Our 2025 Agenda

• Envisioning the insights function of tomorrow in a rapidly shifting world
• Embracing a new mindset - working in the extended eco-system of AI agents as a wider team
• Amplifying the consumer voice and embedding in business decision making
• Building a future-ready insights org – squads, sprints and signal hunters

• Delving into the shift from manual CRM practices to AI driven personalization
• Bridging data silos and engagement gaps to strategically shape future customer loyalty
• Exploring how AI, personalization and innovation are set to transform customer experiences across industries
• Adapting to evolving customer expectations in an increasingly digital and connected world

• Unlocking enduring value & growth via sustained brand collabs.
• Exploring actionable strategies and innovative frameworks for cultivating brand alliances that resonate.
• Navigating pitfalls and understanding the critical watchouts and common missteps that can derail brand collaborations.
• Understanding the anatomy of a Champion Collab

• Balancing rigor with reality by adapting research methods to fit real-world constraints without compromising insight quality
• Making research accessible with agile, cost-effective tools to reach real consumers with minimal spend
• Turning research into influence by leveraging consumer feedback to challenge internal biases and champion customer-led decisions
• Building a research mindset: from ice cream reformulation to CPG brand turnarounds — a personal journey showing how research, when done smartly, can shift market share and reshape categories

• Accelerating insight generation with Gen-AI tools that streamline data synthesis, trend detection, and reporting
• Ensuring quality and integrity by combining AI efficiency with human oversight for contextual accuracy and bias mitigation
• Upskilling your teams to critically use and evaluate AI outputs—building new competencies, not just new tools
• Embedding responsibility by establishing ethical guardrails for data privacy, transparency, and culturally sensitive insights

• Showcasing Nestlé’s Consumer Pulse program which blends continuous human insight with the power of AI to drive agile, real-time decision making
• Effectively leveraging AI to enhance—not replace—the human experience in understanding consumer and shopper needs
• Embedding consumer-centric insights across all business functions, not just marketing
• Exploring practical examples of scaling empathy and responsiveness across a global organization

• Bridging the “insight-action” gap: serving as an enabler of action
• Formats that resonate: presenting insight in ways that speak to marketers, creatives, and C-suites alike (stories, provocations, visuals)
• Metrics of impact: tracking the ROI of insight — beyond “how many attended the debrief”.
• Culture of influence: building credibility and trust for the CMI function across cross-functional teams

• Securing roles and maintaining space despite the emergence of tech & IT in insights & analytics
• Performing ¨in spite of¨ resource resets: budgets, layoffs, evolved team profiles, tech onboarding and outsourcing
• Riding the wave: repositioning the value of the function and elevating to your business stakeholders

• Showcasing illustrative examples of success / failure
• Identifying strategic differentiators
• Establishing a framework to identify and apply to various situations
• Implementing healthy insights practices to support the journey

• Decoding local priorities: Understanding how cultural and economic contexts shape financial decisions and influence product design strategies
• Adapting to regulation: Aligning offerings with regional compliance landscapes to build trust and drive adoption
• Building digital trust: Tailoring experiences for relationship-based cultures distinct from digital-native expectations
• Designing beyond standards: Addressing gaps in digital literacy, language, and access that traditional UX guidelines overlook

• Maintaining research and brand consistency across diverse regions
• Building a scalable research practice across cross-functional teams
• Navigating cultural nuances and on-ground realities in emerging markets
• Lessons from growing a research function post-acquisition (Careem & Uber)

• Integrating physical, digital, and human touch points into a unified customer journey
• Prioritizing consumer needs over sales by embracing a post-pandemic, customer-centric approach
• Balancing automation with empathy by combining AI efficiency and human interaction
• Measuring impact through CSAT, NPS, adoption rates, and Return on Experience (ROX) across industries

• When strategy bows to insights: building business direction from the ground up, not top-down
• Small team, big ambition: leveraging AI and automation to scale research impact without scale
• From data to belonging: how CX becomes a living community that grows with your customers
• Serving the financially excluded: why empathy is not just a method, but a mindset

• Scaling insights impact without scaling headcount by building internal capability through a structured, repeatable framework
• Identifying commonly recurring project types to target high-demand, low-complexity work suitable for decentralization
• Equipping teams for success with clear, actionable guidelines that enable consistent, self-directed execution
• Demonstrating tangible business value through improved speed, reduced costs, stronger decisions – and a real-world case study that proves the model works

• Toolkits and templates for scaling research access
• How democratization affects research team structure
• Guardrails to protect quality and validity
• Ensuring a democratisation framework: when and how to apply

• Defending qual as critical for emotional and contextual insight
• Scaling qual with tech while keeping nuance
• Reintroducing qual in data-driven cultures

Had enough of polished success stories and glorified corporate profiles? In our failure panel, distinguished industry leaders will share their biggest mistakes–and what they learned from them! Hear what NOT to do and how to overcome the inevitable mistakes every great leader has made on their path to success.