CX Decoded By CMSWire

Two digital agency leaders explain how AI changed their pricing, platforms and staffing. Chris Teitzel, founder and CEO of Seattle-based Cellar Door, and Anita Melendez, chief operations officer at Orange County, Calif.-based KWALL, joined CX Decoded at Pantheon's Go Live conference in Miami. They covered: Why Cellar Door moved off time-and-materials billing while KWALL kept its model Letting employees experiment with AI, and what came out of it Building websites with a CMS instead of on one The governance work created by employee-built AI tools Why agencies are hiring project managers and strategists over developers

Farah Ahmed started on the phones 25 years ago. Today he's director of sales and CX transformation at StorageVault, where nine voice AI agents resolve simple calls and route customers in hard life transitions to human advisors. He explains why a clean knowledge base got StorageVault from contract to live pilot in under three weeks, and why he designs every rollout around employees first.

PayNearMe CMO Anne Hay explains why she judges events by who her team spends time with rather than how many leads they collect, how to earn a spot on a buyer's shortlist and why curiosity is a marketer's most important skill.

Jeremy Cohen, manager of fan development and insights for the Buffalo Sabres, explains how AI analysis of more than 40,000 fan comments, monthly focus groups and street-level listening during a playoff run shaped real investments in the Sabres fan experience.

Suzie Dieth, VP and Chief Experience Officer at NRG and CMSWire's 2026 CX Leader of the Year, joins CX Decoded to trace nearly 21 years of building a CX program from scratch — from contact center roots to AI-driven insight at scale.

Three competing CDP vendors — Tealium, Treasure AI and Databricks — join CX Decoded for an unusually candid panel on real-time activation, the orchestration layer and why trust may be the category's next real fight.

Jorge Camargo, Head of Digital Platforms at Bank of America, joins CX Decoded to discuss the eight-year evolution of Erica, the bank's AI assistant — covering scale, personalization, compliance and what's next as generative AI reshapes client expectations.

Clarks' Mario Protano joins CX Decoded to unpack how AI is reshaping product discovery, why brand mentions are replacing clicks as a success metric, and how the 200-year-old footwear brand is rebuilding its affiliate and attribution strategy around a messier customer journey.

Jessica Herring, VP of Member Experience at Loyalty Credit Union, joins CX Decoded to talk AI chatbot design, member trust, and why she skipped the NPS score entirely.

Justin Racine, chief digital officer at Geriatric Medical & Surgical Supply, joins CX Decoded to explain why B2B buyers are more emotional than the industry assumes — and why fixing employee experience matters just as much as fixing the customer journey.