Anticipatory Service in the Age of AI showed how luxury hospitality is raising the bar. Sedlak explained how the brand built its Customer Intelligence Center (CIC) to help advisors anticipate a guest’s needs before every call, while keeping every recommendation in human hands. 

Customer-First, Not Efficiency-First 

Sedlak opened with a word cloud familiar to anyone who has sat through a contact center AI pitch: reduction, savings, headcount, shrinkage, cost avoidance. The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection chose a different starting point: customer-first, not efficiency-first. 

The result is AI that works for agents, not instead of them. CIC doesn’t talk to guests, score agents, or make decisions. It listens at a scale no person can, then hands the patterns it finds to a human who decides what to do with them. 

Knowing the Guest Behind the Call 

The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection serves four distinct guest personas, and each needs something different to build trust: 

• The Returning Guest already trusts the brand and wants recognition and consistency. 
• The Luxury Upgrader is comparing The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection to what they know and needs proof of the upgrade. 
• The Experience-Led Traveler is moved by atmosphere and story, not spec sheets. 
• The Informed Evaluator needs clarity, documentation, and patience before committing. 

CIC helps advisors catch the personal details that make anticipatory service possible. On-screen examples included delayed honeymoons, milestone birthdays, retirements, and decades-long friendships. That kind of context turns a booking into a celebration. 

Coaching at Scale 

For leaders, CIC doubles as a coaching tool. They can ask questions in plain language, such as whether advisors missed mentioning a celebration or special occasion in the past 30 days. The answer comes back as an analysis across nearly 1,500 calls, showing where team members need support. 

The Question Every CX Leader Should Ask 

Tracy’s closing message was simple: technology alone does not create exceptional experiences. It never has. AI listens at a scale no person can, but the advisor still decides what matters. 

She left the room with a question worth bringing back to every AI roadmap: Is your AI strategy built to make your people faster, or to make them more perceptive? For organizations under pressure to automate, The Ritz-Carlton Yacht Collection offers a different model, one where AI raises the ceiling on service instead of just lowering the cost floor.   

Join us in Dallas 

Catch keynotes like this at the next CRS in Dallas, March 10–12, 2027, for more real-world stories from brands redefining customer experience. Register today and save your seat. 

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Customers don’t trust institutions to resolve issues without multiple handoffs. Employees don’t trust that transformation will improve their work rather than eliminate it. Boards don’t trust that AI will create advantage without reputational, regulatory, or security risk. And then generative AI arrived. 

The Paradox Every CX Leader Lives Under 

Deploy AI for efficiency while strengthening trust. Reduce expense while improving experience. Move with urgency while satisfying regulators.  

Contain cost-to-serve while raising the standard of care. None of these is an either/or choice, and that is what makes the job so hard. 

The Same Wrong Answer, Twice 

Alice made it real with a true story. A customer asked an AI assistant a simple question and got a confident, policy-backed answer. Two days later, unsure, she called. The associate checked the same knowledge base and confirmed it. She made a financial decision on it, then discovered the answer was wrong. 

The failure wasn’t the AI or the associate. It was the system. When both draw from the same source of truth, one wrong answer becomes two, delivered with the illusion of independence. 

Empathy Plus Precision 

The fix starts with a core equation: empathy plus precision, never one at the expense of the other. Without precision, empathy becomes theater, and customers feel understood but still misinformed. Without empathy, precision turns cold, and customers get the right answer and leave anyway. 

Alice then introduced the TERV model: four variables that determine whether AI earns trust or erodes it: Trust, Ease, Recovery, and Value. Her Trust Scorecard turns trust into something leaders can diagnose across transparency, accountability, fairness, security, and human agency. 

Builders, Breakers, and the J-Curve 

Trust builders include explaining what AI can and can’t do up front, designing fast escalation to a human, and involving frontline associates in design. Trust breakers include hiding automation behind a human-sounding voice and optimizing for handle time over customer confidence. 

The field lessons agreed. The biggest gains came from pairing automation with an always-available human path. The costliest missteps came from scaling pilots before building governance. And because AI adoption follows a J-curve, leaders must lead through the dip, not restructure during it. 

Myths to Let Go 

Gen AI doesn’t replace the frontline; it reshapes it. Deflection isn’t a strategy; resolution is. And governance doesn’t slow innovation; it’s what makes scale possible. 

