Over three unforgettable days in Dallas last week, Cresta brought together an extraordinary group of innovators, executives, and change-makers redefining what’s possible in customer experience.
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WAVE 2025, our inaugural flagship event, was more than a conference — it was a milestone moment for the AI and CX community, filled with connection, inspiration, and breakthrough innovation.
Where Innovation Meets Purpose
The event opened with a keynote from our CEO, Ping Wu, who challenged the audience to reimagine the future customer experience.
“The future of customer experience isn’t about doing more with less. It’s about turning scarcity into abundance — creating experiences that are more human, more proactive, and more personal than ever before.”
Ping also unveiled four new innovations designed to bring that vision to life: Real-Time Translation, Automation Discovery, Prompt Optimizer, and Agent Operations Center. Each product reflects Cresta’s commitment to transforming conversations into a competitive advantage, empowering global teams to work faster, smarter, and in harmony with AI.
From demos to live translations and real-time supervision of AI agents, attendees saw what the next era of hybrid human–AI work will look like — one where automation doesn’t replace people, but elevates them.
Customer Stories in Action
Cresta’s vision came to life through the voices of our customers. Leaders from Propel Holdings and Xanterra Travel Collection shared how they’re using Cresta to deliver smarter, faster, and more consistent customer experiences with Cresta AI Agent.
Colin Taylor, Senior Director of Operations at Propel, described scaling to meet 40% year-over-year growth with the help of AI:
“In our business, it might take 3-6 months to ramp up a live agent, and we just couldn’t hire fast enough,” he said. “That’s where AI Agent helps us…we finally have consistency. Our customers get the same information whether they’re talking to an AI agent or a live one.”
Kevin Dillman, Senior Director, Central Reservations at Xanterra, reflected on how AI agents transformed their operations across 12 deployments in just five months:
“It’s doing exactly what we wanted — improving containment and giving us 24/7 coverage. A human agent might lose patience on a long call. Our AI agent never does.”
In another standout session, Rachel Walker, Managing Director of Innovation & Solutions at United Airlines, highlighted how Cresta’s technology is helping the airline bridge the gap between insights and action — building real-time trust between leadership, agents, and customers alike.
“With Cresta Insights, we’re able to see what are the customers contacting about, what are they asking, what are their requests? We're also able to see how our frontline is doing, if they’re responding correctly. That builds trust for our customers, if something needs to be tweaked, if there’s been confusion, we can make corrections. It also drives trust with our agents that we have their back: they’re so happy to see that they’re getting better information, faster.”
Brandy Maxwell, Ops Enablement & Customer Insights, shared a story on customer deflection from their Insights to Action team, which uses real-time conversational intelligence to pinpoint customer pain points, guide digital improvements, and quantify ROI across the entire organization:
“We have this fare type that doesn’t allow customers to make changes unless they upgrade to a higher fare, and they have to pay for that upgrade. Even though customers can self-serve, they were still contacting us. First of all, we used Cresta to understand that this is a contact type that’s happening. Then we dug even further into the data, it was really because we were asking customers in self-serve channels to pay before they even knew if they could make the change or what the change would look like. So we made some enhancements to our website and mobile app, and we immediately saw through the data in Cresta, a 50% reduction in this contact type.”
At CVS Health, the impact of AI-powered insights is transforming how teams measure and improve customer experience in real time. Srikant Narasimhan, VP of Enterprise Customer Experiences & Insights, shared how co-development with Cresta has helped the company scale intelligently and meaningfully:
“One of the biggest things that unlocks for us with Cresta has been the ability to score the sentiment on every single call. A big success that I'm excited about is now we've scored 100% of our calls. So at an agent level, we understand performance, not just from their perspective, but from the consumer's perspective. It has given us a really enhanced understanding of avoidable calls, calls that we have trouble resolving, and the ability to close the loop. Now we are opening it up to a wider range of experiences.”
For CVS Health, the power of Cresta’s sentiment scoring has gone beyond efficiency metrics — helping uncover opportunities to improve customer interactions, resolve friction points, and strengthen relationships through data-driven empathy.
Insights from Inside the WAVE
Beyond the product launches and keynote moments, WAVE 2025 delivered deep, candid conversations from leaders across industries who are living the future of AI-powered customer experience every day. Their insights painted a picture of what transformation really takes — from managing change and building trust to redefining success in an era where technology and humanity must evolve together.
Redefining ROI and Refocusing Efforts
A recurring theme throughout WAVE was the call to look beyond short-term efficiency metrics and focus on sustainable, human-centered ROI. John Donovan, former CEO of AT&T, echoed that the most successful leaders measure ROI not just in savings, but in experience, culture, and trust. He reminded the audience:
“Quality is always cheaper than cleaning up the mess afterwards.”
