Support Driven Expo 2026: The Sessions Worth Building Your Schedule Around

Support teams are navigating rapid advances in AI, evolving customer expectations, and growing pressure to operate more strategically. This year's Support Driven Expo lands right in the middle of that shift. More than 50 practitioner-led sessions span seven tracks — Management, Community, Knowledge Management, Support Engineering, Support Operations, Career Development, and AI — with lessons coming from the people solving these problems every day.

One thing stood out scanning this year's agenda: it's harder than usual to tell what a session is actually about just from its track. A Support Operations talk is really about leadership. A Management session is really about process design. It's a small signal of how support is becoming increasingly multidisciplinary — the strongest teams don't treat these as separate initiatives, and this year's sessions have been built around that overlap.

At LaunchBrightly we spend a lot of time thinking about what it actually takes to keep a knowledge base accurate as a product changes underneath it — so the Knowledge Management track is where we'll be spending a lot of our own time in Chicago. A few sessions we’re super excited to build our schedule around include:

One Knowledge Base, Three Masters
Riz Sherif | Director of Customer Experience at Credit Repair Cloud

Your knowledge base now has to work for three readers at once — customers self-serving, agents resolving tickets, and AI systems generating responses — and most teams are still writing for just one of them. Riz's session covers a framework for auditing and restructuring content so it holds up across all three.

Using AI to Clean Up Your Messy Knowledge Base
Cora Van Leeuwen | Technical Support Specialist at Attio

Every knowledge base accumulates technical debt — duplicate articles, inconsistent terminology, outdated content. Cora's session looks at using AI to accelerate that cleanup instead of setting aside months for a manual overhaul.

AI Chatbots Are Useless Without Docs
Paulo Sérgio Teixeira Pinto | Happiness Engineer at Automattic

A direct look at why AI support tools are only as good as the documentation underneath them, and what that means for how teams should prioritize content work as AI handles more of the interaction volume.

Designing Learner-Centered Documentation
Rose Pajaroja-Villanueva | Happiness Engineer at Automattic

Rose makes the case for writing documentation around how people actually learn, not how a product team thinks about the feature — with practical guidance on structuring articles that build understanding instead of just listing steps.

And that's just one track. The AI track alone runs more than a dozen sessions this year, and Support Operations, Management, and Career Development are all deep with practical, tactical talks.

If you'll be in Chicago, come say hello! Both Dennis and Josh will be in Chicago always up for swapping ideas whether you want to talk AI, knowledge management — or just want to shoot the breeze 🙂

You can find the full list of stellar speakers from all talk tracks below.

Knowledge Management

Documentation only works if people actually use it, and that gets harder as products change faster than teams can keep up with them. This track digs into what it takes to build knowledge bases that hold up under that pressure — strategy, content design, and the governance that keeps things consistent as a team and its docs both grow. Several sessions this year also look at where AI fits into that picture, both as a tool for maintaining content and as a new kind of reader the knowledge base now has to serve.

Using AI to Clean Up Your Messy Knowledge Base
Cora Van Leeuwen | Technical Support Specialist at Attio

One Knowledge Base, Three Masters
Riz Sherif | Director of Customer Experience at Credit Repair Cloud

AI Chatbots Are Useless Without Docs
Paulo Sérgio Teixeira Pinto | Happiness Engineer at Automattic

Designing Learner-Centered Documentation
Rose Pajaroja-Villanueva | Happiness Engineer at Automattic

Management

Leading a support team looks different depending on where that team is in its growth, and this track reflects that range — sessions here cover everything from a first-time manager finding their footing to experienced leaders navigating reorgs and shifting expectations. The common thread is people: coaching, performance, burnout, and the decisions that come with leading through change rather than around it. Expect practical approaches over abstract leadership theory.

Break Your Team's Burnout Loop
Anna Brozek | Owner, Soma Naperville

How to Develop Your Own System for Effective 1:1s
Reagan Helms | VP of Customer Experience at Planning Center

The Cost of Urgency in Customer Support
Priscilla Brooke | Head of Podcaster Success at Buzzsprout

Leading Through What You Cannot Fix
Michelle McGowan | Director of Operations at Rocket Money

Maybe You Can Work Four Days Too
Abby Armada | Senior Customer Support Manager at Flickr

Moving from Transact to Transform
Dan Rohda | Senior Director, Customer Support at CARET

Building the Culture Where Your Team Stays and Thrives
Chrissy Sebald | Director, CX Practice & Support Operations at Boldr

AI Evolves. Humans Lead.
Melissa Torres | Head of Global Support Operations at Handshake

The Support Agent That Learns: Compounding Expertise from Every Ticket
Zach Michel | VP, Customer Onboarding & Support at Atlan

When Support Gets Weird
Jil McKinney | Director Customer Support at Descript

Community

Support doesn't happen in a vacuum, and this track looks at the role community plays around it — from community-led support models to the feedback loops that connect users directly to the teams building for them. It's about extending support past the traditional ticket queue and into spaces built on trust and participation.

