Sara Hanley’s Session
8:05 a.m.–8:50 a.m. PT — Wednesday, May 13, 2026
AI transformation in marketing isn't failing because of a lack of tools. It's stalling because of a lack of clarity. In this keynote panel, senior marketing leaders from Google, ASAPP, and Zapier unpack why so many teams are stuck in "pilot purgatory": rushing to adopt AI without first defining what success actually looks like, or redesigning the workflows that AI needs to run on. From Sarah Hanley's framing of AI adoption as a visibility problem, to Richard D'Amato's emphasis on rigorous workflow mapping before any agent gets deployed, to Dan Slagen's three-phase evolution of AI capability and the widening adoption gap it's created, this conversation gets specific about what it actually takes to move from experimentation to transformation.
The panel goes beyond strategy to tackle the harder organizational questions: which work should AI own entirely vs. what must stay human, how to build production-grade AI marketing systems that hold up in the real world, and how to sustain change management momentum when early enthusiasm fades. Moderated by Adam Constantine, these leaders also share candid predictions about which of today's most confident AI marketing assumptions will look obviously wrong just 18 months from now.
Key Takeaways
- Understand why the gap between AI adoption and real business impact keeps widening, and what's actually driving it
- Identify the foundational work most teams skip before deploying AI, and why it causes transformation efforts to break down
- Discover how leading marketing organizations are deciding what to hand off to AI and what to deliberately keep human
- Learn what production-grade AI marketing systems actually look like in practice, and the common mistakes teams make building toward them
- Explore how to sustain organizational momentum for AI transformation once the early excitement wears off
- Hear which widely-held AI marketing assumptions these leaders expect to be proven wrong in the next 18 months
