Beyond the Map ‘26: Where context, clarity, and impact collide

Without context, AI generates a lot of noise and not enough clarity. And there’s no prompt that will cause it to instantly spit out a shared understanding of what’s happening, why it matters, or what to do next.

That’s why enterprise leaders and journey practitioners from around the world are heading to London this November for the second edition of Beyond the Map.

Last year, we explored the evolution of journey management. This year, the conversation moves forward: to human judgment, better decision-making, and what it takes to connect context, create clarity, and drive impact across the enterprise.

Here’s who’s taking the stage, what they’re tackling, and what you can take back to your organization.

Who's talking

From 9-11 November, at Kings Place, London, leaders from some of the world's most complex organizations will share what they're learning as they put journey management, experience context, and AI to work inside the enterprise.

The confirmed lineup includes:

• Autodesk: Khayyam Lasi, Program Lead, Journey Management, on turning journey management into operational infrastructure.

• Lyreco: Aude Jacquemin, Group Customer Experience Manager, on turning transformation into daily decisions

• Synchrony Financial: JD Buckley, VP of CX Strategy and Service Design, on tracing insights through roadmaps using the 4RI framework.

• Essent: Nick Poldermans & Niels Corsten (Deloitte Digital) on building a journey-centric operating model.

• Kimberly-Clark: Eric Boye, Associate Director, Service Design, & Kate Kapp, Customer Experience and Journey Leader at Arbex (Kimberly-Clark), on connecting experience from strategy to execution.

• MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group: Stefan Wörnle, Senior Manager Global Customer Experience, on turning journey insights into moments customers trust.

• Grundfos: Cecilie Elisabeth Kobbelgaard, Global Customer Journey Manager, on scaling customer insights within a global enterprise.

• MetLife: Caroline Maté, Director, Experience Strategy Lead, on creating structures that scale.

• CHG Healthcare: Dan Sullivan, Director of Journey Management at CHG Healthcare, on creating shared organizational buy-in.

• NCR Voyix: Berri Berto, Product Strategy and Service Design Lead, on scaling context rather than just deploying AI agents.

What we’ll do: Connect context, create clarity, drive impact

The agenda for Beyond the Map 2026 is built around a sequential enterprise challenge: making better decisions when both people and AI have access to more information than ever before.

1. Connect context: Build the foundation

Most enterprises struggle because their data doesn't talk to itself. Want to know why something happened? Talk to research. What happened? Check the dashboard. What customers actually did? Look at interaction data.

Each lives in a different system, owned by a different team and described in a different language. Tagging everything "onboarding" doesn't integrate it. It just puts the information in the same neighborhood.

Dan Sullivan, Director of Journey Management at CHG Healthcare and a confirmed Beyond the Map '26 speaker, made that disconnect impossible to ignore. His team built a walk-through, museum-style exhibit of CHG's provider journey and presented it to more than 500 employees.

As product managers moved through it together, some discovered they had been solving the same problems independently. Different teams were working from different pieces of the same context, and none of them had known the others existed.

That shared understanding didn't happen by accident. It took building something concrete enough that people could see, in the room, where their work actually connected.

The same principle applies to AI. Without context connecting the evidence, journey and business priorities, AI can still produce a confident answer. It just becomes much harder to know whether that answer can be trusted.

Connecting context gives people and AI the foundation. The next challenge is creating clarity around what matters.

2. Create clarity: Know what matters

Having the information isn't the hard part anymore. Agreeing on what it means is. Aude Jacquemin, Group Customer Experience Manager at Lyreco, encountered that problem at enterprise scale. The organization had journey work everywhere, but every team had its own version and format. "So many files, so many formats," she said. "And when it came time to decide, you have endless debates."

To fix it, they created "one shared framework, visible to all," as Jacquemin put it. It was simple, visual, and tied to clear definitions of success. Headquarters provided the structure, while individual markets applied it locally.

That's clarity in practice: a shared way to interpret it so people can agree on what matters and decide what to do next. Jacquemin returns to Beyond the Map this year to go one step further, turning that shared framework into daily decisions.

Deciding what the organization should bet on still requires judgment, grounded in shared context.

3. Drive impact: Make decisions visible

A better decision only matters if it eventually changes something: a priority shifts, an initiative gets funded, a cost falls, revenue grows, or a risk is avoided.

JD Buckley, VP of CX Strategy and Service Design at Synchrony Financial, has spent years on the question that keeps CX leaders up at night: "How do we know this research made a difference, and would the product team have done that anyway?"

Her answer is a framework she calls 4RI. Most organizations only measure influence at the finish line, but major enterprise initiatives can take two or three years to reach a customer. By the time the outcome arrives, the evidence that justified the decision has usually been forgotten, absorbed into someone else's win, or lost in a reorganization. 4RI is built to catch that problem before it happens, and at Beyond the Map ‘26, JD will break down exactly how it works.

Driving impact requires traceability from the beginning. You start by connecting the insight to the decision and the decision to what gets built, to the outcome that changes. With that chain intact, the business can see how customer understanding actually shaped performance.

Connect context. Create clarity. Drive impact.

Each step makes the next possible. And at Beyond the Map, you’ll see how organizations are putting that progression into practice.

What you'll take back with you

Whether you're building a journey practice, connecting CX to product and operations, introducing AI, or trying to prove business impact, you'll leave with ideas you can put to work:

• Practical ways to prove influence: Learn how CX and journey leaders are connecting insights to roadmaps, decisions, and measurable outcomes.

• Operating models that work at enterprise scale: See how organizations including Grundfos, Essent, and Kimberly-Clark connect teams around shared context while enabling them to act locally.

• A clearer approach to AI: Explore what people and AI need to make better decisions, and where human judgment still matters most.

• Hands-on learning: Work through real challenges alongside practitioners and TheyDo leaders, moving from ideas to application.

• A community of peers: Compare approaches with people solving similar problems across industries and functions, and build relationships that continue beyond the event.

Three days of ideas and connections, keynotes, enterprise case studies, and hands-on workshops, with conversations continuing over welcome drinks, dinner, and everything in between.