The Choice 

Every leadership team now faces two paths: AI as a blunt cost-cutting instrument, or AI as a trust amplifier that elevates employees, strengthens relationships, and enables organizations to scale faster to increase revenue growth. As Alice put it, trust is not a feature you ship. It is a debt you pay, one human decision at a time. Technology doesn’t transform organizations; leaders do. 

Join us in Dallas 

Conversations like this are why CX leaders come to CRS. Join us at our next CRS in Dallas, March 10-12, 2027, to keep building trust into every layer of the customer experience. Save your seat today. 

The post The Trust Algorithm: What the CX Masterclass Taught Us About AI appeared first on Execs In The Know.

That shift matters.

For the past several years, CX leaders have been surrounded by possibilities. Generative AI could transform service. Voice AI could reshape the contact center. Predictive models could enable more proactive engagement. Automation could change how work gets done.

But possibility is no longer enough. As AI investment moves from experimentation toward implementation, leaders are being asked to make harder decisions: Which use cases deserve investment? Where can AI create measurable value? What needs to remain human? How should success be measured? And what happens when an AI deployment doesn’t deliver the expected results?

The answers are increasingly being found in the details of actual deployments.

What Happens After the Pilot?

One challenge facing CX leaders is that much of the conversation around AI remains conceptual. Industry reports can identify trends, and technology providers can demonstrate what their platforms can do, but neither necessarily answers the questions leaders face when putting AI into production.

What problem were you actually trying to solve? Why was AI the right approach? What changed after implementation? Did customers notice a difference? Did employees? Did the business? And perhaps most importantly, what did you learn that changed the next decision?

These questions matter even more as organizations evaluate AI across different parts of the customer experience. A voice AI deployment, for example, may be evaluated through containment, transfer rates, resolution, and customer sentiment. An employee-facing application may be measured through productivity, quality, or time saved. Proactive AI may require an entirely different definition of value.

No single AI metric tells the whole story. The real work for CX leaders is connecting the use case to the business problem, defining what meaningful improvement looks like, and building the measurement discipline to determine whether the technology actually delivered it.

Use Cases Can Reveal More Than One AI Success Story

Looking at AI through individual use cases can also help leaders make better decisions about their own roadmaps.

Customer-facing AI may reveal where automation can improve access without creating additional friction. Voice AI can demonstrate how conversational technology is changing the economics and experience of the contact center. Proactive engagement can show what becomes possible when organizations use AI to anticipate customer needs rather than simply respond to them.

Workforce applications offer another perspective, particularly as AI begins changing the nature of the work itself. The value of examining these applications together is not to identify one universal model for AI adoption. It is to see how different organizations are approaching the same fundamental challenge: turning AI capability into measurable CX and business impact.

The differences are often as instructive as the similarities.

Some organizations may be focused on efficiency. Others may be pursuing revenue, experience improvement, employee enablement, or greater scalability. Some use cases may begin with a narrowly defined problem and expand. Others may reveal limitations that lead the organization to change course. Those distinctions matter when building an AI roadmap because the path from experimentation to scale rarely looks the same across organizations.

What Leaders Should Be Looking for in an AI Use Case

As more AI deployments move into production, the most useful examples are not necessarily the ones with the biggest claims. They provide enough detail to understand the decisions behind the result.

A useful use case should answer four questions:

1. What problem was worth solving?
AI should start with a meaningful customer, employee, or business problem, rather than the technology itself.

2. What did the organization actually deploy?
Understanding the application, workflow, and role AI plays provides important context for determining whether the approach could translate to another environment.

3. How was impact measured?
Outcomes should extend beyond an AI adoption metric. Leaders need to understand what changed for customers, employees, and the business.

4. What did the organization learn?
Implementation rarely follows the original plan perfectly. The adjustments, challenges, and lessons can be just as valuable as the final outcome.

That last question may ultimately be the most important. The organizations moving AI forward are not simply proving that a technology works. They are learning where it works, where it doesn’t, and how to make better decisions with each deployment.

Moving From AI Curiosity to Discipline

The next phase of AI in CX will require more than identifying exciting applications. It will require discipline around prioritization, implementation, governance, measurement, and scale. That means CX leaders need fewer hypothetical conversations and more visibility into what is happening in the real world.

What are organizations deploying today? What results are they seeing? Where are they encountering friction? And what are they changing as they learn?

Those questions can turn someone else’s AI deployment into a useful input for your own roadmap.

