CCW Vegas 2026: Beyond the AI Hype – How to Build Contact Centers That Actually Deliver

Customer Contact Week (CCW) returns to Las Vegas on June 22–25, 2026, hosted at Caesars Forum. Positioned as the world’s largest customer contact event, CCW blends a high-volume conference program with a major expo hall and several focused, role-specific experiences, including the CCW Innovation Summit, CCW Management Summit, and CCWomen Summit.

What keeps senior leaders coming back is no longer curiosity about AI. It’s the harder question: how to implement automation without eroding trust, creating compliance exposure, or burning out the humans still handling the most complex moments.

CCW’s 2026 agenda makes that tension explicit. It leans into AI and automation, workforce optimization, self-service and support, and customer experience strategy, while still giving real space to leadership and culture—often the difference between a transformation that ships and one that stalls.

By design, CCW isn’t only main stage inspiration. It’s built around workshops, summits, and think-tank formats that push toward decisions, useful if you’re arriving with a mandate to reduce cost-to-serve while improving experience quality.

Rebecca Jarvis, Chief Business, Technology & Economics Correspondent at ABC News, returns as main stage host, guiding discussions tied to digital disruption, hyper-personalization, privacy, data security, and cost efficiency.

Why CX Leaders Attend CCW Vegas

For leaders, CCW’s value typically comes down to three outcomes:

• Pressure-test where AI and automation are actually delivering ROI
• Compare operating models for workforce performance and quality
• Assess the vendor landscape in one place, less reliant on marketing claims and more grounded in peer reality

CCW’s programming also signals that 2026 is not the year of experiments. It’s the year of accountability. You can see that in session naming and formats: workshops focused on building and operationalizing AI agents; summits focused on leadership behaviors and the human impact of automation; breakouts and think tanks tackling capacity, knowledge, and channel strategy.

Agenda At A Glance: June 22-25

• Monday, June 22: Arrival, badge pickup, executive-level programming like the CMP Research Circle. Welcome party in the evening.
• Tuesday, June 23: Workshops and summits, including CCW Innovation Summit, CCW Management Summit, and CCWomen Summit. CCW Excellence Awards Gala (separate ticket).
• Wednesday, June 24: Expo hall opens, full day of keynotes and breakouts. Headliner programming on main stage. After party.
• Thursday, June 25: Main stage programming, breakouts, expo hall networking. Conference concludes.

The Themes To Watch In 2026

CCW frames its program around four core challenge areas: Customer Experience, AI and Automation, Self-Service and Support, and Workforce Optimization.

That’s a strong map of where customer contact is heading. CX leaders are being asked to design experiences that feel human while automating at scale. They need self-service customers actually adopt. They need workforce models that support a hybrid ‘AI plus human’ operating reality. And they need governance that prevents speed from turning into risk.

The schedule also points to a practical shift: not just AI capability, but AI deployment discipline. Several sessions explicitly focus on moving beyond pilots, restoring trust, and building guardrails.

Key Sessions and Summits to Prioritize

If you’re choosing where to invest attention, Tuesday is a strategic lever—it’s where CCW concentrates hands-on and leadership-focused experiences.

• CCW Innovation Summit: Geared toward AI, automation, and tech trajectories. Topics include the AI-powered customer, the employee experience in the age of AI agents, rebuilding trust, and tech trends that actually move the needle.
• CCW Management Summit: Leans into leadership behaviors and operational outcomes. Themes signal a focus on emotional resilience, coaching, and vendor decision-making grounded in research-driven evaluation.
• CCWomen Summit: Focuses on human-centered leadership, community, and career advancement, with sessions including humanizing AI and centering humanity in customer journeys.

Wednesday and Thursday shift into broader conference programming. Wednesday’s main stage includes The Next Era of Customer Contact with Bryan Stoller, VP Customer Support & Advocacy at United Airlines, plus breakouts and think tanks tackling regulated CX innovation, CCaaS replacement decisions, capacity planning, and knowledge management.

The agenda also lists main stage headliners Shaquille O’Neal, 4x NBA Champion on Wednesday and Lisa Vanderpump, Business Mogul, Author, & Philanthropist on Thursday.

Featured Speakers and Headliners

• Rebecca Jarvis, Chief Business, Technology & Economics Correspondent, ABC News
• Shaquille O’Neal, 4x NBA Champion
• Lisa Vanderpump, Business Mogul, Author, & Philanthropist
• Chris Barton, Founder & Creator, Shazam
• Damola Adamolekun, CEO, Red Lobster
• Bryan Stoller, VP Customer Support & Advocacy, United Airlines
• Tabatha Coffey, TV Host (Tabatha Takes Over) & Author
• Heather Arthur, VP, Global Client Experience Centres, Scotiabank

Beyond the main stage, the broader lineup includes customer contact and CX leaders across financial services, healthcare, retail, travel, and more—useful because real constraints vary by industry, and ‘best practice’ rarely transfers cleanly without adaptation.

The Expo Hall: What It’s Built For

CCW positions the expo hall as a major part of the experience, highlighting 200+ solution providers across categories like AI and automation, communications, insights and analytics, services, and workforce enablement.

For CX leaders, the expo hall is most valuable when you arrive with a decision framework. Use sessions and workshops to sharpen requirements first, then vendor conversations become more diagnostic and less performative.

How to Plan Your CCW Week for ROI

If the goal is measurable impact, plan CCW in three layers:

1. Decide what must change in the next two quarters—deflection, agent productivity, QA modernization, AI governance—and map those priorities to sessions and workshops. Lock in Tuesday early.
2. Treat vendor meetings like structured discovery. Bring a scorecard. Ask about deployment time, governance model, integration complexity, and proof of outcome. Don’t accept ‘pilot success’ as evidence of scalability.
3. Make networking intentional. Identify peers in similar industries and constraints. Use after-hours events for relationship building, not casual browsing. The biggest ROI often comes after the event, when you can call someone who has already lived through your next decision.

CCW’s broader message for 2026 is clear: contact centers are becoming the operational heart of CX strategy again. AI will accelerate that shift, and it will expose weak processes faster than ever. The leaders who win will treat customer contact as a system, not a set of tools.