A CEO spoke about repaying customers before the fraud headlines broke. A logistics leader shared how a medicine crossed a closed state border during the pandemic. An AI agent made phone calls on its own in front of a live audience.
On paper, these stories had very little in common.
Yet at EngageX 2026, they all pointed to the same message: customer experience is no longer a support function; it’s how businesses earn trust, build loyalty, and stay relevant in an AI-first world.
We brought together over 400 leaders across industries to build EngageX 2026 as a forum for envisioning the next generation of customer experience where AI scales human empathy and makes interactions better rather than simply cheaper. What happened next?
Five Forces That Shaped EngageX 2026
01
Zero Patience Economy
Swiggy and Zepto on how instant commerce has permanently reset what consumers tolerate. Delay is no longer an inconvenience. It is a broken promise.
02
Trust-Personalisation Flywheel
IDFC FIRST Bank’s depositors didn’t leave after a fraud. Bajaj Life’s repeat buyers come back year after year. Products can be replicated. Experience is the differentiator. Trust is what compounds it.
03
Human-AI Inversion
Shivakumar Ganesan made it live on stage. The shift from AI assisting humans to humans guaranteeing AI is not gradual. It is structural.
04
Experience P&L
CX is no longer a service function. Zepto, DTDC, and Exotel showed how customer experience directly compounds into revenue, retention, and market share.
05
Memory Moat
Customers expect to be recognized the way a good shopkeeper always did. AI can scale that memory. But it has to be built, deliberately, over time.
Trust Is Not a Brand Attribute. It’s an Economic Asset.
We started the evening with a CEO panel on a topic that sits at the heart of every financial institution: Trust. Moderated by Latha Venkatesh (CNBC TV18), the discussion brought together Tarun Chugh (Bajaj Life Insurance), Alok Aggarwal (Muthoot Homefin), Dhiraj Relli (HDFC Securities), Raju Dodti (L&T Finance), and Shivakumar Ganesan (Exotel) to share how they earn, protect, and strengthen customer trust at scale.
Trust behaves like a ledger. Every customer touchpoint either credits it or debits it. One bad experience can undo years of goodwill.
Data privacy can no longer be treated as a compliance checkbox. Under the DPDP Act, consent is now purpose-specific and revocable. Companies that treat it as a proposition, not a burden, will win.
L&T Finance uses AI models to serve rural borrowers, citing instances of women in villages borrowing 55,000 rupees. When you understand the emotional weight behind that transaction, the margin for error becomes zero.
“Trust is not built through communication alone. It is built through consistent, transparent, accountable conduct across every touchpoint.”
Building CX That Learns, Predicts, and Compounds
From trust, the conversation naturally moved to intelligence. We were joined by Vijaybahu Joshi (Reliance Jio), Marina Datta (Birla Opus), and Rohan Chhazed (Swiggy) for a discussion on what it really takes to build AI-powered customer experiences at scale and the operational, data, and organizational challenges that come with it.
CX models adopted from the West are monolithic. They don’t account for regional emotional behavior. The real innovation lies in “context-conscious design,” designing for what the customer was going through, not just what they did. A product defect when you just got promoted hits differently than the same defect when you’ve been laid off.
Breaking data silos across departments is not a technology problem. It is a KPI problem. When every function is measured on the same customer outcomes, intelligence starts to flow.
Loyalty is evolving — from scratch cards to loyalty points to subscriptions. Today, a brand where effort is low and trust is high, wins the edge.
“Speaking is an escalation. By the time a customer contacts us, something has already gone too far.”
Champions of CX: 25 Years, One Promise — Blue Dart
What does customer obsession look like over 25 years? Sonia Nair, VP and Head of CX at Blue Dart, joined us to answer exactly that. From shelving IVR rollouts that customers rejected to redesigning them based on customer feedback, the lesson was clear: customer experience starts with listening, not technology.
The same principle guided Blue Dart during COVID, when teams worked across closed state borders to deliver life-saving medication to a customer in need. And it continues to shape the company’s approach to AI today. By automating routine interactions with Exotel’s voice AI agent, Blue Dart’s team is focusing more on judgment, empathy, and a human touch.
“AI will get smarter. But the human connect that delivers the emotion will always be the blockbuster.”
