Editorial
Research Report
Building the Case for Modern Public Sector Messaging
The Gist
- Trust is now the CX differentiator. As AI-generated content, deepfakes and answer engines reshape discovery, brands must earn credibility with both customers and AI systems that increasingly influence buying decisions.
- AI failures expose strategic weaknesses. Organizations that deploy AI without clear goals, governance and change management risk accelerating existing customer experience problems rather than solving them.
- Operational discipline beats AI hype. The most successful organizations focus on governance, employee experience and narrowly scoped use cases instead of chasing every new AI capability.
What CX Questions Were Answered?
Editor's note: Forrester CX Forum East centered on the questions CX leaders are asking now: how to rebuild trust, deploy AI with discipline and strengthen the human foundations that technology alone cannot create.
NEW YORK CITY — The talk track is familiar across just about any marketing or customer experience event lately. AI will write your content, route your tickets, predict your churn and book the room before the guest knows they want it.
The analysts onstage at Forrester's CX Forum East, held June 16-17 at Discover Brooklyn, spent two days on a less flashy but ultimately more consequential topic: how organizations are meaningfully deploying these platforms.
Forrester CEO George Colony opened up his keynote by challenging attendees to “build the experience that AI can’t,” building on the idea of thinking beyond platforms.
The conference also unveiled the organization’s updated Total Experience Score, which now incorporates employee experience alongside brand and customer experience. This brings a new, and very human, component to this measurement, and reinforces that success in building a comprehensive and sustainable experience starts with employees.
Forrester used the morning keynote to introduce an expanded Total Experience Score that folds in a new EX Index, putting a number on the employee-to-customer link that most teams have treated as an article of faith. The logic is old news to anyone who's run a contact center. Disengaged agents produce disengaged service, but incorporating these signals into an overall experience measure is the new part.
Let’s explore three main themes from Forrester CX Forum East and how each point to the critical foundation that lies beneath the technology, and the part that AI can’t invent for any organization.
Table of Contents
- Consumer Distrust Is the Default Setting
- AI Failures Are Failures of Strategy
- From FOMO to Focus
- The Shift From Buying Features to Transforming Operations
Consumer Distrust Is the Default Setting
Jess Lloyd from Forrester built her keynote around the premise that may hit a little too close to home for many: distrust is the consumer's resting state. AI-generated content, deepfakes and synthetic reviews have trained people to treat whatever's in front of them as fake until proven otherwise.
Distrust changes the discovery problem, too. Two subsequent breakout sessions, one on growing brand visibility across answer engines, co-led with Bridgestone's demand marketing VP, and one on preparing for AI agents as a new target audience, arrived at the same place from different doors. The buyer evaluating you might not be a person. When an answer engine summarizes your brand for a shopper who never lands on your site, a model you don't control is narrating your reputation.
Forrester CEO George Colony cautioned, “You will not be able to give a great customer experience unless you can speak the truth. This means your AI will need to speak the truth. Your CEOs will need to speak the truth to their employees. Those are the kinds of companies that will succeed in the future.”
One case study flipped the same technology to defensive use. Clozd showed how AI can comb through your own win-loss and feedback data to surface what customers actually believe about you. Worth doing, since guessing got dangerous.
Related Article: Employee Experience Is Now a CX Variable — and Most Brands Are Failing It
AI Failures Are Failures of Strategy
The second theme of the conference made the connection between strategic failures and the failure to see past what might seem solely like platform adoption. Forrester’s Colleen Fazio’s closing-afternoon keynote made the case that AI failures are strategy failures, bolting intelligence onto a system that was never built for coherence. This only leads to fragmentation at higher speeds.
“Transformation maturity is not inevitable for organizations relying on AI to solve complex problems for customers,” said Fazio, emphasizing that clarity and intent have to exist before automation can help.
Fazio continued by giving an example of a high-profile online payments provider that adopted agentic service as a solution to reducing headcount, and quickly found their CSAT scores tanking, causing a very abrupt (and public) backtracking to bring back human customer service agents that were thought to be able to be replaced with a chatbot. Even though the AI worked as intended, customers weren’t on board with it, and what started as a technology-first decision ultimately didn't come to fruition when customer experience got in the way.
