GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech
The GOTO podcast seeks out the brightest and boldest ideas from language creators and the world's leading experts in software development in the form of interviews and conference talks. Tune in to get the inspiration you need to bring in new technologies or gain extra evidence to support your software development plan.
GOTO - The Brightest Minds in Tech
Connection is Everything: Extended Q&A • Ken Hughes
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This Q&A session was recorded at GOTO Copenhagen 2025.
https://gotocph.com
Ken Hughes - The King of Customer Experience
Keynote available here: https://youtu.be/tHf-BFM2CNM
RESOURCES
https://twitter.com/KenHughesIE
https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenhughesie
https://www.kenhughes.info
DESCRIPTION
In this extended Q&A following his GOTO Copenhagen 2025 keynote, Ken Hughes — "The King of Customer Experience" — tackles the questions every business avoids asking honestly. He argues that employee experience always comes first: you cannot ask people to deliver extraordinary customer moments unless they themselves feel seen, empowered, and purposeful at work. On ROI, he challenges the entire premise, proposing a shift from "Return on Investment" to "Desire to Invest" — because measuring caring with a ledger is the behavior of, as he puts it, a toxic psychopath. The real unlock, he insists, is placing the user genuinely at the centre — not as a metric, but as a human being who deserves to feel like the only person in the room.
The conversation turns to AI's role in making this scalable, and here Hughes lands his most forward-looking point: the era of having to choose between serving the masses and making an individual feel special is ending. AI will enable what he calls "scaled personalization" — the ability to make every customer their own blue dot simultaneously, the way a personalized Minecraft lesson teaches area and perimeter to an 8-year-old who wasn't getting it in a classroom. The session closes with a striking reminder: the brands people remember aren't the ones with the slickest products — they're the ones that made them feel genuinely seen. A nurse. A fishing magazine. Five dollars. That's the bar.
Read the full abstract here:
https://gotocph.com/2025/sessions/3778
RECOMMENDED BOOKS
Ken Hughes • Taylormaking • https://amzn.to/3WOEgd9
Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz • The Good Life • https://amzn.to/4orelUS
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