On October 29, Execs In The Know will bring CX AI use cases together for a 90-minute rapid-fire virtual session focused on real deployments, results, and lessons learned, with live Q&A following each use case. For CX leaders evaluating where AI can create meaningful impact, the goal isn’t to leave with someone else’s roadmap. It’s to leave with a clearer view of the decisions, measurements, and lessons that can inform your own.

Learn more and save your seat for the virtual event.

The post Turning AI Investments Into Measurable CX Impact appeared first on Execs In The Know.

CX has always been demanding. But the pressure facing CX leaders today feels different. Teams are navigating rapid artificial intelligence (AI) adoption, shifting customer expectations, economic uncertainty, constant pressure to do more with less, organizational change, and the very real questions about what the future of work looks like.

And behind every strategy, transformation, and performance metric are people trying to keep up with it all. The human cost of that pressure can be easy to overlook.

According to the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) 2026 Workplace Mental Health Poll, 53% of employees say they have felt burned out because of their job, 39% have felt so overwhelmed that it was difficult to do their work, and 38% say their mental health has suffered because of demands at work. At the same time, only 30% say they feel comfortable discussing their mental health with senior or C-suite leadership.

That last number should make leaders pause.

Because you can have an organization with an excellent benefits package, an employee assistance program, and a thoughtful wellness initiative, and people still don’t feel safe saying, “I’m not okay.“

The pressure is real. So is the responsibility.

CX leaders spend a lot of time thinking about how to reduce friction for customers. We map journeys, identify pain points, and look for signals that tell us where an experience is breaking down. We should be applying some of that same thinking to the employee experience.

What are we asking of our teams? Where is the pressure accumulating? Are people being given enough support to navigate change? Are managers equipped to recognize when someone is struggling? And perhaps most importantly, have we created an environment where asking for help is viewed as a sign of trust rather than weakness?

NAMI’s research found that 75% of employees believe senior and C-suite leadership has a responsibility to cultivate an environment where people feel comfortable talking about mental health. Yet only 54% believe their company as a whole prioritizes mental health. That gap matters. Leadership doesn’t mean having all the answers. It means creating the conditions where people can be honest about what they need.

Sometimes that starts with something incredibly simple: asking someone how they’re doing and actually making space for the answer.

Why Leading with Impact matters

At Execs In The Know, we created Leading with Impact because we believe our responsibility to the CX community extends beyond business performance.

Our work is deeply human. So the way we show up for the people doing that work should be human, too.

Through our support of NAMI, we’re helping CX leaders create workplaces where mental health can be discussed openly, stigma can be challenged, and people can feel supported. Our Stigma-Free efforts provide leaders with practical resources, language, and frameworks to help make mental health part of the workplace conversation rather than something people feel they need to hide.

This isn’t about having the perfect program or saying the perfect thing. It’s about being willing to start the conversation. NAMI reminds us that one honest, caring conversation can be a turning point for someone who is struggling. September gives us a reason to have that conversation, but it shouldn’t be the only time we do it.

For CX leaders, that responsibility is particularly meaningful. We ask our teams to bring empathy to every customer interaction. We ask them to absorb frustration, solve complicated problems, and create moments of connection, often under tremendous pressure. They deserve that same empathy from us.

Leading with impact means remembering that the people behind the experience are part of the experience, too.

This September, let’s make room for the conversation. Let’s make it easier to ask for help. And let’s lead in a way that reminds our people they don’t have to carry everything alone.

If you or someone you know is struggling or in crisis, call or text 988 to reach the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline, available 24/7.

Learn more about Leading with Impact and NAMI’s Suicide Prevention resources.

The post The Human Side of CX Leadership We Can’t Afford to Overlook appeared first on Execs In The Know.

That makes real estate an especially interesting lens for the broader customer experience (CX) conversation.

For companies serving consumers through complex, high-consideration journeys, support can’t exist on the sidelines. Every search, question, handoff, and moment of friction is part of the customer experience and can either build confidence or erode it.

That’s the conversation Phoebe Schultz, Vice President of Customer Experience Operations at Zillow Group, will bring to the main stage at CRS Scottsdale, September 30–October 2, 2026, at The Phoenician.

Turning Support into Strategy

In her keynote, Turning Support into Strategy: Zillow’s Approach to Smarter Self-Service, Schultz will share how Zillow approached a challenge that will sound familiar to many CX leaders: a support ecosystem that had become fragmented over time.

