The Customer Contact Week UK Summit opens today at Novotel London West, bringing together more than 300 customer experience professionals for a host of sessions, workshops and keynotes. Taking place between 11 – 13 May, the summit is built around the theme of “eliminating silos, unifying CX and creating human-centric experiences”.
As AI adoption accelerates across customer operations, the industry is navigating a tension that sits at the centre of this year's programme. Automation is expanding. Agentic AI is moving from concept to live deployment. And yet the sessions filling the CCW agenda this week suggest that the most contested question in CX right now is not how should you implement AI, but what role should humans now perform?
Behavioural Science Takes the Main Stage
In Tuesday's opening keynote, Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman of Ogilvy and founder of its Behavioural Science Practice, will challenge the rational, process-led assumptions that typically govern CX design. His session examines how psychology, framing and interaction design can shape customer behaviour in ways that data-driven automation rarely captures, and why small changes in language and experience design can deliver outsized impact on trust and loyalty. Reading between the lines, the key takeaway is that technology alone does not explain why customers stay, or why they leave.
Empathy as Strategy
The programme reinforces this throughout. A panel on Tuesday morning, for example, explores how organisations can balance automation with a deeply human approach to supporting vulnerable customers at scale. A closing fireside chat on the same day, led by Natalie Beckerman of iQor, also takes direct aim at efficiency-first thinking, arguing that organisations risk eroding both customer trust and employee engagement when performance metrics crowd out human connection.
The Agent of the Future programme launches this morning to “help agents build confidence, skills and a mindset to succeed today and lead tomorrow”. The invitation-only initiative brings up to 20 customer service agents into the summit for dedicated development sessions, mentorship and, for a select few, a place on the main stage panel on Wednesday. A clear message here is that as AI handles more of the transactional layer, the agents who remain need investment to bring greater value to other areas.
Where Humans Fit in the AI-Enabled Contact Centre
Wednesday brings the operational dimension into focus. A panel titled "Where Humans Thrive: Designing the AI-Enabled Contact Centre" brings together leaders from Transport for London, Sky and All Clear Insurance to explore how contact centre teams are being redesigned around AI rather than replaced by it. The conversation sits alongside sessions on workforce strategy, agentic AI deployment and what designing effective human and AI workflows looks like when the stakes are real rather than theoretical.
The closing keynote brings the week's themes together in a collaborative C-suite panel featuring chief-level leaders from Bel, UKTV, TalkTalk and AutoTrader, organisations spanning very different industries but united by the challenge of building customer strategies that are both AI-enabled and genuinely human in feel.