Coveo Impact 2019 kicked off with an exciting first day of keynotes and customer sessions.

…and we’re off! We officially kicked off our first day of the Coveo community event of the year with a jam-packed day of exciting workshops and keynotes.

It’s our third year hosting this event for our community, and the pressure was on to make this year bigger and better than ever. From booking an even bigger space to increasing the amount of attendees, we “leveled up” this year’s event.

“Last year Impact was all about why relevance was important,” said Jesse Richardson of BMC Software, a Coveo customer and returning Impact attendee. “This year, Coveo has done a great job connecting the different points and painting a big picture by showing how other businesses are actually doing relevancy.”

“It’s very helpful to hear from companies like Salesforce and F5 how they’re succeeding with relevance transformation, and taking that back to my team,” said Deepak Pathak, a Coveo Impact attendee and Dropbox employee.

Key Takeaways from Day 1 of Impact

#1 Businesses need to go beyond digital. Coveo CEO and Chairman Louis Tetu opened the conference with a rousing call-to-arms for the transformative power of AI. In order to succeed in the “AI-Takes-All” economy, businesses today need to be relevant in every moment of interaction with their employees, customers and partners.

“AI is the game changer,” Louis said. “It’s no longer an aspiration or opportunity, it’s an imperative. You either adopt it or compete against companies that use it.”

Businesses can’t just transform digitally, they need to transform to be more relevant to their customers. Relevance is about a person, not a persona or a segment. And they’re only a window away from taking their business elsewhere. AI enables that transformation from personalization to relevance.

“You have to be great a million times,” Louis said. “You have to move from personas to individual people. From 1 million people and 10 experiences, to 1 million people and 1 million personalized experiences.

You can also read an in-depth recap of the Opening Keynote from our friends at Perficient.

#2 The relevance journey pays off. The opening keynote and breakout sessions today centered around how to move forward in your relevance journey.

For Xero, this is a journey two years in the making. Their team explained how they were able to approach their “content challenges” from both ends, resolving both the discoverability and architecture of content with their new support site – with amazing results and a completely transformed customer experience.

CTO Linda Baker from The Wyanoke Group shared a similar story, explaining how her team used the Coveo Relevance Maturity Model to chart a client’s relevance transformation. “We use Coveo for completely different reasons other than search,” Linda said.

Some of our most powerful stories of business impact from relevance came from our Impact Award Winners. You can read all about our big winners in our latest press release.

Rosalind Litchfield, Salesforce VP, Product Management, also shared a powerful story of their investment with Coveo and how it has led to flat case volume despite a substantial increase in their customer base.

#3 Relevance is not just a project; it’s a “transformation.” Every story shared today focused on the seismic effect that investing in relevance has on your organization.

“Relevancy and meaningful experience are the new norm, said Rosalind Litchfield, VP Product Management at Salesforce. “To do that we need to unify information. It’s a big transformation, not just bringing that data together, but that line between physical and digital is getting increasingly blurred.”

Peter Cook, VP, Digital Transformation at F5 Networks explained that this journey began with a “quick win” for his team. “We only went Coveo route in the back half of last year. We’re standing before you now, having gotten it deployed relatively quickly,” he explained during the Opening Keynote. “Without question, we are using Coveo to drive the most relevant experience for our customers.”

You can relive all of the action from today on Twitter:

We ended the evening with the Relevance Challenge where teams from different organizations raced against the clock! Putting their Coveo skills to the test, our participants engaged in an ever difficult series of challenges inspired by the classic “capture the flag” game from our youth. 

What were your key takeaways from today? What are you most looking forward to tomorrow? Catch up with us on Twitter by following #CoveoImpact!