The Last Good Month Before the Summer Slowdown

Something happens to the CX and digital transformation conference circuit in June and July. The energy drops, the flagship events retreat to the autumn, and the windows for genuine peer exchange close for a few months. May, by contrast, is where the spring calendar reaches its fullest expression — and often where its most practically useful events land.

There's a particular quality to May conferences that's distinct from the earlier months. The attendees who've been through March and April have already processed the year's biggest ideas, challenged the frameworks they were unsure about, and arrived at the May events with sharper questions. The conversations in May tend to be more advanced for it. There's less "have you heard about X?" and more "we tried X and here's what actually happened."

This guide covers the May 2026 events worth attending if your work sits in customer experience, UX, digital transformation, service design, or any of the disciplines close enough to feel the current. The events below were selected on the same criteria as the March and April editions: substantive content, credible speakers, genuine peer exchange value, and a track record of delivering something that changes how attendees think rather than just confirming what they already believe.

Eight events made the list for May. Here's what to know about each.

The May 2026 CX Events That Are Worth Your Time

Customer Contact Week (CCW) — Las Vegas

The flagship Customer Contact Week in Las Vegas is, by most measures, the largest customer service and contact centre event in the world. That scale can be a limitation as much as an advantage — the exhibition floor is enormous, the session count is overwhelming, and navigating the signal-to-noise ratio requires planning. But for CX professionals with any responsibility for service delivery or operations, CCW's depth in the mechanics of customer interaction is genuinely unmatched.

The conference has evolved significantly over the past five years. What was once primarily a contact centre technology showcase has become a more sophisticated forum on the future of customer service as a discipline — the role of AI in replacing and augmenting human agents, the relationship between employee experience and service quality, the measurement of emotional quality in automated interactions, and the design of escalation paths that feel human rather than procedural. These are CX questions, not just operations questions, and CCW has started to talk about them that way.

The 2026 Las Vegas edition is expected to run substantial programming around generative AI in customer service — specifically, the gap between what vendors are promising and what early adopters are actually seeing in production. The sessions on conversational AI quality assurance, on the design of AI-human handover moments, and on the economics of AI deployment in contact centre environments are likely to be the most cited content from the event. The workforce management track, which covers the operational and human implications of AI in service teams, is typically the most practically useful for service delivery leaders.

Speaker profiles at CCW typically include heads of service and CX from major US brands across retail, financial services, insurance, and utilities, alongside practitioners from the technology side. The mix of perspectives — operational, strategic, technological — is one of the strongest features of the programme, and the case study content tends to be notably specific on metrics: resolution rates, handle times, CSAT movements, and the financial outcomes of CX operations decisions.

The exhibition floor is worth approaching with a structured brief. The technology vendor landscape for contact centre AI is evolving quickly, and CCW gives a useful snapshot of where the market is — what's genuinely production-ready versus what's still being pitched as production-ready before it is. The conversations with vendor teams around specific implementation questions tend to be more substantive when you're asking about real deployments rather than capability claims.

Who is it for: Customer service directors, contact centre leaders, CX operations heads, AI deployment leads, workforce management professionals, and CX executives with service delivery accountability.

Date: May 18–22, 2026

Place: Caesars Forum, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

Fee: Approx. $1,800–$2,800 (varies by pass type; group rates available)

Link: customercontactweek.com

A note from Renascence: CCW Las Vegas is the event that takes the "last mile" of customer experience seriously — the actual moment of interaction between a customer and a service system. Most CX strategy conferences talk about experience design from the outside in; CCW forces you to look at it from the inside out. If your CX programme includes any service delivery component — and it almost certainly does — the operational intelligence here is worth having.

UX London — London

UX London is one of those events that has maintained a consistent quality of programming through a decade of significant change in the UX and design landscape. Hosted at the Barbican in London, it combines a workshop-heavy first two days with a full-day conference on the third — a structure that rewards attendees who treat the development of craft alongside the consumption of ideas as part of the same investment.

