Brand Building in the Age of AI: How the World’s Most Recognized Brands Are Winning the Invisible Shelf (Virtual Only)

AGENTIC COMMERCE: HYPE, HOPE, OR THE NEW PATH TO PURCHASE?

Agentic commerce is generating enormous excitement, but what's real and what's still hype? Drawing on Forrester's latest research, this session explores how consumers are already using answer engines and AI assistants across the customer lifecycle—from discovery and product research to consideration and, increasingly, purchase. We'll examine where AI agents are genuinely influencing buying decisions today, where adoption remains limited, and why trust, data quality, and business incentives continue to constrain fully autonomous shopping. Attendees will learn how leading brands and retailers should prepare for a world where AI agents increasingly shape consumer choices, while separating near-term opportunities from longer-term speculation.

Sucharita Kodali

VP, Principal Analyst Forrester

HOW SAATVA IS USING AI TO BUILD A SMARTER MARKETING ENGINE

While much of the conversation around AI focuses on the future, Saatva has focused on the foundational work that makes AI useful: organizing and structuring data to power smarter decisions and better customer experiences. Emily Steveson, Paid Media Manager at Saatva, will share how the team used AI to analyze thousands of customer service calls to uncover customer insights, competitor mentions, pricing trends, and frequently asked questions. She'll also discuss how that same approach helps automate reporting workflows and optimize Saatva's landing pages so AI platforms can better understand and recommend the brand.

Emily Steveson

Paid Media Manager Saatva

HOW ICONIC BRANDS ARE BECOMING THE FIRST CHOICE BEFORE THE SEARCH BEGINS

AI is reshaping how consumers discover, compare, and choose brands – not through ads or search results, but through answers generated by ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. For brands, this is both the greatest threat and the greatest opportunity in a generation. When the interface disappears and an algorithm becomes the gatekeeper, decades of brand equity can be rendered invisible overnight - or amplified beyond what any media spend could achieve. Join Brandlight.ai CEO Imri Marcus and Jeff Long, Sr. Director of Digital & CX at Kimberly-Clark for a candid conversation about what the data reveals, what real organizational change looks like, and what every CMO in the room can do immediately to make their brand the one AI recommends.

Imri Marcus

Co-Founder and CEO Brandlight.ai

FROM SEARCH RESULTS TO SYNTHESIZED ANSWERS: BRAND VISIBILITY IN THE LLM ERA

Consumers increasingly start, and sometimes end, their brand journeys inside an LLM rather than on a search results page. When a model responds to questions like "What should I buy?" or "Is this brand trustworthy?" it isn't ranking links; it's synthesizing one answer from training data, retrieved content, and third-party consensus. The brand's job shifts from winning the click to being represented accurately and included at the moment of decision. This session lays out a practical foundation. We start with the controllable layer: getting owned properties machine-readable, factually consistent, and structured so models can ground on them cleanly. Next, we tackle visibility measurement, what to track, and what actually matters versus vanity noise. Finally, we look ahead: whether open web scraping gives way to licensed feeds and agentic access, what replaces SEO-style optimization, and where brands should invest beyond their own sites. Attendees will leave with a readiness checklist for owned properties, a framework for LLM visibility measurement, and a clear point of view on where to place bets as the ecosystem's data supply chain gets rebuilt.

Michael Ditter

Enterprise AI Executive | Co-Chair, ANA AI Council

SESSION 5

Speaker TBA

Newell Brands