Analytics Unite Grows With Headliners From Reckitt, Mars, Wendy’s, Confluencer Commerce
Analytics Unite, held April 7 to 9 in Chicago, is just weeks away and speakers are preparing engaging presentations on some of the top trending topics in consumer goods and retail.
Analytics Unite 2026 is built around a single mission: Redefining the Possible. This year's theme focuses on the growth track, which is rarely a straight path, but instead belongs to leaders who embrace volatility with adaptability, agility and confidence.
Tuesday, April 7, 2026
Smart Execution in Action: How Reckitt Elevated Shelf Performance With a Major Retail Partner
Go behind the scenes as Varun Kakaria, CIO of Reckitt's North America business, reveals how his company collaborated with a major retail partner to deploy AI-powered insights directly in stores. This session unpacks the consumer goods company’s end-to-end journey, including what triggered the project, how AI guided specific shelf-level actions and the measurable lift that followed. Learn the partnership principles and tactical best practices that made the collaboration successful.
Wednesday, April 8, 2026
The W[AI]s of Working: Rethinking Growth, Profitability and Consumer Reach
As AI reshapes the commerce landscape, retailers and consumer goods companies face new challenges: Profitable growth is harder to sustain, forecasting demands greater precision, and consumers are increasingly discovering products through AI-driven interfaces. This keynote presented by Bryan Gildenberg, founder and CEO of Confluencer Commerce, will explore how organizations must prepare to improve financial performance and unlock new ways of working. It will also address the reality that AI adoption is fundamentally different from a traditional software rollout.
How AI Agents Are Reshaping Customer Support
As customer expectations rise, frontline support teams need faster, smarter tools to keep pace. Through a real-world case study from Wendy's, presented by SVP chief data officer Wendi Eriksen, learn how emerging AI technologies are being deployed to improve responsiveness, streamline issue resolution and better resource the teams who serve the restaurant chain's guests every day.
Thursday, April 9, 2026
Integrating Intelligence in an Autonomous World
As automation increasingly runs the core of retail and consumer goods operations, the next frontier isn’t smarter machines, it’s smarter leadership. We'll close out Analytics Unite by exploring how Ramesh Kollepara, SVP, global CTO for Mars Snacking, is combining human creativity, contextual understanding and ethical judgment with machine precision and scale. Learn how they’re reshaping teams, rethinking KPIs and cultivating cultures that keep people at the center of progress, even as agentic systems are poised to take on more responsibility.
