At the Elevate’26 Customer Experience Summit in Orlando, I got to do something I genuinely love. Stand in front of a room full of people who are building the future of mobile experience and say, “You did it.”
I co-presented this year’s Elevate Customer Experience Awards with our CEO, Brett Caine. The program spotlights brands doing the hard work of turning everyday mobile interactions into real business results.
What hit me most was not the wins themselves. It was the people behind them. Walking the floor and talking to attendees, the word I kept hearing was authentic. It was great to hear that come through — that is just who we are at Airship. Every winning team I met was laser-focused on one thing: meeting their customers where they are, on mobile, with relevance and purpose. And they are doing it while the bar keeps moving.
AI is no longer a future-state conversation. It is the operating layer that the best brands are already building on. The teams in that room were not asking “should we use AI?” They were asking “how fast can we scale it?”
One attendee grabbed me after the awards and said, “This is the only event where I actually feel like a partner, not a customer.” That one stayed with me. That energy was real. And it matched exactly what we are building at Airship.
We pride ourselves on being partners, equally committed to delivering results. We recently announced our expanded AI Agent Fleet which acts as an extension of the team — working behind the scenes around the clock. Think of the Airship AI Agent Fleet as a true extension of your team — a collaborative, multi-agent system that automates the heavy lifting behind the scenes. I am genuinely excited about what this means for our customers’ ability to drive measurable results. You simply provide a brief through a conversational interface, and specialized agents get to work: scaling brand-compliant content, surfacing goal-optimized opportunities, and delivering sophisticated, personalized experiences across every channel.
And this all happens in hours, not weeks or months, with no coding needed.
The winning brands at Elevate are already thinking this way. They are using AI to act faster, dig deeper, and deliver experiences that actually mean something to their customers.
That is what Elevate is about.
Congratulations to all of our 2026 Elevate Award winners:
- Elevate Visionary Brand: Southwest Airlines
- Journey Orchestration Mastery: The Economist
- The Business Impact Award: CIMB Malaysia
- Excellence in Personalization: OneFootball
- Experimentation Award: Sally Beauty
- ASO Leader Award: Accuweather
- New Mobile App: Virgin Atlantic
- Innovation Partner: VML
Eight winners. Eight teams. Mobile-first leaders that are rising to the challenge, not by adapting to a changing industry, but by leading it. I can’t wait to see what they do next.
For more insights into the winning strategies of these leading brands, read the mobile-first-customer-experience-playbook.