The workshops are the event's strongest feature. Each is run by a practitioner who is actively using the methods they're teaching — not a consultant presenting a framework, but someone who ran the research last month using the approach they're about to share. The depth of practical instruction available in UX London's workshop programme is comparable to a dedicated training course at a fraction of the cost and with significantly better company.

The conference day mixes keynotes and shorter talks across themes that typically include the future of design research, AI tools in the design workflow, inclusive design practice, and the increasingly contested question of what UX means when AI is generating interfaces and making real-time experience decisions. The 2026 edition is expected to have a particular focus on the researcher's role in an AI-augmented product environment — how research methods adapt when the products being researched are themselves adaptive.

The speaker quality at UX London is notably high and notably international. Practitioners from Europe, North America, and Asia are consistently represented, and the curation tends to favour people with something genuinely new to say over people with the biggest names. Past editions have introduced ideas that took a year or two to reach the mainstream CX and design conversation — which is either forward-looking or ahead of its time depending on how quickly your organisation moves.

For CX professionals based in Europe, UX London offers something the US-based events don't: a peer community shaped by the European regulatory and market context, with a design culture that places ethics, sustainability, and public interest alongside commercial outcomes as legitimate design criteria. That texture is increasingly relevant as GDPR enforcement matures and as the ethical dimensions of experience design become more visible to customers and regulators alike.

Who is it for: UX designers, design researchers, CX designers, product designers, interaction designers, and design leaders with a strong craft orientation.

Date: May 12–14, 2026

Place: The Barbican, London, UK

Fee: Approx. £900–£1,300 (workshop-only, conference-only, and combined passes available)

Link: uxlondon.com

A note from Renascence: UX London is the European counterpart to UXLX in April — different format, similar commitment to craft over spectacle. The workshop programme is what makes it distinctive. If your team is building UX research capability or developing the design craft that sits beneath your CX programme, this is one of the most effective and enjoyable ways to do it. The Barbican adds something to the experience that a hotel conference centre simply doesn't.

CX Innovation Exchange — Sydney

The CX Innovation Exchange has positioned itself as the most substantive CX conference in the Asia-Pacific region — and its May timing makes it a useful capstone to the global Q2 calendar for organisations operating across APAC alongside their European or Middle Eastern operations. The Sydney edition draws a predominantly Australian and New Zealand audience with significant representation from Southeast Asian markets, and the conversations reflect the specific dynamics of those markets: high digital adoption, intense retail and financial services competition, and a consumer base that is both demanding and increasingly sophisticated about what good experience looks like.

The Innovation Exchange format is structured around challenge-based sessions — rather than presenting solutions, speakers are invited to present the hard problems they've faced and the approaches they've taken, including what hasn't worked. This produces a different quality of conversation than the success-story format that dominates most CX conferences, and attendees consistently cite the honesty and specificity of the content as the event's distinguishing feature.

Key content threads for 2026 are expected to include AI-driven personalisation in retail and financial services (the APAC market has moved faster on this than most Western markets), the challenge of experience consistency across the digital and physical channel blend in markets with high mobile-first adoption, and the question of how to build CX governance structures that survive leadership changes — a persistently difficult problem in a region with higher executive turnover than Europe or North America.

The speaker programme for 2026 is expected to include CX leaders from major Australian banks and financial institutions, leaders from Telstra and other major telecoms, retail brands across both physical and digital contexts, and government service design practitioners from state and federal agencies. The diversity of sectors is a genuine strength — the cross-industry pattern recognition that emerges from these sessions is often more instructive than the industry-specific sessions at single-sector events.

Who is it for: CX leaders, digital transformation executives, service design practitioners, and customer insights heads operating in or across APAC markets.