Zillow Group had numerous separate help sites, four technology platforms, and 12 support silos, an infrastructure shaped in part by years of acquisitions. The systems supported customers, but the experience reflected the company’s internal structure rather than how customers moved through their journeys.

That distinction matters.

For CX leaders, fragmentation isn’t simply a technology problem. It can show up as customers repeating themselves, searching across multiple places for answers, being routed to the wrong resource, reaching a human when a simple digital answer would have solved the problem, or being pushed into self-service when what they really need is human help.

Zillow’s experience offers a compelling look at what happens when an organization starts treating support differently.

Rather than viewing consolidation as an exercise in reducing complexity, Zillow used it as an opportunity to rethink the role of support altogether: not simply as a cost center, but as a product, a source of customer insight, and a way to connect customers with the right help at the right moment.

What CX Leaders Can Learn

The lessons extend well beyond real estate. As customer expectations continue to rise, organizations across industries are asking similar questions: How much should we automate? Where does self-service genuinely improve the experience? How do we make it easier for customers to find what they need? And how do we preserve the human moments that matter?

Schultz will explore how Zillow is approaching those questions through four key ideas:

1. The org chart trap: Why support experiences can become organized around internal structures rather than customer journeys, and the strategic cost of that disconnect.
2. Help as a product: What changes when support infrastructure is designed with the same discipline and intentionality as any other customer-facing product.
3. Friction as a signal: How customer questions and support interactions can reveal problems in products, processes, and communications.
4. Human where it matters: How intelligent triage and digital self-service can help organizations scale while still making room for the human interactions that build trust and loyalty.

For CX executives, the bigger takeaway is simple: support is telling you something.

The questions customers ask, where they get stuck, and when they seek human assistance can reveal where the broader experience is working and where it isn’t. The opportunity is to listen to those signals and turn support from a reactive function into a strategic advantage.

Join your CX leadership peers at CRS Scottsdale to see Zillow’s keynote. Learn more and register for CRS Scottsdale today.

The post From Help Desk to CX Strategy: What Zillow is Rethinking About Self-Service appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Casio understands this better than most. From the calculator that transformed everyday computing to the iconic G-SHOCK watch known for durability and innovation, Casio has built its reputation by creating products people rely on. Today, that same commitment extends beyond the product itself and into every repair request, warranty interaction, and support conversation.

For Casio, customer service is not simply about resolving issues. It is about reinforcing the promise customers believed in when they chose the brand in the first place.

In a recent KIA Spotlight, Execs In The Know sat down with Mike Begala, General Manager of Service North America at Casio, to explore how the company approaches post-purchase support, balances technology with human connection, and creates experiences that strengthen customer loyalty.

The Post-Sale Experience is Where Trust is Reinforced

Casio’s service organization oversees technical support, repairs, parts, warranty programs, and customer care across North America. While operational performance matters, Begala believes success goes beyond traditional service metrics.

The real measure of a great customer interaction is whether someone leaves feeling confident in their decision to choose Casio.

“Some of the best feedback we receive is when a customer tells us they felt taken care of,” Begala shared. “If someone comes to us with a problem and leaves feeling better about the brand than when they started, we’ve done our job.”

That mindset reflects a broader shift happening across customer experience organizations. Customers are no longer evaluating brands only by the products they purchase. They are evaluating how companies respond when something goes wrong.

Combining Digital Efficiency with Human Support

Like many CX leaders today, Casio faces the challenge of delivering fast, convenient support while maintaining the personal connection customers expect.

Begala believes technology plays an important role in simplifying routine interactions and giving employees better access to information. However, technology should enhance the customer experience—not replace the empathy and expertise that make service memorable.

“The strongest teams are always looking for ways to improve customer experience and make things easier for the people around them,” he explained.

For Casio, the goal is creating a seamless experience where customers can quickly find answers when they need them while still having access to knowledgeable support when a more complex situation requires human assistance.

Leadership Starts with Empathy

A key theme throughout Begala’s conversation is the importance of people. While systems, processes, and technology are essential, he believes exceptional service starts with employees who genuinely want to help others.

“You can teach systems and processes, but it’s much harder to teach someone to care about the customer experience,” Begala said.

That focus on empathy is especially important as customer expectations continue to rise. The best service teams are not just solving problems—they are building relationships and creating moments that reinforce trust.

