Like most MarTech leaders, Danelle Williams started Hilton’s transformation with the strategy and the platforms. The business case was approved, the platforms selected, the execution underway. Then she realised something the strategy hadn’t accounted for: the teams were being pulled along, not driving the work.

In this keynote she shares what came next: bringing MarTech, CRM, outbound and content into one human-centred operating model and what she is learning every day about AI at Hilton. The lesson: the hardest part of MarTech is the part that isn’t tech. And she is determined not to learn it twice.

Against a backdrop of restructures and redundancies that are reshaping who is in market and what they can bring with them, the capability that once built judgement and brand instinct is slipping away. But the harder question sits one level up: it isn’t only which skills we hire for, it’s how the organisation itself reorganises around the capabilities now at our fingertips.

When a marketer can build in HTML in ten seconds and fifteen hundred saved hours have to go somewhere, the structures we work within start to bend; teams that were rigidly owned end to end become shared, porous, and harder to define. The organisations that get this right won’t just survive the disruption; they’ll redesign the way work moves through them. So we’ll discuss:

• What does the talent pipeline actually look like right now, from the graduate entering the industry to the senior leader recruiting for roles that didn’t exist two years ago?
• Is it really the next generation who are behind, or the layer in the middle?
• Once AI absorbs the low-value work, where do you reinvest the hours that you get back, rather than letting them dissolve into business as usual?
• How do you redesign roles and team structures around shared, blended capability instead of protected patches?
• And what are the skills that don’t change, the ones we must be careful not to automate the experience out of?

Data has become a commodity; the power is no longer in collecting it but in how you activate it, and that is moving decisioning to the centre of the stack, the next battleground after the whole CDP play. Plenty of organisations bought a customer data platform without ever deciding where the decisioning brain would sit, and now, with loyalty and pricing feeding the decision and an agentic customer arriving, the question is unavoidable. We’ll discuss:

• Where should the decisioning brain actually sit; a centralised intelligence hub, or localised decisioning closer to the platform?
• How do you get the next-best-action for every customer in the moment, without waiting for an enterprise-wide build?
• How do you sequence and suppress across channels, when the rules are written in each system in isolation?
• How do you weigh the big-bang business case against the iterative path that builds capability but may hit the number?
• What is the reach beyond digital shopping does this reach, once supply, distribution and the agentic customer are in scope?

Traffic through web is down, consumers are transitioning away from the traditional routes, with new channels on the rise for the next generation. This meant that Tourism Australia had to stop drinking the Kool-Aide of monolith tech-stacks and transition to something more optimised, efficient, and appropriate for the future of MarTech.

This session will show how Melinda shifted the narrative for their internal stakeholders, and underwent their tech-stack transformation, one that delivered over $1 million in savings in decommissioned tech without effecting their website performance. This session will show their case-study: how they mapped the strategy, changed the narrative, achieved the stakeholder buy-in and measured their results for a true multichannel MarTech stack.

Most MarTech programmes have one or two champions who really get it; the rest of the organisation does not. Ownership sits fragmented across data, technology, marketing and change, and the customer experience fragments with it. At Bupa the challenge is sharper still; health insurance, health services and group data sit in separate parts of the business, across separate legal entities, yet the ambition is to serve one customer.

This panel brings together senior leaders from three different parts of Bupa to show what a genuinely cross-functional MarTech Centre of Excellence looks like in practice. We’ll explore how they get data, technology and marketing speaking from the same script; how they join up customer engagement across brands while meeting legal and privacy obligations; and what it takes to move from a specialist function to an organisation-wide capability.

AI fatigue is real and contracts are getting bigger, not smaller. Join your peers to discuss:

• What capabilities should organisations build, buy, rent or retire as AI becomes a major discovery channel?
• How do you identify which AI use cases are worth investing in versus those driven by vendor hype?
• What data, content and knowledge foundations are required to be discoverable and trusted by both humans and AI?
• How do you establish governance and ownership for AI capabilities without slowing innovation?
• How should MarTech teams measure success when AI increasingly sits between brands and customers?

The inclusion conversation around MarTech and its future is more than an interesting diversity sidenote. AI is reshaping who feels secure in their role, and a moment of shared uncertainty has a way of making everyone feel, for the first time or the first time in a long time, that the ground beneath their job is less settled than they assumed.

The people who have navigated that feeling longest are those who built careers against the odds, in spaces where the systems were designed by others and rarely with them in mind. Along the way they developed exactly the qualities the whole industry now needs: the ability to lead with confidence and creativity in the absence of precedent; to be generous with knowledge rather than defensive about it; and to build psychological safety for others by being visibly honest about one’s own uncertainties.

This panel brings those voices to the centre, not as a sidebar, but as a masterclass. We’ll discuss:

• With the industry at a moment of shared uncertainty, how do we use it to build something more inclusive as a permanent, structural change?
• How have you built the confidence to show up and hold your own within the world of MarTech?
• What does it actually take to bring someone into a room, or onto a leadership team, who has never felt represented there before?
• How have experiences of exclusion shaped the way you lead others through change, and what can the rest of the industry learn from it?
• What does being generous with your voice, your seat and your knowledge actually look like in practice?

Everyone is being told to build the roof before the concrete has set. The instinct under AI pressure is to bolt on tools, restructure in a hurry and hope velocity follows; but the old playbook does not scale, and a restructure on its own buys you a 10 to 15 per cent lift when the business is asking for five to seven times the output. The tech, the teams and the processes all have to be re-engineered together, or none of it holds.

This session goes inside one of the biggest operating-model rebuilds a digital team has undertaken in five years. You’ll hear why the honest first move was a deliberate pause; not change for the sake of change, but a clear-eyed look at the end-state and the local and international models that could get you there. We’ll examine why your underlying workflow, not your org chart, is the thing that quietly breaks first; how to re-engineer the way work actually moves once it stops being an assembly line of tickets; and how to take people on the journey when their fear, and their sense of identity tied to a role, is as real as any technical constraint. You’ll leave with a way to control the narrative and the destination, rather than reacting to every quarter’s change.