Date: May 6–7, 2026

Place: Sydney, Australia

Fee: Approx. AUD $1,800–$2,500

Link: Check Australian CX event directories and LinkedIn for 2026 details

A note from Renascence: The APAC perspective on CX is consistently underrepresented in the global conference circuit, and it shouldn't be. Markets like Australia, Singapore, and South Korea are running some of the most sophisticated CX programmes in the world, particularly in financial services and retail. If your organisation operates across markets or is looking at global benchmarks seriously, the Sydney CX Innovation Exchange provides a perspective that most European and US-centric events simply don't surface.

Gartner Marketing Symposium & Xpo — Denver

Gartner's Marketing Symposium is the counterpart to its CX-focused events — and for CX professionals who work closely with marketing, it provides a view from the other side of the house that is often more illuminating than anything a dedicated CX conference can offer. The questions marketing leaders are asking about AI, personalisation, first-party data, and customer loyalty are increasingly indistinguishable from the questions CX leaders are asking, but the two communities often don't share the same room to ask them.

The 2026 Denver edition is expected to have a strong thread on the convergence of the CMO and CCO roles — the organisational question of whether marketing and customer experience should be unified under a single strategic leadership function, what the evidence says about which structures produce better outcomes, and how to build the cross-functional collaboration that makes the question less urgent. Gartner's research on CMO effectiveness and the changing scope of the marketing function is the most analytically rigorous treatment of this question available.

The AI content at Gartner's Marketing Symposium tends to be more practically grounded than at most events — partly because Gartner's hype cycle methodology gives them a disciplined framework for distinguishing what's genuinely production-ready from what's still aspirational. The sessions on AI in marketing and experience personalisation for 2026 are expected to focus on the specific capability gaps that are preventing organisations from deploying AI effectively, rather than on the vision of what AI will eventually enable.

Gartner events always have a research quality floor that most conferences don't — the content is validated against real data before it reaches a stage, which means the assertions made in sessions are more defensible than the assertion-as-opinion format that dominates elsewhere. For CX professionals making the case for investment decisions, the data points from Gartner events tend to carry weight in internal conversations in a way that practitioner case studies sometimes don't.

Who is it for: CMOs, marketing directors with CX accountability, CX leaders working on brand-experience alignment, digital marketing and personalisation leads, and CX executives managing cross-functional programmes that include marketing.

Date: May 18–20, 2026

Place: Denver, Colorado, USA

Fee: Approx. $2,800–$3,500 (Gartner clients receive significant discounts)

Link: gartner.com

A note from Renascence: The marketing-CX boundary is where some of the most important unresolved questions in experience management live. Gartner's Marketing Symposium is one of the few events where those questions get treated with the seriousness they deserve, backed by research that's hard to argue with. If you're navigating the CMO-CCO question inside your organisation — or managing a CX programme that depends on marketing-side data and activation — the content here is directly applicable.

Digital Summit Series — Multiple US Cities

The Digital Summit Series runs across multiple US cities throughout the year, with May editions in several markets. What makes it worth including here is not any single event but the cumulative model: a conference format that brings together digital marketing, UX, content strategy, and customer experience content in a city-specific format that's accessible to practitioners who can't travel to the flagship national events.

The quality across the series is variable — the sessions that land tend to be the more practitioner-specific ones on digital CX tools, analytics, content personalisation, and UX optimisation rather than the broader strategic keynotes. But at the price point it runs at (significantly lower than the major research firm events), it provides a useful access point for teams that want to build shared vocabulary and exposure to current digital experience practice across CX, marketing, and product functions.

The May editions typically run in Boston, Chicago, and Seattle, among other markets. The local context of each event adds something useful — the Boston edition has a strong healthcare and edtech thread, Chicago draws heavily from the retail and financial services communities, and Seattle reflects the technology-company-dense market it operates in. Choosing the city edition based on the industry composition of its attendees is a reasonable selection strategy.

For organisations that are building CX capability at a team level rather than just investing in senior leadership development, the Digital Summit Series offers a practical and affordable way to bring a group of practitioners into current conversations about digital experience, UX, and content strategy simultaneously. The post-event alignment conversations — "here's what we all heard, here's what it means for how we work" — tend to be highly productive when a team attends together.