Learning from the CX Community

As a member of the KIA Community, Begala also highlights the value of connecting with other customer experience leaders facing similar challenges.

From evolving technology to changing customer expectations, peer conversations provide valuable opportunities to share ideas, learn from successes, and accelerate innovation.

Casio’s approach reflects a powerful CX lesson: trust is built over time, but it is strengthened in the moments when customers need a brand the most.

Read the full KIA Spotlight to learn how Casio is redefining post-sale customer experiences through empathy, innovation, and a commitment to customer trust.

The post How Casio Builds Brand Trust After the Sale appeared first on Execs In The Know.

Jyotsna Khandekar sits at the center of that work. As a Director of Product Management, she leads the customer-facing digital platforms and AI initiatives that serve millions of users, including Cisco Community and the systems that surface the right insights to the right customers at the right time. Over 17 years in technology, spanning go-to-market, partner commerce, and now customer experience, she’s built a rare, end-to-end view of how product, revenue, and customer relationships all connect.

We sat down with Jyotsna to talk about where AI is genuinely improving customer experience, what it actually takes to build trust in AI systems, and why she believes the next real competitive edge isn’t your product or your data; it’s how fast your organization can turn customer understanding into action.

Execs In The Know (EITK): AI is transforming customer experiences across industries. What opportunities excite you most, and where do you see organizations getting it wrong?

Jyotsna: What excites me most is the shift AI makes possible in customer experience — moving from reactive to proactive, predictive, and personalized. For most of our support history, we waited for a customer to hit a wall and come to us. AI lets us flip that: anticipate what a customer needs and meet them with the right help at the right moment, sometimes before they’ve even had to ask. That’s a fundamentally better experience, and we’re only at the beginning of it.

Where organizations get it wrong is in starting with technology rather than the customer. There’s a lot of pressure right now to “have an AI story,” which pushes teams to adopt AI first and then hunt for a problem to attach it to. The ones who get it right do the reverse; they start with a real customer problem and ask whether AI is genuinely the best way to solve it. The other trap is optimizing for internal efficiency at the customer’s expense, measuring success by what the company saves rather than the value the customer actually gains.

EITK: Trust has become a critical topic in the age of AI. What does “trustworthy AI” mean to you, and how should organizations build trust with customers while adopting new technologies?

Jyotsna: To me, trustworthy AI comes down to three things: visibility, governance, and safety.

Visibility means you can observe which model handled a request and what data and actions were involved, audit the decisions afterward, and explain the output with clear reasoning and sources. If you can’t see what the system did and why, you can’t trust it.

Governance means real human oversight, with clear conditions for when a person can step in and when they should.

And safety means guardrails: monitoring for abnormal behavior, setting stop conditions, and hardening against attacks. When you can account for all three, and put that visibility in the customer’s hands, the AI earns trust.

Working at Cisco shapes how I see this: trust in the AI era depends on the full stack working together — the network that carries it, the security that protects it, and the observability that lets you see what’s actually happening end-to-end. That’s how you build trust with customers, too: by showing them the system is observable, governed, and safe, not just telling them.

EITK: What’s one AI myth you’d like to debunk?

Jyotsna: One myth I’d debunk is that keeping a human in the loop is a weakness, a sign your AI isn’t good enough yet. I see it the opposite way: it’s a sign of maturity, because it means you understand the stakes. Autonomy without boundaries isn’t innovation, it’s risk.

The goal isn’t to remove people as fast as possible; it’s to know exactly where human judgment matters most and design for it.

EITK: What’s one CX metric you pay closest attention to?

Jyotsna: The one I watch closest is adoption depth — how much of what a customer already owns they’re actually using. I care about it because it’s a leading indicator, not a lagging one: a renewal tells you what has already happened, while adoption depth tells you, months ahead, whether a customer is getting value and is likely to stay. It’s also what my team directly works to move — sending customers the right insights through the right channels about what they’re using and what they’re not yet using, so we’re actively closing that gap. If someone’s using only a fraction of what they’ve invested in, that’s a signal to act now. And if they’re deeply adopted, satisfaction and renewal tend to take care of themselves.

EITK: What technology trend are people underestimating right now?

Jyotsna: This one isn’t about a specific model or chip; it’s about where competitive advantage actually comes from now.

