ScaleAround is now a supplier member of Cnect Wales, the network for Wales’ customer contact and customer experience industry. We joined in September 2026. The short reason is that the businesses Cnect brings together, contact centres, customer operations teams and the firms that serve them, are exactly where AI is landing hardest and fastest right now, and where honest technology leadership is in shortest supply.
Here is what Cnect Wales is, why we joined, what members can expect from us, and what we expect to learn.
What Cnect Wales is
Cnect Wales is the trading name of the Welsh Contact Centre Forum, which has spent 28 years bringing together the customer contact and customer experience industry in Wales. That industry is one of the largest employers in south Wales, tens of thousands of people across financial services, utilities, telecoms, retail, public sector and outsourced operations, and it has grown from a cost centre into the place most businesses now compete on customer experience.
The network runs the annual Cnect Wales Awards, a programme of roundtables and leader events, and a Senior Leader Conference each autumn. Its members are the operators themselves and the suppliers who serve them. We have joined as the second kind.
Why this network
Customer operations is where AI is being adopted at pace, often by staff before anyone senior has signed it off, and where a wrong move shows up in front of customers within days. Agents using AI to draft responses. Automated triage deciding which customer gets a human. Quality teams using AI to score calls. Workforce planning tools making decisions about shifts. Every one of those is a governance question, a data protection question and an operational risk, and most of them are being answered on the fly.
The leaders running those operations are, almost without exception, not technologists. They are operational leaders who measure everything, run tight teams and know their numbers cold. They are being asked to govern AI with no senior technical voice in the room. That is the gap we exist to fill, and Cnect Wales is the room where those leaders meet.
We are also bringing our AI training into the network. Our Leading Through AI day for senior leaders, and our shorter Practical Prompt Engineering course for anyone who uses AI tools at work, are both available to member organisations, and eligible Welsh employers can claim back a large share of the cost through Welsh Government skills funding until the end of March 2027.
What members can expect from us
Straight answers on technology. If a member organisation is weighing up an AI supplier, worrying about a security questionnaire, or trying to work out whether its systems will hold up, we will tell them plainly what we think, whether or not there is any work in it for us. That independence is the point of a fractional model.
A view from the CTO seat. Most contact centre and customer operations leaders are not technologists and should not have to be. Having someone who has run engineering functions and sat on boards in the room makes the technology conversation easier and the decisions better. We have written about where AI agents actually save time in the back office, which is the kind of question we expect to be asked most.
Practical AI governance. Light enough for a busy operations team to follow, strong enough to satisfy a bank, a regulator or a large client asking how AI is being used with their customers’ data. Our AI governance work is built for exactly this.
Training that fits the industry. Both our courses run online in small cohorts, so an operations team can send people without taking a floor offline, and both are built around the delegate’s real work rather than generic examples.
What we get from it
Honesty cuts both ways. We joined because Welsh customer operations businesses are a market we want to serve properly, and because Cnect’s events put us in front of the leaders who need what we do. We also sponsored the Cnect Wales Awards 2026, which we have written about separately.
We expect to learn a great deal from the members. Customer operations leaders run some of the most measured, operationally disciplined teams in Wales. They know how to take a process apart, measure it and put it back together better. That discipline is exactly what AI adoption needs and mostly lacks, and it is a culture technology teams could learn from.
We also expect to be challenged. A room full of people who measure everything will not accept vague claims about AI, which suits us, because we do not make them.
Where this fits
Wales has a real technology sector now and a leadership gap to match, which we have written about in technology leadership in Wales in 2026. The membership bodies matter more here than in larger markets, because they are where the ecosystem actually meets. FinTech Wales does that for financial services. Cnect Wales does it for customer operations. Being part of both puts us alongside the two industries in Wales where technology decisions are most consequential and least well supported.
Get in touch
If you are a Cnect Wales member with a technology or AI question, you do not need to wait for an event. Start the conversation on our contact page. We will be at the Senior Leader Conference in November and at roundtables through the year, and we are easy to find.
Frequently asked questions
What is Cnect Wales?
Cnect Wales is the membership network for Wales’ customer contact and customer experience industry, running the annual Cnect Wales Awards, roundtables and a Senior Leader Conference. It is the trading name of the Welsh Contact Centre Forum, established 28 years ago.
What kind of member is ScaleAround?
A supplier member, which means we provide services to the industry rather than running a contact centre ourselves. Our areas are AI governance, fractional CTO and CIO leadership, technology reviews and delivery.
Why would a technology consultancy join a contact centre network?
Because customer operations is where AI is being adopted fastest and where the leaders making those decisions most need honest, senior technology advice. It is the room where that need is concentrated.
Does ScaleAround offer training to Cnect Wales members?
Yes. Leading Through AI, a CPD-certified day for senior leaders, and Practical Prompt Engineering, a 3-hour course for anyone who uses AI at work. Both run online, and eligible Welsh employers can claim Welsh Government skills funding towards the cost.
What should a contact centre leader ask ScaleAround?
Anything about AI in the operation, whether a supplier’s claims stack up, how to govern staff use of AI tools, whether the systems will scale, or how to answer a client’s security questions. We give straight answers.
How do I contact ScaleAround?
Through our contact page, or at a Cnect Wales event.