Who is it for: Digital marketers, UX practitioners, content strategists, digital product managers, and CX professionals building digital experience capability at team rather than leadership level.

Date: Multiple dates throughout May 2026 (varies by city)

Place: Multiple US cities including Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and others

Fee: Approx. $400–$700 per event

Link: digitalsummit.com

A note from Renascence: This is the most accessible entry point on the May list. It won't shift your strategic direction the way Gartner or Forrester will — but it's a genuinely solid way to build team-level capability across digital CX, UX, and content functions at a price that doesn't require executive approval for each individual. The team attendance model is worth considering specifically.

World Summit on Customer Experience (WSCE) — Vienna

The World Summit on Customer Experience is one of the genuinely global CX events — its attendee base spans Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and the Americas in a way that most CX conferences don't replicate. Vienna is a fitting host for an event that takes the internationalism of the CX conversation seriously: it's geographically central to the European market, its business culture is formal enough to attract C-suite attendance, and the city itself has a service culture that functions as a living case study in the relationship between heritage and innovation in experience design.

The WSCE programme is structured around the proposition that customer experience is a business strategy, not a function — and the sessions reflect that framing. The conversations are explicitly about what it takes to build organisations that deliver consistently excellent experiences, not just about the tools and methods for measuring or designing those experiences. The CEO and C-suite presence at this event is notably higher than at most CX conferences, which changes the depth at which strategic questions get addressed.

Topics expected for 2026 include the organisational design of experience-led businesses (specifically, how to build CX governance that survives leadership change), the relationship between employee experience and customer experience at the strategic level, the future of loyalty in a market where switching costs are declining and AI-driven comparison is accelerating, and the question of how to build a credible business case for CX investment in a macroeconomic environment where cost pressure is acute.

That last topic is worth dwelling on. The business case for CX is becoming harder to make in many organisations, not because the evidence is weaker but because the economic environment is making every line of investment harder to justify. The WSCE sessions on CX economics — the revenue, retention, and cost-avoidance evidence base for experience investment — are among the most rigorously argued treatments of this question currently available at conference level.

Speaker profiles typically include Chief Customer Officers and Chief Experience Officers from major European and global brands, alongside academics and researchers whose work is directly applicable to the CX strategy questions being addressed. The balance between practitioner and researcher voice is better calibrated here than at most events.

Who is it for: Chief Experience Officers, Chief Customer Officers, CX programme directors, C-suite executives with CX accountability, and senior leaders building the case for experience-led business strategy.

Date: May 12–13, 2026

Place: Vienna, Austria

Fee: Approx. €1,600–€2,200

Link: Check WSCE official site and European CX event directories for 2026 details

A note from Renascence: The WSCE is one of the few events where the business case for CX gets discussed with the rigour it needs. If you're navigating internal resistance to CX investment, or building the strategic argument for a CX programme with a board that doesn't yet fully understand the economics, the evidence and frameworks from this summit are among the most useful available. Vienna in May is also a genuinely excellent combination.

Cannes Lions — Cannes (CX and Brand Experience Tracks)

Cannes Lions needs little introduction in the marketing and creativity world. Its relevance to the CX community is more contested — this is primarily an advertising and creativity festival, and the CX signal can get lost in the noise. But the case for selective engagement is strong, and it's grown stronger as the festival has developed specific programming around experience design, human behaviour, and the role of creativity in building long-term customer relationships rather than just generating short-term attention.

The tracks most relevant to CX professionals are the Creative Business Transformation Lions, which celebrate work at the intersection of business strategy and creative execution, and the Design Lions, which include a growing body of work on service and experience design. The Lions Health and Lions Innovation tracks also carry content that CX professionals at the intersection of healthcare or technology and experience will find substantive.

What Cannes offers that almost no other event provides is a concentrated view of what world-class creativity applied to customer experience looks like across industries, geographies, and budget scales simultaneously. The Grand Prix winners in experience design and brand transformation categories tell you something important about where the bar for experiential excellence is moving — not just in advertising but in the full spectrum of how brands show up for customers.

