Kaare Wesnaes

8:00 a.m.–8:45 a.m. PT — Thursday, November 19, 2026

Keynote Panel: The Gap Is Widening: What Separates Marketing Organizations Winning With AI From Those Still Piloting

Access to AI is no longer the advantage – nearly every marketing organization now runs on the same models and tools. Yet a widening gap separates the teams generating real pipeline and ROI from those stuck in perpetual pilot mode two years in, and it rarely comes down to the technology. This panel brings together innovation, product marketing, and partner marketing leaders from Ogilvy, UiPath, Informatica, and First Advantage to unpack what actually pulls organizations ahead: adoption built on trust rather than mandates, work that's redesigned before the tool is deployed, and AI fluency distributed across the organization instead of hoarded by a small group of experts.

Drawing on hard-won, in-the-trenches lessons – including a compliance tool that jumped from near-zero uptake to 84% adoption simply by shifting from blocking to advising – our panelists move past the hype to the operating realities that decide who scales and who stalls: governance, executive sponsorship, cross-functional buy-in, and the critical difference between technical proof and the operational trust that turns a demo into daily use. If your organization is still piloting, this conversation will show you exactly where the bottlenecks are and how the leaders got past them.

Key Takeaways:

• Diagnose why pilots stall out – and why the wall is almost never the technology itself.
• Design AI adoption around human trust, giving people recommendations and agency instead of hard blocks and mandates.
• Redesign the work before deploying the tool, rather than plugging AI into a broken workflow and expecting different results.
• Distribute AI fluency across the organization so capability lives with the people closest to the work, not just a handful of experts.
• Involve IT, legal, and procurement in week one so pilots have a clear, pre-approved path to production and scale.
• Measure what "winning with AI" really looks like in pipeline and ROI numbers – and set ambition beyond doing yesterday's work faster.