Customer Contact Week Vegas 2026: Less Hype, More Operating Discipline

A practical preview of the keynotes, summits, and sessions shaping customer contact strategy in 2026.

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Customer Contact Week Vegas
Event NewsGuide

Published: April 22, 2026

Rob Wilkinson

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.

In This Guide

What Is Customer Contact Week Vegas 2026?

CCW Las Vegas is a four-day event designed for contact center, customer service, and CX teams. The official event overview frames it as a place to explore best practices, technologies, and customer service priorities through content, networking, and vendor engagement.

The event includes main stage sessions, breakout programming, workshops, summits, networking receptions, and an expo hall. It also includes an invite-only Executive Leadership Exchange for senior leaders who want higher-trust benchmarking and more curated conversations.

Why CX Leaders Attend CCW Vegas

For leaders, CCW’s value typically comes down to three outcomes. First, you pressure-test where AI and automation are actually delivering ROI. Second, you compare operating models for workforce performance and quality. Third, you 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

CCW Las Vegas 2026 runs Monday through Thursday in distinct phases:

Monday, June 22 is oriented around arrival, badge pickup, and executive-level programming like the CMP Research Circle. The day closes with a welcome party.

Tuesday, June 23 is built around workshops and summits, including the CCW Innovation Summit, CCW Management Summit, and the CCWomen Summit. The CCW Excellence Awards Gala also takes place Tuesday evening and requires a separate ticket.

Wednesday, June 24 marks the expo hall opening and a full day of keynotes and breakouts. Headliner programming appears on the main stage and the day closes with the after party.

Thursday, June 25 continues with main stage programming, breakouts, and expo hall networking. The conference concludes that evening.

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.

The CCW Innovation Summit is 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. CMP Research positions the Innovation Summit as a working forum for leaders who need to translate AI momentum into outcomes customers and employees can feel.

The CCW Management Summit leans into leadership behaviors and operational outcomes. The themes signal a focus on emotional resilience, coaching, and vendor decision-making grounded in research-driven evaluation.

The 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 then 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

CCW’s speaker lineup blends enterprise operators, analysts, and high-profile headliners. Main stage and headline names include:

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.

First, decide what must change in the next two quarters—deflection, agent productivity, QA modernization, AI governance, and map those priorities to sessions and workshops. Then lock in Tuesday early.

Second, treat vendor meetings like structured discovery. Bring a scorecard. Ask about deployment time, governance model, integration complexity, and proof of outcome, and don’t accept ‘pilot success’ as evidence of scalability.

Third, 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.

 


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