The 2026 programme is expected to include significant content on AI creativity — not just AI as a tool for generating content but AI as a collaborator in the design of experiences. The sessions on brand trust, on the ethics of AI-generated creative work, and on what authenticity looks like in a world where the creative process is increasingly non-human are directly relevant to CX professionals thinking about the AI transformation of their own customer interactions.

Let me be direct about the limitations: Cannes Lions is expensive, it's physically exhausting, and a significant proportion of the content is aimed at an advertising audience rather than a CX one. The professionals who get the most out of it are those who treat it as a creativity and culture input rather than a CX methodology event, and who attend specific sessions with clear intent rather than following the main programme.

Who is it for: CX leaders with responsibility for brand experience, CMO and CCO adjacent roles, creative directors in CX-driven organisations, and experience strategists interested in where creativity and CX meet at the highest level.

Date: June 16–20, 2026 (just outside May; included here for planning purposes as the lead-up programming begins in May)

Place: Cannes, France

Fee: Approx. €3,500–€6,000 depending on pass type (day passes available)

Link: canneslions.com

A note from Renascence: The CX community has an uneasy relationship with Cannes — too commercial for the serious practitioners, too unfamiliar for the advertising crowd. But the work recognised in the experience design and transformation categories has become genuinely instructive for CX leaders, and the concentration of global creative intelligence in one place for a week is hard to replicate. Go for the specific tracks. Ignore the yacht parties. Return with a sharper sense of what excellent looks like.

CX Middle East Summit — Riyadh

The CX Middle East Summit in Riyadh has grown significantly in stature over the past two years, reflecting the broader acceleration of CX investment across the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia as Vision 2030 has matured from a government ambition into a business operating reality. The summit draws senior CX leaders from across KSA's public and private sectors — financial services, retail, hospitality, telecommunications, government services, and the emerging entertainment and lifestyle sectors that have developed rapidly under Vision 2030.

The KSA market has specific characteristics that make this summit distinct from the Dubai-based regional events. The pace of change is faster — organisations that didn't have a CX function three years ago are now building enterprise-scale programmes. The customer expectations are evolving rapidly as a younger, more digitally native population becomes the primary consumer demographic. And the government mandate for service excellence — through the National Transformation Programme's customer experience frameworks and sector-specific regulatory requirements — creates a structured accountability for CX outcomes that doesn't exist in most markets.

The 2026 Riyadh edition is expected to focus heavily on AI deployment in customer-facing services — a topic where KSA's major organisations are moving quickly, often ahead of their global peers in specific sectors. The sessions on Arabic-language AI for customer service, on digital identity and personalisation in the Saudi context, and on the CX implications of the Vision 2030 mega-projects (NEOM, Diriyah, Red Sea Project) are expected to be the most distinctive content at this event.

Renascence's work in the region has given us a direct view of how rapidly CX maturity is developing in KSA. The conversations we're having with Saudi organisations today — about governance architecture, VOC infrastructure, and the connection between employee experience and service quality — would have been significantly earlier-stage conversations two or three years ago. The summit reflects that maturation.

For CX professionals working in or looking to enter the Saudi market, this is the most important regional event of the year. The connections made here — across industries, across public and private sectors — are the foundation of how CX practice in the Kingdom develops and shares itself.

Who is it for: CX leaders, digital transformation executives, and customer insights heads operating in or across KSA and broader MENA markets; particularly relevant for organisations navigating Vision 2030-aligned CX requirements.

Date: May 19–20, 2026

Place: Riyadh, Saudi Arabia

Fee: Approx. SAR 2,500–4,500 (government delegate rates available)

Link: Check regional Saudi event directories and LinkedIn for 2026 registration details

A note from Renascence: The KSA market is one of the most dynamic CX environments in the world right now — partly because the pace of change creates both opportunity and pressure, and partly because the government framework for service excellence is more specific and more enforced than in most markets. If you're operating in KSA or building a CX programme that needs to respond to Vision 2030's service quality expectations, this summit is the most focused intelligence you can access.