For larger enterprises, balancing ambition with executional reality is a constant tension. Bob Victor, SVP, Head of Customer Solutions at Comcast, underscored the importance of starting small and proving value fast:
“Every dollar at a big company these days is heavily scrutinized. You’ve got a budget and a long-term plan…but if you come up short this quarter, the question becomes ‘what projects can we freeze?’ So there’s tremendous pressure. The way through that pressure is, start small and build upon that success. You can only do so many large initiatives.”
And as Robin Gareiss, CEO and Principal Analyst at Metrigy, pointed out, leaders are rethinking what “efficiency” even means in the age of AI:
“Companies are resetting their benchmarks in this age of AI. Take average handle time. With AI, you solve the problem in 25% less time, so let’s take those minutes and do an upsell pitch. You’ve solved a problem and you’re bringing revenue into the company.”
Building Partnerships that Last
At the same time, leaders are working to restore a balance between personalization and efficiency — a tension that sits at the heart of modern CX. Sharad Sachdev, Global Lead for Gen AI-Powered Customer Experience at Accenture, articulated this future perfectly:
“Somewhere we lost personalization. Now, we talk a lot about personalization. What we want today is a new frontier of efficient personalization, where you know me very well without losing the efficiencies that industrialization has brought us. It’s very hard to achieve, but it’s a strong vision to have. That’s why we partnered with Cresta–to bring this to our customers.”
Driving Adoption Through Trust and Measurable Impact
At WAVE, leaders emphasized that the real power of AI isn’t just in automation — it’s in how it elevates people. For many organizations, adoption begins when teams see tangible proof that new tools make their day-to-day work better, faster, and more rewarding. Several leaders shared their experience of driving adoption and trust throughout their implementations with Cresta.
Mark Fleming, Corporate VP of Member Experience at SCAN Health, shared the measurable difference Cresta’s Agent Assist has made for both agents and customers:
“What Agent Assist has done for agents is to help make their jobs easier. Efficiency, speed to be able to do things. Transfer rates from outbound team to inbound team have fallen off a cliff because of this work. If I think about post-call survey results, we have a 93.5% very satisfied customer score with over 100k survey results. Before we implemented Cresta, it was in the 80s. Those are some pretty tangible results. Customer service scores matter.”
Edmund Mackey, Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer at Aptive, added that the foundation of every successful deployment is transparency and trust:
“Adoption is the biggest piece. So the mindshift for your employees they have to know where you’re trying to go, and for me, it’s never about replacing people, people are your most valued asset, so if you’re bringing them along, and they know you’re not trying to change the workforce or that you’re really only trying to augment things that allow them to be more valuable in their roles, they are more likely to adopt.”
Meanwhile, Fred Spano, VP of Integrated Sales at Frontdoor, highlighted how Cresta accelerates learning and confidence for new team members — an essential ingredient for long-term success:
“The real unlock is in how you shorten the tenure curve - tenure matters so much. There is such a drastic difference between someone who’s been in the job for three weeks vs. six months. We’ve been obsessed with how to shorten that tenure curve–how do we get these agents reps? The best thing we’ve found to shorten that tenure curve is Cresta.”
Together, their experiences underscored that successful adoption isn’t about forcing change — it’s about empowering people to perform at their best and giving them the confidence, data, and support to grow faster than ever.
Leadership and Reinvention: Lessons from Molly Bloom
Cresta WAVE closed with an unforgettable conversation with Molly Bloom, the entrepreneur and bestselling author with an inspirational story of reinvention.
Through humor and honesty, she reminded us that resilience isn’t about avoiding failure — it’s about owning it, learning from it, and starting again.
“We don’t just get one shot. We get as many shots as we’re brave enough to take.”
Curated Connections: Building Community Beyond the Stage
Between the sessions and keynotes, WAVE 2025 offered opportunities to connect, relax, and have fun — Cresta-style.
Attendees spent one afternoon enjoying their choice of special event, including rounds of golf under the Texas sun, custom Stetson hat-making workshops, and sommelier-led wine tastings.
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The highlight? An exclusive evening takeover of AT&T Stadium, home of the Dallas Cowboys — complete with the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders, on-field photos, and the chance to kick field goals under the stadium lights.
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It was the perfect reminder that WAVE isn’t just about technology. It’s about people — connecting leaders and builders who share a common goal of shaping the future of CX together.
Looking Ahead
As Cresta’s first-ever WAVE came to a close last week, one message echoed through every session, every conversation, and every connection: The future of customer experience is human.
At Cresta, we’re more energized than ever to empower that future through combining the intelligence of AI with the empathy, creativity, and intuition of people. WAVE 2025 was just the beginning.
“This isn’t a moment,” said Cresta CMO Russell Banzon in his closing remarks. “It’s a movement — one we’re building together.”
Until next time, thank you to everyone who joined us for WAVE 2025. Let’s keep learning, connecting, and making waves. 🌊
