for bragging rights — and a travel voucher — as the top scorer takes the crown.

Facing a finance leader who viewed customer experience investment as unquantifiable cost rather than genuine business value, one CX leader built a measurement framework that connected experience improvements directly to retention and revenue, securing sustained budget where satisfaction scores alone had failed to persuade.

• How the team recognised that satisfaction and engagement scores were never going to win the budget argument, and shifted focus to metrics finance already trusted.
• The specific approach used to connect a defined experience improvement to a measurable change in retention or spend, rather than relying on correlation alone.
• How the framework built for one pilot became the standard approach for justifying future experience investment.

With privacy regulation, cookie deprecation, and AI-mediated search all fragmenting the data trail marketing has traditionally relied on for attribution, this closing keynote examines how marketing leaders are rebuilding the case for their budgets when precise, full-journey tracking is no longer possible.

• Revisiting the limitations of traditional attribution models, and why current disruption is accelerating a reckoning that was overdue regardless.
• Emerging approaches that marketing teams are adopting to demonstrate impact without complete journey visibility.
• How marketing leaders are reframing ROI conversations with finance around confidence intervals and directional evidence, rather than the precise attribution numbers that are becoming harder to produce.

With growing pressure to justify technology and experience investment in commercial terms, leaders are re-examining which metrics genuinely predict business outcomes and which have simply become comfortable habits.

• A candid look at which long-standing engagement and satisfaction metrics are losing credibility with finance and executive stakeholders.
• How leading teams are moving from correlating experience improvements with outcomes to demonstrating direct commercial impact.
• As AI becomes embedded across personalisation, content, and decisioning, how organisations are isolating and proving its incremental value rather than crediting it for gains that would have happened anyway.

Wrap-up of the day's key takeaways — and your chance to win some epic prizes.

Unwind with your peers for a couple of drinks on us!

That's a wrap on the 2027 series. See you next year.