CCW Nashville Recap 2026: Moving AI From Pilot to Operational Reality

AI may have dominated the conversation at Customer Contact Week Nashville, but the message coming out of the event was clear: the industry is ready to move beyond experimentation. 

Across conversations at Liveops Booth #404, sessions, and discussions with CX leaders, the focus wasn’t simply on what AI can do. Organizations are increasingly asking harder questions:  

• Where does AI actually belong?  

• How do we move successful pilots into production?  

• Where is human expertise still essential?  

• And how do we turn AI investments into measurable business outcomes? 

Those questions were also at the center of one of the week’s most important conversations for Liveops: an interactive executive workshop focused on operationalizing AI beyond the pilot stage. 

Operationalizing AI: A Practical Workshop for Scaling Beyond Pilots 

On Wednesday, Liveops’ Michelle Winnett, SVP of Operations, Ali Birouti, Director of Digital Evolution, and Jordan Zivoder from CMP Research led the 90-minute workshop, “Operationalizing AI: A Practical Workshop for Scaling Beyond Pilots.” 

The session was built around a simple reality facing CX leaders today: 

AI is no longer the question. Operationalizing it is. 

Most organizations have already experimented with AI. Many have launched pilots or introduced AI into individual workflows. But moving from isolated implementations to an operating model capable of supporting AI across the enterprise is a much more difficult challenge. 

Rather than focusing on adding more AI tools, the workshop challenged CX leaders to think about the organizational capabilities required to make AI work: governance, workflows, measurement, prioritization, human expertise, and clearly defined business outcomes. 

Drawing on CMP research and the LiveNexus AI Review and Roadmap framework, the session moved participants through three stages: understanding the current AI landscape, assessing their organization’s readiness, and translating those findings into an actionable roadmap. 

Understanding why AI initiatives stall 

The workshop began by examining the state of AI adoption and why promising initiatives can struggle to move beyond the pilot stage. 

The conversation shifted the focus away from technology alone. Successful AI transformation requires organizations to understand not only what AI can do, but where it should be deployed and what problem it is expected to solve. 

That distinction matters. 

An AI pilot may demonstrate that a technology works. Operationalizing AI requires something broader: integrating that capability into workflows, establishing accountability and governance, defining how people and AI work together, and measuring whether the implementation is actually improving the desired business outcome. 

For CX leaders, that means the next phase of AI isn’t necessarily about finding another use case. It’s about building the organizational capability to execute the right ones. 

Assessing where organizations are today 

Participants then put that thinking into practice through an interactive AI Maturity Assessment. 

Using the Liveops Crawl → Walk → Run → Fly framework, attendees evaluated their organizations across 10 dimensions of AI readiness, adoption, governance, execution, and business impact. 

The four stages provided a practical way to think about progression: 

Crawl — Build trust 

Walk — Guide decisions 

Run — Execute actions 

Fly — Optimize outcomes 

Participants scored their organizations individually before comparing perspectives with peers and discussing the barriers preventing them from progressing to the next stage. 

The goal wasn’t maturity for maturity’s sake. The assessment created a starting point for a much more important conversation: What needs to change operationally for AI to deliver greater value? 

Understanding where an organization stands today helps leaders identify gaps before making the next investment, whether those gaps involve governance, data, workflows, organizational alignment, measurement, or technology itself. 

Take your AI maturity assessment

Turning AI readiness into an actionable roadmap 

The final portion of the workshop moved from assessment to execution. 

Using principles from the LiveNexus AI Review and Roadmap, participants explored how to prioritize high-value AI opportunities, establish governance and operating models, define meaningful success metrics, and create an implementation roadmap. 

A critical part of that process is intentionally designing how AI and human expertise work together. 

The future of CX isn’t simply about automating as many interactions as possible. Organizations need to determine where automation improves the experience, where AI can augment human decision-making, and where empathy, judgment, expertise, and human connection continue to create greater value. 

That requires organizations to start with the desired outcome rather than the technology. 

By the end of the workshop, participants had a framework they could use to evaluate their current position, prioritize investments, address organizational barriers, and begin building a more deliberate path toward scaling AI. 

From AI ambition to operational reality 

The conversations at CCW Nashville reinforced something we see increasingly across the market: AI ambition isn’t the problem. Turning that ambition into operational reality is. 

Organizations don’t necessarily need more AI tools. They need greater clarity around which problems are worth solving, which use cases should come first, how AI fits into existing operations, and how success will be measured. 

That’s the thinking behind the LiveNexus AI Review and Roadmap. 

Rather than beginning with a predetermined technology solution, the Review and Roadmap helps organizations examine where they are today, identify the opportunities that can create meaningful value, evaluate potential barriers, and develop a practical path forward. 

Because scaling AI isn’t simply a technology initiative. 

It’s an operating-model decision. 

The bigger conversation at CCW Nashville 

Beyond the workshop, conversations throughout CCW Nashville reflected a CX industry undergoing a significant transition. 

AI is changing what’s possible, but customer expectations haven’t disappeared along the way. Customers still expect convenient experiences, effective resolution, and access to human expertise when an interaction requires it. 

For CX leaders, the opportunity is to bring those priorities together. 

The organizations that lead the next phase of customer experience won’t necessarily be those that deploy the most AI. They’ll be the ones that understand where AI belongs, where people create the greatest value, and how to orchestrate both around better customer and business outcomes. 

Thank you to everyone who joined Michelle, Ali, and Jordan for the workshop, stopped by Liveops Booth #404, and connected with our team throughout CCW Nashville. 

The event may be over, but the work of turning AI strategy into measurable outcomes is only getting started. 

Ready to move your AI strategy beyond the pilot stage? Explore the LiveNexus AI Review and Roadmap to understand where you are today—and build a practical path toward what comes next. 

Explore LiveNexus AI Review & Roadmap