AI and beyond: Recapping the Forrester CX Summit

It’s hard not to be excited about the future after an event like the Forrester CX Summit, and this year’s event revealed that there’s a lot to look forward to. On this episode of Catalyst, Clinton chats with Lisa Woodley, VP of Design at Launch by NTT DATA, about her experience attending this year’s conference, what she found most surprising, and what lessons can be learned.

What is the Forrester CX Summit?

The CX Summit North America, hosted by global market research consultancy Forrester, is a multi-day conference where leaders in CX, marketing, and digital to come together to find inspiration and insight to help shape their strategies, measure performance, align metrics with business goals, and balance traditional and emerging technologies to drive growth and revenue with customer experiences. This year’s event took place from June 17-20 in Nashville.

The surprises for 2024

Every year, the event has multiple tracks covering different aspects of customer experience, but for 2024, there was not one single track that did not have something to do with AI. What stood out to Lisa was how quickly – and in the span of a year – AI  has completely taken over the design and digital product space and was more than enough to fill up all four days of the Summit with interesting topics.

Given how oversaturated we’ve been with AI discussions over the past few years, maybe the AI theme doesn’t sound so surprising. But what was most interesting about the Summit’s AI focus was how devoid of hype and ‘fluff’ it was, and how many actionable real-world use cases were shared. 

The top takeaways

This year’s Summit helped to demystify some of that hype and debunk one of the biggest criticisms of AI technology. A key theme of the event across the keynotes and sessions was the partnership between humans and machines. AI is not here to replace, but rather, to reshape our ways of working. It is a tool for designers and other CX professionals, but not the entire answer. There will always be things that AI can do faster or more efficiently than a human, but elements of human intelligence that technology cannot replicate or replace. Human knowledge and artificial intelligence need to work in tandem to maximize their joint impact.

As AI advances and becomes an integral part of the workflows of just about every role, it’s necessary to evolve how we approach challenges, conduct our day-to-day activities, and train the next generation to do these jobs. It’s not a matter of introducing technical AI capabilities into our skill sets and letting everything else fall to the wayside. In fact, more ‘traditional’ subjects and skills like language and creative thinking are going to become more valuable than ever. 

What about ethics?

Another major topic of the Summit was ethical AI. However, it was not about how to determine whether AI is ethical or not, but rather how to find a solution that is ethical without sacrificing usefulness. There will be tough conversations to be had, and there needs to be a designer in the room to represent the best interests of the user. That will involve spotting potential gaps and biases, and being very critical of the data used to train AI. We will always need humans to be the voice for other humans.  

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