At Forrester’s 2026 CX Forum East, AI dominated conversations and sessions over the day-and-a-half gathering. At the event’s conclusion, it became clear that organizations getting real value from AI share common traits: they obsess over trust, clarity of purpose, and employee readiness alongside the technology itself.
Across the keynotes, panels, and case studies, five themes defined the conversation:
Think of AI as an Experience Engine
Speakers across multiple sessions reframed AI as an “experience engine” built to serve specific customer and employee outcomes.
Kelly Marie Smith, VP and Head of Experience AI & Innovation at New York Life, Nancy Flowers, VP of Customer Experience Strategy and Design at Voya Financial, and Santosh Gunaseelan, Director of Creative Personalization, Optimization and Design at Amazon Ads described their journeys from AI pilots to scaled deployments that change how employees work and how customers make decisions. Concrete use cases included:
- Advisor “AI school” to build confidence and empathy in financial conversation
- AI-driven fraud detection and knowledge management in contact centers
- Agentic AI studios helping advertisers produce content across formats.
When asked to describe their success metrics, the panel spotlighted containment rate, CSAT, subscription saves, and quantified financial outcomes.
Chris Lettau, Senior Director of Customer Service Platforms at SiriusXM and Dror Avieli, Managing Director & VP Customer Success at Consensys added lessons from deploying generative AI into high-volume conversational systems. They agreed that teams searching to secure executive buy-in need to come armed with real numbers and that pilots must be designed for constant iteration. They also concurred that winning implementations often blend vendor solutions with internal expertise.
This mirrors what Corporate Insight observes across the financial services firms we track. Most incumbents such as major banks, brokerages, and insurers currently cluster in what we call the “Informs” and “Analyzes” tiers of the AI capability spectrum. These firms provide tools that deliver market data, summarize account activity or surface insights on demand. Much rarer are firms pushing into the “Advises” and “Acts” tiers with tools that provide personalized recommendations and, in some cases, execute them autonomously. Robinhood‘s Cortex, Schwab‘s Portfolio Insights, and platforms like Origin and Composer are among the competitive differentiators at the moment. The gap between recognizing AI’s potential and deploying it as a true experience capability is exactly where most financial institutions find themselves right now.
Trust and Responsible AI Are Now Competitive Differentiators
The rising cost of distrust ran as a throughline across the conference. With FBI data showing tens of thousands of AI-related fraud complaints and hundreds of millions in losses, responsible AI governance has moved to the front of the agenda.
Forrester’s research found that 86% of consumers say responsible AI matters in their purchasing decisions. A related session on trust moderated by Forrester’s Katy Tynan and featuring Blake Carter, Head of Change Management at PepsiCo examined the psychology underneath trust. Tynan defined trust as:
- Whether a system acts in your best interest
- Whether it performs reliably
- Whether accountability exists when something goes wrong.
Corporate Insight’s consumer research similarly emphasizes trust as a critical factor in any positive customer interaction. In our 2026 AI in Financial Services Today study, which incorporates survey data from over 2,000 consumers, 43% described themselves as more concerned than excited about AI, and 57% reported abandoning a chat interaction upon detecting they were talking to an AI rather than a human. Further distrust of firms deploying AI that is beneficial to the end user (versus allowing them to decrease costs or cut staff) emerged repeated in survey open ends as well as in-depth interviews conducted by our team.
CI’s report identifies what we call the Accountability Triad:
- AI self-identification
- Accessible human escalation pathways
- Clear human review of key AI-driven decisions
This triad maps directly onto Forrester’s responsible AI framework. Firms that get these three elements right are building a trust foundation that functions as a genuine competitive asset.
How Can Firms Compete in the Era of Answer Engines?
One of the most practical and urgent threads of the conference was how answer engines are rewriting discoverability. Organic traffic is declining in volume while rising in quality, as AI surfaces a smaller set of “best” answers to consumers. Marketers are shifting their focus from lower-funnel keyword tactics toward upper-funnel brand and experience strategy.
Peggy Costabile, VP Digital and Demand Marketing at Bridgestone described “digital gemba” exercises where they put executives through real search journeys using LLMs and answer tools that made the stakes more tangible. When leadership witnesses a brand missing from the top recommendations in live scenarios, the urgency to act becomes self-evident. Costabile opined that brand narrative and data footprint have become the new battleground for customer acquisition.
The “digital gemba” concept resonates with how Corporate Insight approaches competitive intelligence. For nearly 30 years, we’ve maintained real, authenticated customer accounts at the institutions we track that allow us to see what customers actually see once they log in to their account. Bridgestone’s approach applies that same discipline to discoverability: executives experiencing customer reality firsthand rather than relying on abstracted reports. How a firm’s products appear when a consumer asks an AI assistant “what’s the best high-yield savings account?” or “should I use a robo-advisor?” will increasingly shape acquisition. CI is actively monitoring how financial institutions are managing that presence.
Total Experience: Employee Experience as the Growth Lever
Forrester introduced the Total Experience (TX) Score and EX Impact, showing how improvements in employee experience directly improve a firm’s position on the growth grid. Home Depot was spotlighted as a TX honoree, with results tied to an “inverted pyramid” culture, heavy investment in pro customer logistics, and tools designed to make associates’ jobs easier rather than more monitored.
CX leaders who treat EX as an HR problem are missing the point. Employee experience has become a core design variable in every AI and CX initiative.
Raising AI Readiness: Skills, Culture, and Measurement
The growing emphasis on Total Experience (TX), or the recognition that brand, customer, and employee experiences must move in lockstep, was another standout theme. Several presenters asked the audience some variation of the question: Is your organization actually ready for AI?
The most AI-ready organizations design customized learning paths rather than one-size-fits-all training, embrace the 70-20-10 model (70% learning through doing, 20% through peer learning, 10% through formal courses), and build cultures where experimentation is encouraged and mistakes fuel improvement. Synchrony‘s jD Buckley laid out the “Four RI” framework to help implementation teams trace insights from recommendation to roadmap and from release to impact, offering a concrete model for making that culture measurable.
AI readiness in financial services carries an external dimension that internal assessments can miss: customer readiness. Corporate Insight’s research finds that AI literacy and prior AI experience are stronger predictors of consumer comfort than generational cohort. Notably, this finding undercuts the conventional wisdom of targeting younger customers for AI-forward experiences. Roughly a third of consumers fall into what we’ve identified as a critical swing group composed of conditional adopters of AI who are persuadable but not yet won over. For financial institutions, this group represents the most significant near-term opportunity.
The Big Picture: Embrace the “Simultaneity”
Perhaps the most thought provoking idea at the conference was presented by Forrester’s James McQuivey, who opined that we need to embrace conducting business in a world of “simultaneity” where human wants and technological possibilities are each rapidly expanding at the same time.
Leading organizations are treating this as an invitation: deploying AI to enable simultaneous value creation across multiple streams, investing in employee experience so people have the tools and autonomy to orchestrate those streams, and anchoring every initiative in trust, transparency, and clear purpose.
Justin Suter is the director of thought leadership at Corporate Insight.