The Q2 CX Events Calendar in Full: What It Tells Us

Taken together, the March, April, and May events covered across this three-part series represent the most concentrated period of professional development and peer exchange available to CX practitioners in any given year. The range spans from global flagship research conferences (Forrester, Gartner) to craft-focused practitioner events (UXLX, UX London), from regional intelligence forums (MENA Digital Summit, CX Middle East Summit) to cross-sector innovation gatherings (SXSW, SDGC). It's a genuinely broad picture of where the CX discipline is working through its hardest problems.

A few patterns emerge from looking at Q2 as a whole. First, the AI conversation has moved from the strategic to the operational. The questions being asked at this year's events aren't "will AI transform CX?" — that question was answered some time ago. They're "how do we deploy AI responsibly in customer interactions, and what do we do when it gets things wrong?" Second, the convergence of employee experience and customer experience is no longer a theoretical proposition — it's a practical challenge that organisations are actively managing, and the event content reflects that. Third, the measurement conversation has matured. The shift from NPS as a primary metric to more multi-dimensional, operationally-connected measurement architectures is well underway, and the events that address it with the most rigour — Forrester, Qualtrics X4, the Customer Experience Strategies Summit — are seeing the most engaged attendees on that thread.

The behavioural economics of why people attend conferences — the social proof of peer attendance, the fear of missing out on consensus-forming ideas, the genuine intellectual appetite for challenge — is worth understanding alongside the practical event selection decisions. Not everyone who should attend these events does, and not everyone who attends them benefits. The ones who do tend to share a set of habits: they attend with intent, they bring their hardest current problems, and they leave with positions rather than just notes.

How to Build a Three-Month Events Strategy, Not a Three-Month Events List

There's a version of this guide that's just a list of events to attend. This isn't quite that. The events above are worth knowing about — but the more useful question is how to build a Q2 events strategy that actually serves your CX programme and your team's development rather than just satisfying a professional obligation to "keep up."

The framework we'd suggest has three components. First, define your development objectives before you look at any events calendar. What are the hardest problems your CX programme is currently facing? Where is the gap between your current measurement approach and the insight you actually need? What capabilities does your team have that need development, and what does your programme need that your team doesn't currently provide? Starting with the problems rather than the events tends to produce better selection decisions.

Second, map your stakeholder landscape. The events that produce the most durable professional value are typically the ones where the people you need to know — peers, vendors, researchers, potential collaborators — are also present. That's partly a function of event prestige and partly a function of topic alignment. Knowing who attends which events, and attending accordingly, is a form of professional strategy that most CX leaders underinvest in.

Third, plan the return investment, not just the attendance investment. The best conference ROI happens when the ideas and connections from an event are actively processed and applied within the first two weeks of returning. That requires a post-event protocol: a structured debrief with your team, a list of the ideas worth testing, a follow-up sequence with the connections you made. Without it, conferences become expensive professional development that dissipates quickly rather than compounds over time.

A Final Note on Picking Events in a Saturated Market

The CX events market has grown considerably over the last decade. Some of that growth has produced genuinely better events — more rigorous content, more diverse speakers, more sophisticated peer communities. Some of it has produced events that are primarily marketing vehicles for vendors or consulting firms, dressed in the language of professional development.

Distinguishing between the two requires a few simple tests. Does the event have independent editorial control over its programme, or are most sessions sponsored? Does it feature practitioners presenting outcomes and failures alongside successes, or primarily success stories? Does the peer community it draws include people whose work you'd actually want to learn from, or primarily people who are new to the field and looking for orientation? Is the content specific enough to be directly applicable, or is it inspirational in ways that don't survive the flight home?

The events in this guide pass those tests — or come close enough to justify attending with clear intent. The ones that didn't pass them didn't make the list, regardless of their brand recognition or budget. That's the only editorial principle worth holding to in a market this crowded.