Jas Bansal
Head of Marketing | Kerv | Kerv Experience
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Get in touchPublished 13/10/26
Everyone’s talking about AI. Few are talking about what it takes to make it work. At this year’s flagship K-Summit, Kerv clients and CX leaders cut through the noise, tackling how to target AI investment wisely and safely move from pilot to live production with the lowest risk.
Hosted at the Park Regis Hotel in Birmingham, the day brought together Genesys Cloud users for exclusive previews of upcoming Genesys priorities, candid fireside chats, thought-provoking keynotes and trailblazing agentic AI demonstrations that showed what’s possible right now.
Keeping it real
Opening K-Summit 2026, Julian Barrow, MD of Kerv Experience, set the tone with a simple ambition: that everyone would leave feeling better informed, inspired and equipped to act on the latest industry and customer experience (CX) trends.
The day ahead promised to be hands-on and practical, featuring updates from Kerv and Genesys, real-world breakout sessions, and plenty of peer-to-peer knowledge exchange. Above all, Julian promised an honest look at which CX approaches are working and delivering results, and where organisations still have ground to cover.
“With this in mind, our four Kerv practices remain on hand to assist across the entire technology stack: from contact centre and CX consultancy, compliance and the AI-enabled workforce to managed IT services, business platforms and custom-built apps,” Julian added.
From investment to impact: The art of value generation
Kerv Senior CX Consultant Paul Cox kicked off with a simple question: how do agents really feel about technology and process changes?
An audience poll revealed a remarkably even split between ‘somewhat enthusiastic’ to ‘somewhat resistant’ – a useful reminder that while technology may be advancing exponentially, bringing people with it remains a work in progress.
Meanwhile, AI is moving at breakneck speed. In just four years, we’ve gone from typing a question and getting advice, to frontier agents that can research, manage multi-step actions and deliver a specific outcome. Agentic capabilities are now roughly doubling every four months[1].
The pressure on leaders to act is growing. However, there’s a significant gap between experimenting with AI and turning it into lasting business value. Today, 42% of initiatives are abandoned before they ever reach production[2].
So, choosing the right projects is vital. Organisations achieving the best results from AI follow a similar playbook that:
- Starts with the business problem – not the technology.
- Defines how success will be measured, forecasts benefits and tracks them.
- Pilots first and uses the data to decide whether to scale – or stop.
- Recognises users turn solutions into business value – and makes adoption a priority.
Selecting a use case and moving to pilot comes down to three factors: net value, speed to value and risk. Just as importantly, successful organisations halt a pilot the moment the evidence dictates. Above all, they build lasting new ways of working by involving users, aligning processes to fit, providing training and support, and reinforcing direction through visible leadership.
The message was clear: don’t chase AI for AI’s sake. Find a problem worth solving, prove the value, bring people with you – and let the evidence guide what happens next.
AI for employees: EX success in action
Continuing the theme of diligent planning, Go Car Credit Head of Customer Care Sonia Schofield described how Kerv had helped her turn an underused Genesys capability into a more visible, flexible and customer-focused operating model.
The company supports over 40,000 UK customers who may otherwise have struggled to acquire car finance from traditional lenders due to impaired or bad credit histories. Success is built on excellent service and ensuring stress-free customer journeys with minimal paperwork and simple repayment plans.
Resource planning used to be a huge burden: scheduling was done manually in spreadsheets, with little visibility into adherence or wider KPIs. As the business grew rapidly, high contact volumes, vulnerable customers and regulatory expectations made poor workforce decisions even more costly.
Tapping into Kerv CX Consultancy Services, Go Car Credit arranged a ‘build-as-you-learn’ onsite workshop focused specifically on Genesys Workforce Engagement Management (WEM) capabilities.
Deployed in just two weeks, WEM is now enabling Go Car Credit to receive greater value from its Genesys Cloud investment – by combining automated workforce planning, performance management, quality monitoring, analytics and employee development into one AI-driven platform.
Figure 1. Go Car Credit AI-powered operating model: from high manual effort to usable contact centre intelligence.
Results (see Figure 1) include reduced administrative effort, improved adherence and reporting visibility, and better staffing decisions. Employees also benefit from fair workloads, more accurate scheduling, real-time feedback, and personalised coaching.
“Better tech becomes valuable when it truly changes the way people work.”
-Sonia Schofield, Head of Customer Care, Go Car Credit
Since deploying WEM, the business has grown by 24% without adding extra headcount or fear of compromising CX.
Cutting through the noise
Jeremy White, Senior Innovation Editor at Wired, charted what’s really changing in the industry. Two years of AI model wars had delivered rapid progress and heavy capital investment, while pricing had largely collapsed.
Agentic AI isn’t new: it first surfaced nearly a decade ago. It has simply become more reliable and easier to deploy. The key takeaway was to start with the customer experience and work back to the technology, and to bring employees along for the ride, building support as you go.
The most powerful AI technology in the world won’t deliver value if the people expected to use it aren’t ready to embrace it.
Agentic AI in practice
Three live demos and interactive breakouts gave delegates a clear view of what AI, and Genesys agentic capabilities in particular, can do right now.
Led by Kerv solution architects, these ‘show and tell’ sessions helped attendees picture:
- Early AI foundations and quick wins: for those starting to explore virtual agents.
- Advanced AI and agentic CX: for those further along and ready to move towards full automation.
- Live bot building: how to create a customer journey in Genesys from scratch.
[1] METR Task-Completion Time Horizons, May–Jul 2026.
[2] S&P Global Market Intelligence survey, 2025.
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