The MarTech landscape continues to evolve at breakneck speed, with 2026 promising to bring both unprecedented opportunities and complex challenges. From the relentless tools explosion fragmenting tech stacks, to the emergence of agentic AI reshaping customer interactions, the strategic decisions made today will determine competitive advantage tomorrow. For enterprise organisations, particularly in highly regulated industries, the question isn’t whether these trends will impact operations—it’s how to navigate them successfully.

In this keynote, Maria will dissect five critical trends shaping the MarTech ecosystem: the tools explosion, AI integration, Agentic AI, Data Clean Rooms, and ‘MarTech as a Service’. Drawing from the perspective of Standard Chartered as a global banking leader, you’ll gain practical insights into how large-scale organisations are evaluating, piloting, and implementing these emerging technologies whilst managing risk, compliance, and operational complexity. You’ll leave with a clearer roadmap for prioritising your own 2026 MarTech investments.

Join Met Cash’s Marc Keegan as he explores how Braze is helping evolve loyalty and eCommerce communications through agentic AI, layered personalisation, and continuous experimentation. Discover how insights from real-time engagement inform smarter decisions, create more relevant experiences, and drive meaningful business outcomes across the customer journey.

Ashton Media’s hit podcast, where we talk to leaders about a missteps, mistakes and failures in their careers that have helped them become the leader they are today, hits the stage for the first time in a special MarTech Edition. Hosted by Tomas Haffenden, this will be a session unlike any other as we take a deep dive with a very brave MarTech leader as they discuss what’s gone wrong with ownership models, when AI hasn’t quite worked, how you cultivate a mindset that deals with the rapidity of change, and how to manage expectations when things don’t quite workout as they’ve planned…

For more than 50 years, the International Development Programme (IDP Education) has matched students with study abroad programs and helped them prepare by taking the IELTS, the most trusted English exam in the world.

IDP Education’s marketing team manages content for thousands of programs and scholarships across hundreds of webpages. It’s crucial that this information is accurate, regularly updated, and tailored to each region.

Discover the changes IDP has made to its business to achieve this as well as increase organic traffic across all its websites and improve conversion rates year over year while growing rapidly.

There are tech savvy marketers, and there are customer conscious digital leaders. There are MarTech stacks owned by the digital and/or IT function and there are organisations where that ownership of platforms and customer data fully, or partly, sits in marketing. No one is scaling the cliff-face in quite the same way, but there are some trends emerging that indicate that suggest a maturity curve as to where people are likely to sit. This evolving landscape has created challenges around skill requirements, operational structures and strategic leadership.

With marketing technology now encompassing everything from data analytics and personalisation to content supply chains, in this panel we’ll explore the best organisational design for MarTech success and get into the real issue of what sits with marketing and what sits with digital when owning MarTech functions. In this session we’ll pit a tech leader and a marketing leader with ownership of MarTech under the CMO against a tech leader and marketer with MarTech under the CTO to discuss:

– Should we define MarTech as ‘the leveraging of first-party data and digital marketing to create more personalised experiences for customers’?
– Does it matter where MarTech sits? Should a B2B, for example, conceptualise their ‘maturity’ level against not having MarTech ownership under their CMO?
– Who should ultimately be accountable for ROI from MarTech investments – Marketing, IT or a dedicated MarTech function?
– How do you build the exec level sponsorship into your MarTech strategy, and how do you asses the maturity of that ELT in MarTech terms?
– Who should be the executive sponsor for large vendor partnerships
– In an environment where Marketing wants speed and IT (functional stream) wants control, who should have the final say in vendor selection and tool configuration?
– What’s one MarTech capability you believe should never sit with Marketing? And one that must?

The experimentation piece of the puzzle; when it comes to CX and MarTech, the opportunities are transformative and the challenges complex.

Join to discuss:

• What customer signals should we use to prioritise CX experiments across the journey?
• What role should experimentation play in measuring and improving CX ROI?
• How can we foster a culture of experimentation across CX, marketing and product teams?
• How do we balance speed vs rigor in CX and MarTech experimentation?
• What metrics matter most when evaluating CX experiments across the funnel?

