Each CCW Nashville brings about fresh takes on the challenges and trends dominating our industry, but this year had a revitalized energy. The past year has seen AI evolve from the abstract to the tactical, and with that in mind, business leaders congregated in Nashville with a refreshed perspective of what it is actually capable of.
Through the workshops, sessions, and networking breaks, the conversations touched on everything from workforce gamification to agentic AI to customer trust. With 380 global brands represented at the conference, a multidimensional trend emerged that characterized a narrative of true progress rather than continued speculation.
You can’t innovate what you don’t measure
So much of the past few years has been spent debating what AI can do and what it fails to offer, how much of the “human touch” can be offered by AI, and what level of automation presents a favorable cost to risk ratio. The glaring absence in these conversations has been the link bridging these ideas to tangible business outcomes, and that bridge begins well before any new technology is implemented.
Today, leaders are much more aware that any innovation starts with a comprehensive assessment of productivity metrics. This is where the creativity and analysis of designing customer and employee experiences come together: although business outcomes need to be grounded in metrics, reliance on traditional contact center metrics has become an outdated practice. Rather forging a flimsy connection between CSAT or AHT for every potential technology investment, the process should be inverse. Identify an area for improvement, determine how success would be measured within existing systems, and then initiate the process of scouting a new tool or technology to do so.
Honing in on where AI adds value and where it slows things down
Conversations about “AI in the contact center” have become almost too broad to measure–we have AI taking on responsibilities from information retrieval to analysis to agentic decision making, and all of that often gets umbrellaed into one conversation. What we do know is that 91% of the leaders polled in our January 2025 market study were sourcing and testing AI-powered solutions for their contact center, with 24% of them citing it as one of their overall top priorities. It is clear that AI offers irrefutable potential to improve contact center and CX operations by enhancing efficiency and scalability, and to fail to take advantage of it will likely make it impossible to compete in tomorrow’s market.
We know that AI has tremendous capability, so why has CX not been radically transformed by now? 76% of leaders believe customers using self-service should be able to get the same exact support outcomes (such as resolutions or make-goods) yet 66% of customers struggle to navigate self-service menus and flows. Ultimately this comes down to the widening gap between the expectations of what AI can do, specifically what it can do autonomously, and what it is actually able to provide under imperfect conditions.
Leaders have begun to reorienting to view the limitations of AI as a function of imperfect conditions rather than technological capability. Quantifying the value of an AI investment should include the up-front effort required and ramp-up time, the maintenance required to keep it operational, and an honest assessment of how many features will go unused or underused.
Peer-to-peer learning remains an irreplaceable resource
Sessions at a conference like CCW Nashville take many forms, from expert panels to interactive workshops to keynote speakers in the CMA Theater, but the conversations among attendees that really energize the atmosphere of the event. The challenges faced by CX and contact center leaders can seem impossible to solve without outside guidance: technological complexity, industry-specific nuances, and the blind spots of our own organizations make it arduous to even ask the questions about how we can improve, much less answer them.
At a time when online resources are inundated with SEO-friendly verbiage and buzzwords, finding insightful outside perspectives that aren’t behind a paywall feels impossible. The rapidly changing AI market landscape creates an ongoing necessity for reassessment and reevaluation, but hiring an expensive consultant each time a new issue arises is impractical. Immersive peer-to-peer learning allows leaders to flesh out simpler problems, surface more complicated issues to formally address, and broaden their understanding of challenges in the market.
Miss out on the action? Join us for CCW Orlando in January 2026!