CMSWireTV graphic titled “Biggest Moments of 2025,” featuring headshots of Season 2 guests: Sarah Kimmel of CMSWire, Daniel Thrall of Intuit, Jeff Harling of Zoom, and Uman Chan of The Vitamin Shoppe. Center panel displays “CMSWireTV: The Digital Experience — Season 2, Episode 11” with a play button.
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The Digital Experience Show's Biggest Moments of 2025

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Relive the breakthroughs, bold ideas and brand stories that defined CMSWireTV’s Digital Experience Show in 2025.

The Gist

  • A standout season for DX leaders. Season 2 of The Digital Experience Show brought bold perspectives from some of the top minds shaping AI, personalization, content strategy, and enterprise tech.
  • Brands showed what modern CX really looks like. IKEA, Intuit, Zoom, The Vitamin Shoppe, and USA Swimming revealed how they’re dismantling silos and architecting experiences for speed, relevance, and scale.
  • We stitched together the best moments. Watch the highlight reel inside this article and revisit the biggest insights of the year as we gear up for Season 3 in 2026.

As we wrap an incredible year of conversations on The Digital Experience Show, one thing is unmistakably clear: DX leaders are done waiting for the future to arrive. They’re building it now — with AI shaping content strategy, composability remaking enterprise architecture and customer psychology reframing what “good experience” even means.

In Season 2 in 2025, we heard from executives leading transformations at IKEA, Intuit, Zoom, USA Swimming, The Vitamin Shoppe and more — each bringing practical lessons and honest reflections on what it takes to succeed in an era of real-time expectations.

What I really love? The variety of guests. We always like to have a foundation of practitioners, and this season is littered with the best of the best there. We've got engineers, technologists, DX strategy leaders, a DX industry researcher (my fav, CMSWire colleague Sarah Kimmel), marketers and DX industry analysts like Mark Demeny, one of the very best in the business of digital customer experience. 

Below, I’m recapping the biggest moments from each show — and we also hope you enjoy the video highlight reel so you can experience the best of Season 2 in one place. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope it fires you up for Season 3 in 2026. We’re already lining up another exceptional slate of leaders to take you inside the strategies shaping customer experience, digital experience and everything in between.

Now let’s get into the shows.

Table of Contents

Personalization Up, Confusion Down? Not So Fast

In this episode with colleague Sarah Kimmel, who leads the incredible research team here at CMSWire and all other brands, CX leaders dug into a tough reality: while many organizations believe they’re improving in personalization, customer feedback often says otherwise. Leaders emphasized that teams frequently mistake more content for more relevant content — and that the real differentiator is clarity, context and coordination.

The Need for Unified Decisioning

Guests highlighted that disconnected systems and inconsistent data interpretation continue to undermine CX progress. The top performers are those building unified decision frameworks that guide personalization across channels, not just inside isolated tools.

Too often, internal dashboards look green while customer signals go red. Leaders explored why teams misread their performance — and how integrating voice-of-customer data directly into planning cycles is becoming a must-have.

Related Article: Personalization Up, Confusion Down? Not So Fast, Say CX Leaders

AI, Personalization & the Future of Content Strategy: Inside IKEA's Journey

IKEA’s team brought one of the most grounded perspectives of the season in this episode, showing how the brand uses AI to evolve a massive global content ecosystem.

Good AI Content Still Starts With Human Truth

The IKEA team says that AI doesn’t replace design, creativity or brand values — it amplifies them. Their approach centers on “people, not prompts,” ensuring teams understand customer context before generating anything.

Rather than flooding channels with machine-generated content, IKEA uses AI to refine, localize and extend what humans do best. It’s a model many enterprise teams are now studying closely.

Related Article: AI, Personalization and the Next Era of Content Strategy: IKEA's Journey

USA Swimming’s Storytelling That Actually Makes a Splash

One of the season’s most joyful episodes came from USA Swimming, whose marketing team demonstrated how to keep a decades-old brand culturally relevant.

Storytelling Built Around Real Emotion

Their “Goggles On” campaign is a reminder that good content isn’t about gloss — it’s about authenticity, humor and knowing what your community loves. 

The team shared how they make fast-moving creative decisions without sacrificing brand quality, and how they marry athlete storytelling with fan-driven engagement.

Related Article: 'Goggles On': USA Swimming's Storytelling Campaign Makes a Splash

The Psychology of a Great Customer Experience (According to Intuit)

Our conversation with Intuit’s CX leader dove deep into behavioral insights shaping customer expectations today.

Designing for the Brain, Not Just the Journey Map

Intuit discussed how cognitive load, emotional assurance and goal-oriented design factor into every experience they create.

The team argued that reducing friction isn’t only about speed — it’s about psychological comfort, which drives trust, retention and repeat usage.

Related Article: The Psychology of a Great Customer Experience, According to Intuit

How Zoom’s Team Is Redefining the Digital Experience

This season included two strong Zoom conversations: Zoom’s ecommerce team on modern DX and their broader CX roadmap.

A Shift from Product-First to Customer-First

Zoom walked us through how experience orchestration, simplified purchasing paths and integrated data models are reshaping their digital properties. The stories showed how Zoom’s transformation is touching everything from onboarding to renewal, with AI and analytics seated at the core.

Related Article: How Zoom's Ecommerce Team is Redefining Digital Experiences

Composability Is a Choice — Not a Cure-All

In this discussion with DX leader Mark Demeny, leaders challenged the narrative that composable architecture automatically solves complexity.

Learning Opportunities

Composability Succeeds When the Org Structure Supports it

Guests stressed that governance, team alignment and cross-functional maturity matter just as much as the tools. Companies shouldn’t chase microservices for the sake of trendiness — they should chase what empowers teams to ship faster without creating chaos.

Related Article: Composability Isn't a Cure-All — It's a Choice

How The Vitamin Shoppe Built a Composable CX Stack

We looked into The Vitamin Shoppe’s composable transformation — a rare end-to-end look at what it takes to modernize an established retail ecosystem.

From Rigid Legacy Systems to Rapid Experimentation

Their tech leaders shared how composable services enabled faster merchandising updates, more flexible content workflows and smoother omnichannel journeys. Throughout the episode, they emphasized that composability is only valuable when it makes life easier for the customer — not just the tech team.

About the Author
Dom Nicastro

Dom Nicastro is editor-in-chief of CMSWire and an award-winning journalist with a passion for technology, customer experience and marketing. With more than 20 years of experience, he has written for various publications, like the Gloucester Daily Times and Boston Magazine. He has a proven track record of delivering high-quality, informative, and engaging content to his readers. Dom works tirelessly to stay up-to-date with the latest trends in the industry to provide readers with accurate, trustworthy information to help them make informed decisions. Connect with Dom Nicastro:

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