All 2026 Marketing Conference Sessions

Signature Series: 2026 CMO Spend Survey ─ Key Insights to Shape Your Marketing Strategy

Speakers:

• Ewan McIntyre, Vice President Analyst at Gartner

Key takeaways

• In 2026, it’s no longer about doing ‘more with less’ - it’s growth with less. CEOs are demanding growth while expecting an AI-driven overhaul of how the enterprise creates and captures value.

• CMOs are going all-in on AI, allocating 15.3% of budgets to AI initiatives, but many organizations lack the maturity to scale those investments.

• Seventy percent of CMOs say becoming an AI leader is a critical goal for 2026, but just 30% report fully developed AI readiness.

• Marketing budgets have plateaued at 7.8% of company revenue in 2026.

• Seventy-six percent of CEOs say AI is the most disruptive technology, and 88% plan to increase AI investment.

How to Use AI For Marketing Strategic Planning

Speakers:

• Amy Abatangle, Vice President Analyst at Gartner

Key takeaways

• The role of the CMO is about to change fast: 65% of CMOs say advances in AI will dramatically change their role in the next two years.

• Most marketing AI is still focused on productivity - time saved, cost efficiency, speed of delivery. That helps with cost pressure, but it doesn’t improve the decisions that drive growth.

• Strategy creates more value than tactics - so AI has to move upstream into decision support.

• Agentic AI changes the unit of work from task to decision. Marketing must evolve from a campaign factory into a learning system - one that makes decisions based on value, volume, lift, risk and signal readiness.

• AI creates value when it becomes a decision-support layer across marketing strategy, planning and execution - creating closed-loop learning where insights continuously inform decisions. 

Train AI Agents to Embody Your Brand

Speakers:

• Alan Lopez, Senior Director Analyst at Gartner

Key takeaways

• AI is already representing your brand. According to Gartner research, 47% of consumers and 60% of B2B buyers say they consulted GenAI tools or chatbots for a recent purchase decision.

• AI systems don’t experience your brand the way humans do. They extract patterns, pull structured claims, detect differentiation and compress nuance. If your content is vague or overly clever, AI flattens it into something average.

• To make your brand survive summarization, infuse AI-preferred content with brand style: use proprietary terms, quote wrapping, first-person expertise, and stylized schema content so the AI has fewer generic words to swap in.

• Don’t ignore multimodal influence. Modern AI ‘sees’ your images - so your hero images, captions and alt text can shape the adjectives AI uses to describe your products.

• This is not about adding another channel. It’s about redefining brand stewardship: brand is also how intelligent systems behave when no one from your company is in the room.

Signature Series: How to Become a Genius Digital Marketing Brand

Speakers:

• Matt Moorut, Senior Director Analyst, Gartner

Key takeaways

• Every year we benchmark more than 1,000 brands on digital marketing performance and the top 3% in each industry earn the title ‘Genius.’ Last year, only 33 brands made that cut.
• AI is magnifying the divide between leaders and laggards - driving up performance for those who are capable of using it, but making others fail faster.
• Across the class of 2025, Genius brands were searched for 12x more than peers on Google and received 18.7x more site visitors.
• While most brands pulled back on hiring marketers in 2025, Genius brands stepped up — targeting new roles to close skill gaps that block AI adoption, not on ‘more hands for more tasks.
• Genius brands hired 2.5x more dedicated marketing technology professionals than non‑Genius brands - and they’re prioritizing software and programming skills to increase digital dexterity.

How to Fight AI-Powered Disinformation Before It Harms Your Brand and Drains Your Budget

Speakers:

• Andrew Frank, Distinguished Vice President Analyst at Gartner

Key takeaways

• AI is a brand risk amplifier. These systems aren’t simply indexing information - they’re interpreting it and presenting that interpretation as an authoritative response.
• Although technology fuels the spread of false information, it also offers powerful tools to combat it. AI agents can play a key role in a coordinated operational response.
• Enterprises need TrustOps - an operational approach to managing truth and trust on an ongoing basis. Committing to TrustOps sets organizations up to meet disinformation’s escalating challenge with adaptive measures.
• TrustOps scans channels continuously, executes investigations in minutes and issues human-approved dispatches within hours at most.
• CMOs should care because AI increases not just the amount of misinformation, but its reach and how precisely it’s targeted. You can have a brilliant strategy - and watch it get eclipsed by disinformation.

Human-Centered Brands Are the New Challengers CMOs Can’t Ignore

Speakers:

• Amy Abatangle, Vice President Analyst at Gartner

Key takeaways

• When trust is scarce, brands must stop chasing reach and start designing credibility signals that build relationships.
• AI is changing trust economics. Trust doesn’t just influence preference - it influences discoverability. Trust signals become inputs that shape rankings and recommendations.
• AI can fake intimacy - mirroring emotional tone and offering unlimited ‘support,’ but those connections aren’t genuine. That’s why real human touchpoints and community-driven belonging become even more valuable.
• Human experience (HX) is the portfolio of human interactions a brand deliberately deploys to earn trust: customers, communities, experts, employees, executives - and sometimes personified proxies.
• HX works when it balances four elements: authenticity, expertise, belonging and reliability.