Beyond AI: what Europe’s flagship customer contact event revealed

Amsterdam, early October. Customer Contact Week Europe 2026 brought together around 700 attendees and 50 exhibitors over three days to talk about the future of customer contact. As the industry’s flagship event in Europe, it carried a certain energy that is hard to replicate, the kind that comes from having the right people in the same room at the same time. International technology company Nebi joined as an exhibitor and sponsor, and what we observed over those three days gave us a lot to think about.

One of the things CCW Europe does particularly well is the quality of who shows up. This is not a generalist conference. The attendees are practitioners, decision-makers, and innovators who are directly involved in shaping how customer contact works, which means the conversations on the floor tend to go deeper and faster than at most events. For a company like Nebi, building intelligent customer support solutions like Unvox and Tikito , that kind of focused, relevant networking was genuinely valuable.

The energy of the industry was also tangible. Customer contact is a space that is changing rapidly, and the people working in it know it. That sense of momentum made for an engaging three days.

Walk the exhibition floor and one thing becomes immediately clear: artificial intelligence is no longer a niche topic in the customer contact industry. It is the topic. Every booth, every panel, every conversation circled back to it: AI-powered agents, AI-driven insights, smarter automation , more personalised experiences. The excitement in the room was real, and as a company with AI at the core of its product suite, Nebi felt very much at home.

Talking directly to practitioners, two themes surfaced repeatedly.

The first was risk. People wanted to understand not just what AI can do, but what can go wrong, including the implications of getting it wrong in a customer-facing environment, where trust and experience are everything.

Questions around quality assurance and data analytics came up too: how to measure what’s working, how to make sense of the data that customer interactions generate. These are areas where both Unvox and Tikito go deep, so those conversations felt particularly close to us.

The second theme that surfaced was people. Many organisations shared that the hardest part of transformation is not the technology itself, but bringing their teams along. And this becomes even more complex for companies that are not starting from scratch, those working with infrastructure that has been in place for years, sometimes decades, now being asked to keep up with a completely different set of expectations. Switching to new processes and systems is a significant challenge, and it came up again and again.

CCW Europe left us with something more useful than inspiration, a clearer sense of what the industry actually needs right now. Partners who engage with the full picture: the excitement and the complexity of getting there.

For Nebi, that is the conversation worth having. And it is the one we will keep having.

Nebi is a full-scale software ecosystem with the mission of empowering organisations through intelligent, data-driven solutions. Nebi participated in Customer Contact Week Europe 2026 as an exhibitor and sponsor.

Expertise from selected TNW Council members, admitted through an application and review process to a fee-based program. Opinions expressed by the authors are their own.