Last week, the Cresta team headed to Las Vegas for Customer Contact Week (CCW), and what a week it was.
From a packed booth and standing-room-only sessions to executive dinners, customer conversations, and a Cresta-wrapped bus front and center at the main entrance, CCW was an incredible opportunity to connect face-to-face with the leaders shaping the future of customer experience.
This year, one thing was clear: AI is no longer a future-state conversation for the contact center. Leaders are actively looking for ways to move faster, improve visibility, empower frontline teams, and deliver better customer experiences at scale.
And throughout the week, we had the chance to show how Cresta is helping make that possible.
Across the event, the Cresta team connected with hundreds of customer experience, operations, and contact center leaders. And wow did we pack a lot into one week: 5 packed executive dinners, 2 full suites at Kenny Chesney at the Sphere, 5 speaking sessions featuring Cresta customers and industry experts, and countless conversations in our Speakeasy.
The real highlight was the quality of the conversations.
At the booth, in sessions, over dinner, and around the event floor, we heard the same themes again and again: teams want more than AI experimentation. They want practical, enterprise-ready AI that can help them understand what is happening across every customer interaction, take action faster, and improve outcomes for both customers and employees.
Exploring the AI-powered customer of 2030
Cresta kicked off its session presence at the CCW Innovation Summit with “Meet The AI-Powered Customer of 2030: Findings From Our Groundbreaking Consumer Preferences Survey,” featuring Cresta’s VP of Product Marketing, Devon Mychal, as a market study panelist.
The session explored how AI is changing not only the way contact centers operate, but also how customers behave, communicate, and engage with brands. The discussion covered customer frustration with AI self-service, generational shifts in service expectations, the growing importance of personalization and empathy, and how customers may increasingly use AI to support—or even replace—their own role in service journeys.
For contact center leaders, the message was clear: building an AI strategy cannot start and end with internal efficiency. It also has to reflect what customers actually expect, where they still want human support, and how their own use of AI is changing the service experience.
Alaska Airlines on turning customer signals into action
Cresta hosted a fireside chat, “Your Customers and Teams Have Already Told You What Needs to be Fixed – Stop Asking and Take Action,” featuring Barry Chester from Cresta and Andrea Halverson, Director, Contact Center Experience & Innovation, from Alaska Airlines.
The conversation focused on a challenge every customer service leader knows well: customers and frontline teams are already revealing where friction exists, but organizations need better operational visibility and alignment to act on those signals quickly.
Alaska Airlines shared lessons from its work with AI-powered customer service strategies, including how conversational AI can help teams move faster, improve support delivery, and drive greater accountability across the enterprise. The standing-room-only session underscored just how much interest there is in real-world AI transformation stories from leading customer experience teams.
Preparing for the hybrid AI and human workforce
We also had the opportunity to join the Think Tank session, “The Hybrid (AI+Human) Workforce Is Here. Are You Prepared?” featuring Jeff Kupietzky, CEO of Aspect; Mariela Lopez, VP, Care & Country Manager at Snap Finance; and Antony Passemard, VP of Customer Strategy, from Cresta.
The session tackled one of the most important questions facing contact center leaders today: how should organizations prepare for a workforce where humans and AI agents operate side by side?
As AI becomes more embedded in day-to-day operations, leaders need to rethink workforce planning, coaching, performance management, and the division of work between people and technology. The conversation reinforced that the future of the contact center is not simply about replacing manual work. It is about designing a smarter, more adaptive operating model where AI and human expertise work together to improve outcomes.
MAPFRE on de-risking AI transformation
At the Cresta booth, MAPFRE Insurance joined us for “Coverage Confirmed: How MAPFRE Insurance is De-Risking AI Transformation,” featuring Justin Smith, Director, Insurance Operations Technical at MAPFRE, and Tom Pellerite, Strategic Sales Director at Cresta.
The discussion focused on what it takes to move AI transformation forward with confidence, especially in a complex, highly regulated industry like insurance. MAPFRE shared how organizations can approach AI adoption in a way that reduces risk, builds trust, and creates a path from experimentation to meaningful business impact.
For leaders evaluating AI in the contact center, the session offered a practical reminder: successful transformation requires more than new technology. It requires clear use cases, strong change management, and the right operating model to support adoption at scale.
Frontdoor on finding what actually drives sales
Frontdoor also joined Cresta at the booth for “Your Playbook Is Lying to You: How Frontdoor Used AI to Find What Actually Drives Sales,” featuring Fred Spano, Vice President, Integrated Sales at Frontdoor, and Danny Brown, Strategic Sales Director at Cresta.
The session explored how AI can help organizations move beyond assumptions about what works in customer conversations. By analyzing real interactions, teams can uncover the behaviors, messages, and moments that actually influence outcomes.
Frontdoor’s story highlighted one of the biggest opportunities for customer-facing teams: using AI not just to support agents in the moment, but to understand what top performance really looks like and scale those insights across the business.
Thanks for Joining Us at Booth 558
CCW Las Vegas was an energizing reminder of why we are so excited about the future of customer experience and the role AI will play in shaping it.
To everyone who visited our booth, joined a session, attended a dinner, met with our team, or spent time with us in our Speakeasy: thank you. We loved connecting with you and hearing what is top of mind as you build the next generation of customer experience.
If we missed you at CCW last week, we would still love to connect.
Request a live demo to see how Cresta can help your team deliver better customer experiences with AI.