Reputation, Rewards, Risks: What It Takes to Win and Retain India’s Trust
From discussing trust in theory, we moved to seeing it in action. V. Vaidyanathan, MD and CEO of IDFC FIRST Bank, took us through the bank’s response to the Hana fraud incident; a story that showed how customer-first values are measured during a crisis.
Before the media had the Hana story, the CEO flew to Chandigarh overnight and repaid the full amount. The entire hit was taken in one quarter. A stock exchange disclosure went out that morning. A front-page newspaper ad followed: “Living by customer first values when it matters most.”
Of 8 million deposit customers, not one withdrew money. Deposits grew at a 20% annualized rate in that very quarter. Trust, and nothing else, explains it.
The IDFC FIRST app holds a 4.9 rating. The bank went from a small NBFC to one of India’s largest private sector banks in under a decade.
“You cannot advertise your way into trust. It is how you conduct yourself at the leadership level and in daily operations.”
Launching Architects of CX: The First Cohort
At EngageX, Exotel and Forbes India launched the first cohort of Architects of CX celebrating leaders who built the customer experience their organizations now run on, before anyone else in the room had a playbook for it.
One question came up in every Forbes interview for the accompanying coffee-table book: if AI can now do almost everything a contact center once did, what is the business actually for? The answer, consistently, was memory. The recognition a customer feels when a brand remembers them across every channel, every year. AI can scale that memory. It cannot manufacture it.
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AI in the Loop vs Human in the Loop: Finding Your Harmony
Most companies are still in “AI in the loop” mode, where humans own the work and AI assists. Shivakumar Ganeshan, CEO, Exotel introduces the “human in the loop” model where AI does the work and humans step in only when judgment, escalation, or empathy is required.
Exotel’s Harmony platform is built on this inversion from “AI as assistant” to “AI as worker, human as guarantor”. It handles 60-70% of contact center volume. Humans monitor and focus on conversations where relationships are actually built. Trust in this model comes from the guarantee, not the absence of AI. Customers know a human is available. They rarely need one.
The Airline India Always Deserved
Most of us flew Air India for the first time with our parents. That emotional weight is exactly what made its decline so visible, and its comeback so personal. Rajesh Dogra, Chief Customer Experience Officer, joined us to talk about what four years of rebuilding actually looks like.
The transformation touches 37+ customer touchpoints. New aircraft, redesigned lounges, rebuilt F&B, 15,000 new hires, and 130+ systems reimagined. On new routes, NPS hits 55 to 60. The Maharaja Lounge in Delhi has been called one of the best in the world by over 25 CEOs who’ve walked through it.
AI is now embedded across the customer journey — from AI.g handling thousands of daily queries to internal tools that help advisors respond faster and more accurately. Every piece of customer verbatim gets routed to the right team to fix the problem before the next flyer faces it.
“When we took over, our NPS was minus 35. Today it is 35… Technology is enabling it, but it’s the coming together of people, processes, services, and physical experiences that will help us build the world-class airline India deserves.”
More From the Floor: CX as a Business Metric
Throughout the evening, leaders from DTDC, Zepto, SBI, AWS, and ICICI Lombard shared one consistent message — CX decisions show up directly on revenue, retention, and trust.
Every conversation is a data point. AI can now surface your top three customer issues from last week without a single survey.
DTDC mapped India into 9-square-meter hexagonal cells. Delivery success went up, complaints fell; all from listening to customer data.
In BFSI, the winners aren’t deploying the most AI. They’re deploying it where trust is never the casualty.
Retention is the only honest north star. Not NPS. Not CSAT. Whether the same customers keep coming back.
“The final differentiating frontier will be the human who shows up when things go wrong. Everything else will eventually be commoditized.”
We started EngageX with a simple belief: the best conversations about customer experience shouldn’t happen in silos. They should happen in a room with honest conversations about what works, what doesn’t, and what’s changing.
EngageX 2026 reminded us why those conversations matter. As AI reshapes the way businesses engage with customers, our goal is to keep creating a space where the industry can learn from each other, challenge assumptions, and collectively raise the bar for CX in India. This is just the beginning. As the community grows, so does our ambition: to help shape a future where great customer experience isn’t a differentiator; it’s the standard.
We’d love to have you in the next one.
