ANA Email Excellence Center Committee Meeting: Email in Motion - An Immersive Half-Day Experience

AI is reshaping how email gets filtered, prioritized, and experienced. The gap between who's adapting and who's falling behind is widening fast.

This half-day immersive committee meeting from the ANA Email Experience Council brings together email marketing leaders and practitioners for a day of real talk, hands-on work, and honest peer-to-peer conversation. A half day of people actually running the email programs, working through what AI is breaking, what it's enabling, and how to stay ahead of both.

From keynotes that pull back the curtain on what's happening at the platform level, to working sessions where you'll get your hands dirty with the tools themselves, you'll leave with sharper instincts, stronger connections, and something you can act on Monday morning.

Agenda:

11:35 am - 11:45 am: Welcome, Opening Remarks, Housekeeping

• Jose Cebrian, Senior Partner, CRM & Loyalty, Merkle
• Scott Cohen, CEO, InboxArmy
• Kelly Haggard, Channel Optimization and Innovation, Synchrony
• David C. Morgan, Sr. Manager, B2B Marketing & Email Excellence Center, ANA

11:45 am - 12:00 pm: Welcome from Synchrony

• Kelly Haggard, Channel Optimization and Innovation, Synchrony

12:00 pm - 12:30 pm: Opening Keynote

12:30 pm - 12:50 pm: The ANA Email Excellence Center Awards Winners Celebration
The ANA Email Excellence Center Awards recognize top individuals within the email marketing industry through two prestigious awards.

As part of the day, we will also celebrate excellence in the industry by recognizing the winners of the ANA Email Excellence Center Awards. These awards honor outstanding achievements in email marketing, and recipients will be announced and celebrated live during the event.

There is still time to nominate someone who is pushing the boundaries of what email can do. Whether they are driving results, championing best practices, or mentoring the next generation of marketers, now is your chance to spotlight the leaders shaping the future of email marketing.

• Jose Cebrian, Senior Partner, CRM & Loyalty, Merkle
• Ryan Phelan, Email Thought Leader & Strategist, MarTech.org

12:50 pm -   1:45 pm: Networking Lunch

1:45 pm   -   3:00 pm: Show Us Your Prompts! (An LLM Working Session)
Everyone's using AI, or at least claiming to do so. Often, we're choosing one LLM to rule them all. But the truth? You'll likely find different values in using all of them. Let's find out!

In this hands-on working session, you'll be broken into small groups, each assigned a different LLM. You'll get the same email marketing problem set, no training, no custom instructions either. Just you, your group, and your LLM.

We'll learn together what actually happens when we reach for these tools without thinking critically about them. Why outputs start looking the same, where raw LLM capability ends, and human judgment begins, and what it takes to get a useful output versus something passable.

• Sara Scofield, Vice President | Director, Corporate Email Marketing, U.S. Bank

• Heather Curcio, Email Channel Manager, AARP
• Jennifer Hoth, Head of Lifecycle Strategy, National Vision Inc.
• Karen Talavera, Strategist, InboxArmy
• Tracy Smith, Associate Director, Ascend Marketing
• Maggie Rose-Stover, Senior Marketing Project Manager, Stitch

3:00 pm   -   4:00 pm: Your New Team Doesn't Sleep: Managing AI in the Real World of Email Marketing
Three speakers. 10 minutes. One hard truth each about operationalizing AI in email marketing:

1. Where it goes wrong. Real examples of AI breaking down in production email environments, from rogue internal users to platform agents that confidently do the wrong thing.
2. The product owner problem. Why every AI agent needs a human owner, what that actually requires, and why most teams don't have the bench to support it.
3. Your new org chart. As agents multiply, email marketers are becoming managers of non-human workers. What does that role look like? And are we as an industry ready for it?

After the three talks, we'll dive into a moderated discussion and try to answer the question everyone is actually asking: How do we do this without it becoming a disaster?

4:00 pm   -   4:30 pm: AI in the Inbox: What You're Up Against
The inbox you're designing for today looks nothing like the one your subscribers are actually experiencing. AI-driven features are reshaping how, when, and whether your emails get seen. And it's changing rapidly.

In this session, we'll pull back the curtain on how inbox providers are deploying AI to manage the subscriber experience, what signals they're prioritizing, and what it means for email marketers who are still optimization for a reality that no longer exists.

4:30 pm   -   4:45 pm: Closing Remarks

• Jose Cebrian, Senior Partner, CRM & Loyalty, Merkle
• Scott Cohen, CEO, InboxArmy
• Kelly Haggard, Channel Optimization and Innovation, Synchrony
• David C. Morgan, Sr. Manager, B2B Marketing & Email Excellence Center, ANA

4:45 pm   -   6:30 pm: Happy Hour/Networking Reception (TBD)