Discover education designed to inspire, empower and elevate your retail media expertise. Explore the first look at our featured sessions and the industry leaders set to take the stage at this year’s summit.
In a market where attention is harder to earn and growth pressure is constant, launching and building a successful challenger brand requires expertise and discipline. In this keynote, Eric Skae shares the methods that made start-up Carbone America’s fastest-growing national pasta sauce, drove sales over $100-million in just 5 years, and that earlier helped him build Popcornopolis Gourmet Popcorn and Rao’s Specialty Foods through successful acquisition.
Nearly a century after its founding, Giant Eagle is entering a new phase of growth shaped by a clear strategy, a team to win, a refreshed brand vision, and a relentless focus on delivering for its customers. By bringing together merchandising and marketing into a unified team, the company is strengthening its value proposition, piece by piece, capability by capability, and neighborhood by neighborhood. This presentation will lift the hood on what this shift has meant internally, as well as provide insight into how they're adapting to today's rapidly evolving retail landscape.
Leigh O'Donnell VP, Head of Shopper and Category Insights Kantar
This year, AI shopping use will move from theoretical to table stakes. Shoppers are adopting AI tools at an accelerated rate, making these platforms the first shelf they encounter. For CPGs, this means the rules of winning are changing fast. Drawing on findings from Kantar's AI-Enabled Commerce Pulse, with a base of 2,000 shoppers, this session will decode the algorithmic shelf by identifying who's using and rejecting, how the path to purchase is changing, the categories that are most vulnerable, and which retailers and platforms have the most runway.
Brands and retailers are entering a new era of AI partnerships as consumers increasingly turn to AI to guide their purchasing decisions. This convergence is redefining who controls the customer relationship, revealing new data dependencies and reshaping the future of retail media. This session offers a strategic perspective on what it means to protect the customer relationship when intelligence, influence and commerce flow through AI platforms.
As AI increasingly takes over bidding, optimization, forecasting, and reporting, retail media and eCommerce professionals are asking a very real question: Will AI replace my job — or change it? In this session, uncover a practitioner’s perspective on how AI is already reshaping retail media roles across Amazon, Walmart, Kroger, and Instacart. The focus will be on how this shift impacts our day‑to‑day work, which responsibilities are being automated, which skills are becoming more valuable, and how professionals can adapt to work alongside AI — moving from execution toward higher‑impact decision‑making, orchestration, and commercial influence.