There were several sessions throughout the day that supported the need to understand the value of the human in AI transformation, including a deep dive on being a trusted human leader in an AI world, co-led with Pepsico's head of change management, plus a roundtable on a culture-first mindset for AI adoption and a breakout on change metrics pointedly titled "Measure Twice." Change management drew more stage time here than talk of product or technology.
CX Lessons From Forrester CX Forum East
Editor's note: Forrester CX Forum East focused less on AI capabilities and more on the operational disciplines required to make AI, trust and customer experience initiatives successful. Here are the key lessons organizations should take away.
| Theme | What Forrester Said | What CX Leaders Should Do |
|---|---|---|
| Trust as a Competitive Advantage | Consumers increasingly assume content, reviews and digital interactions may be manipulated or AI-generated. | Invest in transparency, authenticity and verifiable customer proof points that build credibility with both people and AI answer engines. |
| Answer Engines Shape Reputation | Customers may never visit your website before forming an opinion of your brand. | Monitor how AI platforms summarize your organization and ensure accurate, trustworthy information is available across digital channels. |
| Employee Experience Drives CX | Forrester expanded its Total Experience Score to include employee experience alongside customer and brand experience. | Measure and improve employee engagement as a core component of customer experience strategy. |
| AI Failures Are Strategy Failures | Organizations often blame technology when the real problem is unclear objectives, poor governance or weak change management. | Define business goals, success metrics and customer outcomes before deploying AI initiatives. |
| Humans Remain Essential | Several sessions emphasized leadership, culture and change management over technology features. | Design AI programs that augment employees rather than simply replacing them. |
| Governance Enables Agentic AI | Successful agent deployments were narrowly scoped, closely monitored and tied to clear accountability. | Assign ownership, define guardrails and start with single-purpose agents before scaling. |
| Move From FOMO to Focus | Organizations are under pressure to adopt AI quickly, but indiscriminate adoption creates complexity. | Prioritize a small number of high-value use cases instead of chasing every emerging capability. |
| Operational Excellence Wins | The event consistently shifted attention away from technology features and toward execution. | Strengthen processes, governance, customer understanding and employee readiness before adding new platforms. |
| Measure What Matters | Several sessions focused on tracking change management and business outcomes rather than AI activity alone. | Evaluate AI initiatives based on customer impact, employee adoption and measurable business value. |
| Build What AI Cannot | George Colony challenged attendees to create experiences that depend on uniquely human strengths. | Focus on trust, empathy, leadership and organizational culture as long-term differentiators. |
From FOMO to Focus
The third theme emphasized discipline, which can be truly difficult amid all the enthusiasm, C-level pressure to adopt and sheer hype around what these tools can do. The agentic AI sessions sat under a track called "Deploy Technology With Intent," and one workshop on agentic commerce carried the subtitle "How To Move From FOMO To Focus," which is about as honest a read on where most teams actually are as you'll get.
Forrester VP Research Director James McQuivey described our current time as “the simulaneity,” where we (and our customers) want everything all at once, and we’re only going deeper into it.
The presentations focused on real-world practice rather than theory. For instance, a session called "Ready, Set, Agentic" put New York Life, Voya and Amazon Ads onstage to discuss agents that are in production, and there were some recurring themes. One word that came up frequently was governance, which scoped each agent to a single job and kept a human accountable for the outcome. Wyndham used the Five9 keynote to walk through a hyper-personalized guest experience built on its own customer loyalty and booking data, the kind of named, in-production evidence that's been scarce across two years of agentic promises.
The Shift From Buying Features to Transforming Operations
Two days in Brooklyn at the Forrester CX Forum East made the shift from technology-focused to operationally focused hard to miss. This means that the most interesting questions in customer experience have less to do with the technology itself and more to do with everything it relies on. This includes whether your people trust the system, whether your customers trust you and whether you've scoped the work tightly enough to tell if it's helping. The vendors will keep selling capabilities, but Forrester spent the event describing the conditions that make capability worth buying in the first place.
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So before your next platform demo, run the more difficult audit to determine what your organization needs to run the platform successfully. The foundation is the one thing AI can't build for you, and it's what decides whether everything you bolt on top of it actually works.
And take note from events like this one: the companies that lead in the future won’t be the ones that adopt the latest AI-based technologies first; they’ll be the ones that put humans first.
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