For a long time, the moat was your product or your data. But AI has changed that: product ideas can be copied and rebuilt faster than ever, and data alone is everywhere. So in my view, the real moat now is context, and what I’d call contextual velocity. Context is how deeply you understand your users; contextual velocity is how fast that understanding flows through your organization so you can act on it and turn it into relevant experiences for customers. When anyone can copy the product, what differentiates you is the context you hold and how quickly you can put it to work. People are only starting to realize this, but it’s becoming the real differentiator.

This is the first installment of 5 Questions With, a new blog series in which we sit down with CX leaders from different brands to hear how they’re thinking about customer experience today. Keep an eye out for the next conversation.

The post 5 Questions with Cisco’s Director of Product Management appeared first on Execs In The Know.

That gap between what the data says and what customers actually feel is the defining challenge for customer experience (CX) leaders right now. And it is exactly what keynote speaker Julie Weingardt, Chief Operations Officer at Turo, is bringing to the mainstage at CRS Scottsdale.

There is a quiet crisis happening inside organizations that, by every measurable standard, appear to be doing everything right. Operational benchmarks are met, and satisfaction scores hold steady. And yet trust, the thing that actually drives repeat business and long-term loyalty, is eroding in ways the traditional dashboard was never built to detect.

Weingardt has a name for this problem: dashboard blindness. It is what happens when organizations confuse hitting their numbers with understanding their customers. When the metrics are green, but the friction is real, the disconnect does not stay invisible for long. It shows up in social feeds, in churn, and eventually, in revenue.

The Signal in the Silence

One of the most important insights Weingardt will unpack is what unrated interactions reveal. An interaction that goes unscored is not a neutral data point. It is a gap, and those gaps have consequences that quietly compound over time.

As automation becomes a larger part of the customer journey, the moments where customers disengage without providing feedback deserve far more attention than most organizations give them. The absence of a response is itself a response.

The Pressure Every CX Leader Feels Right Now

There is no avoiding the conversation about artificial intelligence (AI). The pressure to reduce costs through automation is real, it is coming from the top, and it is not going away. But Weingardt will challenge CX leaders to think carefully about what gets lost when the pendulum swings too far.

Human empathy, speed in the right context, and the ability to read nuance are not luxuries. They are operational assets with a measurable impact on customer trust. The question is not whether to adopt AI. The question is how to evaluate the trade-offs honestly, using frameworks that account for what a cost-savings analysis alone will never show you.

This is the cost-trust paradox, and navigating it well is quickly becoming one of the most important skills a CX leader can develop.

From Satisfaction to Advocacy

The session is ultimately a call to rethink the entire leadership model around customer loyalty. Satisfaction, as a goal, is reactive by nature. You wait for the interaction to happen, measure how it went, and adjust. Advocacy requires something different: a proactive, systematic approach to how organizations listen, what they measure, and how they scale the kind of experiences that build loyalty over time.

That shift is harder than it sounds, especially inside organizations that have spent years optimizing for the metrics they know how to measure. But it is the work that separates companies’ customers return to from companies customers tolerate.

Why This Conversation Matters Now

The timing could not be more relevant. As AI capabilities expand and budget pressures intensify, the temptation to optimize for efficiency at the expense of connection has never been stronger. Weingardt brings a practitioner’s perspective to a conversation the industry needs to have with honesty and urgency.

Whether you lead CX for retail, a financial institution, healthcare, or anywhere in between, the dynamics she is describing are not unique to Turo. They are the defining tensions of the moment.

Hear Weingardt’s full keynote at CRS Scottsdale. Learn more and register to attend.

The post Why Trust is a CX Metric That Matters appeared first on Execs In The Know.

A keynote speaker at Customer Response Summit (CRS) in Clearwater Beach, Florida, Edmond took the stage to discuss change, not just in shifting consumer behaviors or advancing technologies, but the kind that redefines an entire industry.

A Childhood Rooted in Change

“I want to start by telling you a little bit more about myself,” she began.

Edmond’s journey in hospitality started beside her grandmother, making hotel beds. The repetition, the attention to detail, the care taken with every tucked-in corner—these weren’t just tasks; they were lessons in pride, service, and resilience.

Change wasn’t just a professional necessity for Edmond; it has always been a way of life. She’s lived in 10 different cities in 30 years, moving between Hilton and Marriott, adapting, evolving, and learning along the way. It was never just about climbing the corporate ladder; it was about deeply understanding the guest experience, leading with empathy, and building something bigger than herself.

As she stood on that stage, she didn’t just speak about transformation. She embodied it.

