AI With Intent: How CX Leaders Decide Where Automation Belongs (And Where It Doesn’t)

Senior CX operators from REI & Hyatt share the framework they use to decide where AI drives retention and where automation backfires.

Every CX leader is being asked to deploy AI faster than they can defend it.

The teams seeing real ROI aren’t deploying everywhere. They’re deploying with intent.

Matthew Schaeffer leads digital operations at REI, a 20-million-member co-op where every member touchpoint is also a loyalty signal. Katrina Fine runs AI and technology enablement at Hyatt, where guest experience scales across global brands while preserving local feel. Both are deploying AI right now. Both have a framework for where it belongs, where it doesn’t yet and what it takes to align an organization around the answer.

Their throughline: the difference between AI that resolves and AI that retains comes down to data. The result isn’t faster tickets. It’s CX that grows the relationship.

Why attend?

• Decide where AI belongs: How to evaluate AI-readiness across customer journeys, and which touchpoints to keep human.
• Move AI from CSAT to retention: What it takes for automation to drive loyalty, repeat purchase and lifetime value.
• Win the cross-functional fight: How to align marketing, ops and IT on AI rollouts that ship instead of stalling.
• Defend your AI roadmap to the CFO: Tie every AI decision to a business metric the executive team actually cares about.

Save your seat. You’ll leave with the framework, the language and the proof points to defend your next AI move.