Conversational AI in 2026: What (We Think) Still Matters

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After a year of rapid change in conversational AI, the real work remains the same: building assistants that actually perform. Join CDI’s consultancy experts for an honest conversation about what’s working, what isn’t, and where teams should focus as they plan for 2026.

2025 was a year of massive change in the conversational AI space, especially for the people responsible for building and maintaining real assistants.

Platforms shifted. New tooling promised faster builds. Everyone declared that “agents” would replace everything.

And yet, in many ways, not much changed at all.

We’re still building assistants. Customers still expect good conversational experiences. And AI still needs human judgment to work well in the real world.

As 2026 begins, we’ve brought together a superstar panel from CDI’s consultancy team, Cindy Cardol, Rachel Whitehorn, Willem Don, Jasper Klimbie, and Gokce Kuscu, to talk honestly about the ground reality of building conversational AI today. What’s working. What’s not. And what teams are underestimating.

In this insight-packed one-hour session, we’ll cover:

Building and hiring for strong conversational AI teams
Designing assistants that survive real usage
Optimising systems once they’re live
Orchestrating multi-agent experiences
Making conversational AI deliver business value
Rethinking voice and IVR with GenAI
If you’ve got a question or two, you can share them when you register. We’ll close the session by answering as many as we can.

See you there.

Cindy is an experienced client strategy lead who is passionate about (complicated) AI projects. She manages all stakeholders, provides strategic advice to customers and oversees the quality of the conversation design team’s work. She is comfortable to lead conversation designer teams end-to-end and determines the knowledge roadmap. She can also work collaboratively with colleagues, including non-designers. She has been the lead conversation designer as well as an AI consultant for multiple years now and also worked for a long time on the most recognized chatbot in the Dutch banking industry.

Rachel is a Conversational AI Consultant specializing in customer‑facing chat experiences for highly regulated industries and government agencies. Her background as a licensed insurance agent gives her a practical understanding of customer needs and compliance‑driven environments. At CDI, she designs and optimizes RAG‑powered solutions for clients and contributes to CDI Academy through webinar development and hosting Unprompted episodes.

Willem Don is one of our seasoned Conversational AI Trainers, with eight years of extensive experience in language model development and evaluation. Throughout his career, he has successfully managed AI implementations for over 40 clients, demonstrating a profound understanding of dialogue system intricacies. As a contributor to the Conversation Design Institute's AI Trainer Course, he has been instrumental in shaping the next generation of AI training methodologies.

Jasper is an experienced Conversational AI Consultant. He works with international clients to help them figure out how to get AI to deliver real business value. With a background in (screen) writing and conversation design work at Google, he’s also involved in CDI's Academy running masterclasses and creating course materials. Jasper frequently speaks at public engagements and industry events to educate and inspire around the possibilities of Conversational AI.