Support Engineer

New this year, this track sits at the intersection of support and engineering, for people who spend as much time debugging as they do talking to customers. Sessions cover technical troubleshooting, product collaboration, and what it actually takes to grow into a more technical support role — useful whether you're already there or looking to get there.

Turn Support Reps into Code Contributors
Melissa Silberstang | Happiness Engineer at Automattic

Support Operations

This is the track for the systems underneath the work — workflow design, ticketing, automation, and the operational decisions that let a team scale without quality falling apart along the way. It's the biggest track this year, and it shows: sessions range from release management to reporting to shadow knowledge, all united by the same question of how to build processes that hold up as volume and complexity grow.

Why Dashboards Don't Change Behavior and What Leaders Should Do Instead
Stephanie A. Jones | Customer Experience Leader

Building the Human Systems Behind AI Support
Victoria Crow Dog | Senior Engineering Manager at Clever Inc.

Support Owns the Release
Josh Carpenter | Senior Director, Customer Support at Arkestro

Unlocking the Power of Support Reports
Andrew Rios | Customer Experience Leader and Coach

The Support Playbook for Fast-Moving Products
Brett Rush | Founder of Rush to Resolution

The Account-Aware Support Playbook
Lucas Via | Senior Vice President of Customer Success at Hiver

Blending AI with Emotional Intelligence
Jamie Shibley | CEO | Engagement Strategist at The Expressory

How to Unlock Shadow Knowledge and Create a Culture of Knowledge Sharing
Martin Hobratschk | Founder of Cognita Knowledge Management LLC

The Right Reviewer Changes Everything
Valeriia Golubieva | Quality & Training Lead, CX Team at Manychat

Building a Work Waze — How Clear Processes Protect Teams from Burnout
Carol Lea | Customer Service Representative at Flickr

Stop Letting Your Helpdesk Design Your Support Team
James Amey | Founding Solutions Engineer at Plain

From Support Engineer to Leader
Matt Dunn | Formerly at Sauce Labs and TheLoops

Creating a Healthy Vibe-Coding Culture
Zach Ihle | CX Operations Manager at Planning Center

Build vs. Buy: The AI Decision Every CX Leader Needs to Understand
Sam Chandler | Director of Customer Success, Commercial at Kustomer

Career Development

Support careers don't follow one path, and this track is built around that reality — sessions cover skill development, mentorship, and the transitions people make across roles, whether that's moving into management, going technical, or figuring out what's next after years in the queue. Real stories from people who've made those moves, alongside practical advice for anyone weighing a similar decision

How Leaders Can Turn Support Roles into Lasting Careers
Daver Jennings | Technical Support Senior Manager at OverDrive

Your Career Is a Bucket of Lego Blocks, and You Haven't Read the Instructions Yet
Lala Mamedov | Founder of The Support Strategy

Imagine Without Limits: The Scientific Method of Growth
Sarala Conlan | Senior Customer Support Manager at Kojo

Visibility is your Career Superpower
Shaneika Booker | Manager, Customer Success & Support at Honeycomb Insurance

Future Proofing Our Careers from Entry Level to Executive in the Age of AI
Marlene Summers | Senior Vice President of Global Support at ECI Software Solutions

The Playbook Has Changed
Tamara Wall | Head of Support at Common Room

AI

AI shows up everywhere else on this agenda, but this track is where teams go deep on it directly — real use cases, the hard parts of implementation, and how it's actually changing workflows and roles rather than just how it's supposed to. Sessions range from tactical (a dozen-plus ways to use AI in support ops) to strategic (build vs. buy, what trust in AI actually requires), which tracks with where most teams are right now: past the pilot stage, still figuring out what scaling it responsibly looks like.

How Creating Your Own Tools Can Transform Operations
Joshua Boock | Director of Customer Support at Sauce

Upskill Your Team for the Future
Andrew Randazzo | Manager, Customer Support at Fin

AI Needs Instructions. You're It.
Susannah Barnes | Sr. Manager, Digital Customer Experience at Alation

12+ Ways to Use AI for Support Ops
Francoise Tourniaire | Owner and Principal at FT Works

How Great AI Agents Are Created
Vincent Chan | Founder of NorthOak

The 40% Problem: Building an AI Strategy for the Tickets That Will Never Be Deflected
Niraj Ranjan Rout | Founder, CEO of Hiver

SaaS Support from Swarm to Self-Serve
Oliver Williams | SmugMug

The Human Side of Scaling with AI
Greg Johnson | Head of NA Customer Success Team at LuxCreo

The Rise of the Support Engineer
Daniel Kimber | CEO & Co-Founder at Brainfish

Trusted AI in CX: What Transformation Actually Requires
Caroline Dangson | Product Marketing Manager at Kustomer

See you in Chicago!