Key insights from Leaders in Loyalty 2026: AI, trust, and the future of customer relationships
AI is already everywhere. Writing emails, generating content, analyzing customer behavior, surfacing insights—helping brands move faster than ever before. Yet the most important conversation in loyalty right now isn’t just about tech. It’s about relationships and how brands use technology to strengthen them.
That idea sat at the center of Leaders in Loyalty 2026, hosted by ebbo, where loyalty, CRM, and customer experience leaders gathered in Fort Lauderdale to explore this year’s theme: The Era of Intelligent Engagement. While speakers approached the topic from different perspectives, several themes surfaced throughout the day. Loyalty is becoming more relationship-driven, AI is most valuable when it enables—not replaces—human connection, and trust is emerging as a critical differentiator for brands.
Here are a few of the insights that shaped the conversation:
Loyalty Is No Longer Just a Program
Loyalty programs have traditionally focused on driving transactions. Today, many brands are being challenged to think bigger.
Opening the day’s discussions, Kelly Mahoney, CMO of Ulta Beauty, challenged attendees to think about loyalty differently. As the leader behind one of retail’s most respected loyalty programs, Mahoney argued that modern loyalty programs are no longer simply programs—they are relationship engines. The goal isn’t simply to reward transactions. The goal is to create habits, routines, identity, belonging, and trust.
It’s a subtle distinction, but an important one. Consumers aren’t necessarily less loyal than they were in the past—they’re simply more selective. Earning a place in a customer’s life requires more than points, discounts, and promotions.
Research shared later in the day by Aaron Dauphinee, Chief Marketing Officer of The Wise Marketer Group, reinforced that idea. His findings challenged one of the industry’s most common assumptions: enrollment does not equal loyalty. While loyalty program participation remains high, genuine commitment remains surprisingly rare. According to Dauphinee, “only 31% of consumers describe themselves as “very loyal” to the brands they shop.” Many customers actively participate in loyalty programs yet remain willing to switch brands when presented with a better offer.
Together, the sessions pointed to a similar conclusion: brands have become very good at creating members, but membership alone doesn’t guarantee loyalty.
AI Creates Capacity. Humans Create Connection
If loyalty is increasingly about relationships, the next question becomes: what role should AI play?
As Mahoney noted during the summit, the opportunity isn’t simply to automate more work. It’s to automate the repeatable so brands can spend more time on the moments that matter most to customers. Lizzie Camstra Hughes, who leads Strategy Insights & AI initiatives at ebbo, expanded on that idea, arguing that brands have spent years treating AI primarily as an efficiency tool when its greatest value may be something else entirely: removing the capacity constraints that have historically limited relationship-building at scale.
AI can process data, identify patterns, and surface opportunities at a scale no team could achieve manually. But while AI can uncover insights, it can’t create relationships. As Hughes put it, “AI doesn’t replace the human relationship—it makes it affordable at scale.” It’s not about choosing between AI and people. It’s about designing better handoffs between the two.
Trust as a Competitive Advantage
Customers don’t experience AI as a model. They experience it as treatment. In other words, they may never see the algorithms behind an offer, recommendation, or service interaction, but they remember how it felt. Was the recommendation helpful? Was the problem resolved? Were their time and data respected?
Ryan Baltrip of Old Dominion University’s Loyalty Science Lab explored this challenge through the lens of the Trust Stack, his framework for evaluating how customers experience AI-enabled loyalty through transparency, fairness, relevance, reliability, and recovery.
As AI becomes increasingly embedded in loyalty programs, customer experiences, and service interactions, trust is no longer just a brand value. It’s becoming a competitive advantage. Likewise, brands are now scaling experiences at machine speed. The question is whether they’re scaling trust along with them.
Looking Ahead
While the tools available to loyalty marketers continue to evolve, the fundamental challenge remains the same: How do brands use technology to create relationships that feel more human, not less?
Customers want brands that understand them. They want experiences that feel relevant versus invasive, helpful versus automated, and personalized versus transactional. The path forward is becoming clearer: combining data, AI, and human judgment in ways that create trust, relevance, and meaningful value.
The future of loyalty isn’t about creating more interactions. It’s about building more meaningful ones.
About Leaders in Loyalty
Leaders in Loyalty is an intentionally designed summit that brings together senior leaders across loyalty, CRM, customer experience, and marketing to explore the future of customer engagement. Created to foster meaningful conversation, peer-to-peer learning, and candid discussion, the intimate format allows attendees to share challenges, exchange ideas, and build connections in a way that larger industry conferences often can’t.
Interested in attending a future Leaders in Loyalty summit? Follow ebbo on LinkedIn to stay connected and receive updates on upcoming events, thought leadership, and insights from the loyalty and customer engagement community.
Emily Swet