Marketing and technology partnerships are at the heart of modern business growth—but they often speak different languages. Misaligned objectives, unclear data questions, and competing priorities can stall progress before it starts. So how do you build bridges, not barriers?

We’ll unpack how to get the best out of your marketing and tech collaboration—by asking better questions, clarifying stakeholder needs, and designing systems that drive progress, not perfection.

We’ll introduce the 55/5 rule, demonstrating why a well-articulated problem is the key to efficient data work, and explore how to translate business questions into hypotheses and experiments. You’ll gain a clear framework for working with IT and data gatekeepers, reduce friction in cross-functional teams, and build better documentation and workflows that keep pace with business needs.

Customers are everywhere, attention is nowhere, and AI is rewriting the rules of engagement. Brands once relied on clicks, campaigns, and linear funnels – but today, discovery happens through summaries, social signals, and AI-driven interactions. For marketing and digital leaders, the challenge is clear: how do you meet customers where they are, when “where” is constantly shifting?

Join Sitecore to explore how the AI revolution demands a new operating blueprint for marketing. Moving beyond bolt-on automation, we’ll discuss how leading organisations are re-architecting the way they design, deliver, and measure experiences-where AI acts not as a tool, but as a teammate. Learn how to navigate the shift to agentic experiences, reimagine how your brand stays relevant, and create adaptive strategies that thrive in the next era of customer engagement.

The business wanted to accelerate personalisation, and Shaja was given responsibility for leading the Customer 360 initiative. As with any cross-market programme, aligning 12 countries takes time — and while the team worked toward consensus and long-term investment, they didn’t have immediate access to budget or tools. Rather than wait, they focused on what they could control: building segmentation, defining 100+ customer attributes, and activating them across CRM and digital channels.

In this presentation, you’ll hear how Shaja and her team at Dominos developed a custom audience query tool to overcome tooling limitations and built reporting alongside it — which enabled markets to adopt personalisation and segmentation ahead of a long-term solution. Learn how the Domino’s team used their platforms to close tech gaps and enable content personalisation including loyalty stamp cards, time-of-day and weather-based campaigns, lapsed journeys, upsell triggers, and onsite personalisation testing. As a result they’re now beginning to introduce AI modules to further enhance personalisation and automation.

This is your roadmap to a scalable, data-led foundation that enabled personalisation at scale and helped shape the roadmap for CDP and AI integration. The story is ultimately about progress over perfection — and how data strategy can unlock personalisation even in complex, resource-constrained environments.

The experimentation piece of the puzzle; when it comes to CX and MarTech, the opportunities are transformative and the challenges complex.

Join to discuss:

• What customer signals should we use to prioritise CX experiments across the journey?
• What role should experimentation play in measuring and improving CX ROI?
• How can we foster a culture of experimentation across CX, marketing and product teams?
• How do we balance speed vs rigor in CX and MarTech experimentation?
• What metrics matter most when evaluating CX experiments across the funnel?

In today’s marketing landscape, Customer Decisioning is quickly emerging as one of the most critical and topical subjects. As brands race to deliver personalised, real-time experiences, the real differentiator is not just data collection or channel activation – it’s the intelligence layer in between: customer decisioning. For any organisation aspiring to be genuinely customer-first, a robust Customer Decisioning capability is essential.

The rise of AI-driven decisioning is accelerating this shift. Product companies are doubling down on investment in adaptive models, reinforcement learning, and real-time optimisation. Yet for many brands, Customer Decisioning remains an under-realised capability, often overshadowed by channels, data, or content.

We would like to argue that Customer Decisioning must sit front and centre of the MarTech stack. It is the critical capability that translates data into context-aware actions, ensuring the right message, offer, or experience is delivered in the right moment. Without a strong decisioning foundation, brands risk continuing to operate in silos, relying on human guesswork, and falling short of customer expectations in an AI-driven world.

We will unpack why decisioning matters now more than ever, how leading organisations are approaching it, and what practical steps marketers can take to put Customer Decisioning at the core of their transformation journey.