Refresh 2026

Every CIO has an AI mandate, but while the promise is clear, the path to impact remains murky. Applying AI to complex systems accelerates chaos instead of creating clarity, so we’ll dig into deploying AI the right way—uncomplicating service, empowering teams, and turning potential into progress.

Digital services are now the backbone of the enterprise, yet many IT organizations still operate with fragmented systems and reactive workflows.

This session explores the vision for AI-native ServiceOps, a unified model that connects service management, infrastructure intelligence, and operations. Discover how forward-thinking organizations are using AI to prevent disruption, improve reliability, and deliver seamless digital experiences at enterprise scale.

Overview of Freshworks' partnership vision, changes in the Partner Program, why they matter, and how they support partner success. Insights on upcoming initiatives, collaboration opportunities, and innovation in 2026, including how partners can position themselves at the intersection of human expertise and AI capability.

This session explores key trends in Employee Experience (EX), Enterprise Services within IT Service, AI, and Infrastructure Management (ITAM/ITOM). We'll cover innovations like AI-driven support, proactive service models, hyper-personalization, and omni-channel delivery, and examine how leading organizations are blending human judgment with AI augmentation to create workforces that are faster, more empathetic, and more adaptive. Learn how top organizations are using this tech to boost satisfaction, productivity, and business value without replacing the human relationships that drive loyalty.

Employees expect instant, personalized support, not tickets or policy searches. In this session, see how organizations use AI Agent Studio to modernize HR service delivery with purpose-built, no-code AI agents. Learn how employees can access policy guidance, retrieve information like leave balances, and complete common requests directly in Teams, Slack, or the employee portal. Freshworks’ Chief People Officer Johanna Jackman (JJ) and Chief Information Officer Ashwin Ballal will share how HR and IT partner to deploy AI agents, reduce repetitive work, and deliver a more seamless, high-impact employee experience.

When incidents strike, service desks see the user impact while engineering teams work to restore systems, often in disconnected tools and workflows.

But modern environments demand real-time coordination. In this session, we’ll explore how leading organizations align IT, DevOps, and SRE teams around a shared incident lifecycle. Learn how breaking down silos improves visibility, accelerates response, and connects user impact with operational recovery to manage incidents faster and more effectively.

Because modern incident response isn’t just about resolving tickets faster, it’s about aligning teams around reliability.

Partnership Vision – Building Further, Stronger and Together.

As AI accelerates the pace of buying decisions and raises customer expectations, the partners who win in 2026 will be those who combine the efficiency of intelligent automation with the trust and judgment that only human relationships build. This session will highlight how partnerships are central to Freshworks' go-to-market strategy, enabling faster market expansion, increased deal velocity, and scalable customer acquisition.

This session will outline Freshworks' global partner marketing strategy, with a focus on enabling partners to drive demand and pipeline effectively. We'll cover joint marketing priorities, enablement, and available resources on our existing and upcoming AI capabilities, and show how the most effective partner marketing strategies are being built in 2026.

Service management maturity isn’t a destination, it’s a journey. In this session, we’ll walk through a practical and measurable maturity model designed to help IT leaders elevate service management step by step. From aligning operations with employee experience to leveraging AI-driven insights and workflows, discover actionable strategies to progress through each stage of maturity and build a smarter, more resilient service management organization.

How do you turn AI promise into enterprise impact? In this hands-on workshop, CTO Murali Swaminathan, CIO Ashwin Ballal, and solution engineering leader Payal Patel will facilitate a candid discussion about AI service transformation, showing how to deploy, govern, and scale AI without adding complexity or chaos. Walk away with a clear, actionable playbook, and new connections with other IT leaders.

This session will provide an overview of the evolution of the Freshworks Partner Program. It will outline program structure, engagement models, and key processes, incentive programs, while setting clear expectations on how partners can effectively collaborate with Freshworks to drive joint go-to-market execution and sustainable growth. This session will also introduce partners to Freshworks' enablement and readiness framework, outlining the tools, resources, and processes designed to drive partner success, built for a moment when what partners need to know, and how fast they need to know it, is changing faster than any traditional training programme can keep up with. We'll highlight best practices for onboarding, training, and ongoing engagement.

In this session, we’ll showcase our latest innovations built to power modern service and operations teams.

From cloud-native IT Infrastructure Management and AI-driven Change Risk Intelligence to Experience Level Agreements (XLAs) and no-code automation with Agent Studio, we’re bringing new intelligence and visibility directly into how services are delivered and evolved.

Join our product experts for live demos that show how these capabilities work together — helping you prevent disruption, manage change with confidence, and deliver seamless, experience-first service across the enterprise.

An open and insightful fireside chat focused on the pivotal role of partnerships in our product, marketing, and sales strategy. Partners will hear directly from our executive leadership team on how we're evolving to better support partners, including our approach to future-ready hybrid (Human + AI) workforce strategies, how we're designing our own internal teams around this model, and how partners can co-create go-to-market approaches that help customers navigate the shift. We'll explore how aligning around this shared opportunity creates deeper collaboration, stronger differentiation, and a clear path to winning together in 2026.

To conclude the day, we’ll survey the landmarks on the pragmatic path for the next era of service: deploying AI that is fast to implement, easy to govern, and always improving. You’ll leave with a practical playbook to transform how your enterprise operates, serves, and grows.