A Career Built on Evolving

Edmond’s career began at the Boston Quincy Marriott Hotel, where she first learned the nuances of on-property operations. From there, she rose through the ranks, taking on corporate roles that gave her a panoramic view of hospitality, from the frontlines to the executive suite.

One of her defining moments? Leading the historic merger of SPG^® and Marriott Rewards^® into Marriott Bonvoy^®, a transformation that impacted 6,900 hotels and millions of loyalty members worldwide. This wasn’t just a branding exercise. It was a massive operational and emotional shift for travelers who had built their routines, rewards, and brand trust around these programs.

The challenge was enormous, but Edmond saw it as an opportunity to reimagine what loyalty could mean. The results spoke for themselves: a 7% increase in Elite Appreciation among top-tier guests, proving that intentional change, when done right, fosters deeper guest loyalty.

Then came the introduction of a $235M Property Management System, a transformation designed to streamline operations without sacrificing personalization. Because, as she emphasized, innovation in hospitality isn’t about replacing the human touch. It’s about enhancing it.

Leading Transformation at Marriott International

Many companies wait until an economic downturn forces their hand. Marriott doesn’t believe in waiting. Under Edmond’s leadership, Marriott’s CEC has undergone a strategic realignment, ensuring the company isn’t just reacting to change but anticipating it.

Hospitality is evolving at breakneck speed. The industry is larger, more complex, and more technology-driven than ever before. But Edmond’s philosophy is clear: The best time to reimagine the future isn’t when you’re forced to; it’s when you have the strength and stability to do so on your own terms.

The Power of Human Connection

At its core, travel is deeply personal. A weary business traveler stepping off a red-eye flight, a honeymooning couple arriving at a beachside resort, a solo adventurer checking into a boutique hotel—each guest carries a story. The question is: how does your brand become a meaningful part of it?

For Edmond, the answer lies in the power of human connection, a principle woven into Marriott’s DNA. Technology is a tool, but it’s not the solution.

It’s the warmth of a front desk associate who notices a guest’s exhaustion and offers a complimentary late checkout. It’s the housekeeping team that arranges a child’s stuffed animal just so, making a hotel room feel like home. “Being human is the ultimate competitive advantage,” she said.

This resonated deeply. In an industry often focused on efficiency, cost-cutting, and automation, Edmond reminded us that true hospitality isn’t transactional; it’s emotional.

Lessons in Leadership & Change

Edmond has learned that change isn’t something to fear; it’s something to embrace. She has led through economic downturns, the rise of digital-first travelers, and an industry-wide shift toward sustainability. “Never find yourself standing still; if you stand still, you die. Keep moving,” she explained.

She also reminded attendees of something simple yet powerful: never underestimate the power of asking for help because sometimes, that one ask can change the trajectory of your career.

It’s easy to get lost in the mechanics of hospitality, like room rates, occupancy numbers, and service recovery metrics, but Edmond brought the conversation back to what truly matters: people. As leaders in the customer experience space, our challenge is clear: We must be architects of change and relentless in our pursuit of human-centered innovation.

Because in hospitality, the best experiences aren’t just designed. They’re felt. And that’s exactly what Edmond left us with: a feeling that the future of hospitality isn’t just about where guests sleep, dine, or relax. It’s about how we make them feel.

A special thank you to Frid Edmond and the entire Marriott International team for sharing their insights and leadership with us at Customer Response Summit. Your dedication to innovation, service, and human connection continues to set the standard for the hospitality and CX industry. We appreciate your time, expertise, and the inspiration you brought to the stage!

Ready to continue the conversation? Join us at the next CRS, September 30-October 2, 2026. Connect with fellow CX leaders, hear from trailblazing brands, and explore the strategies shaping the future of customer experience. Learn more and reserve your spot.

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Todd brings over three decades of operational leadership experience to his keynote, along with a willingness to draw on his own personal journey. His session, Mental Athlete: Leadership in a Dysregulated World, explores the connection between a leader’s mental health and their effectiveness on the job, and offers a framework for thinking about self-regulation as a professional practice.

His central premise is that self-regulation (how a leader manages their own mental and emotional state) is a meaningful and often overlooked dimension of professional performance. He draws on the analogy of an elite athlete, for whom mental conditioning is as deliberate and structured as physical training, and asks what it might look like for leaders to bring that same intentionality to their own well-being.

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