Elevating Experiences: Learnings From the Consumer Goods Sales & Marketing Tech Summit
The 2025 Consumer Goods Sales & Marketing Tech Summit, held Oct. 28-29 in Chicago, gathered senior leaders and experts dedicated to driving growth and tech-enabled innovation in the consumer goods industry through elevated experiences.
Over two days, attendees focused on strategies for optimizing commercial operations and elevating customer, consumer and partner experiences through intelligent technology.
With keynotes from industry giants such as E.l.f. Beauty and Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits, sessions explored how AI is rapidly breaking down silos between RGM and marketing, fueling precision personalization and optimizing the commercial value chain.
From understanding the future of agentic commerce to adapting to shifting consumer mindsets in 2026, the event provided a powerful destination for leaders to share actionable insights on building data-fueled, human-led and AI-enabled enterprises.
Here’s a look at the key takeaways from this year’s sessions.
Keynote: Transforming the Enterprise for Amplifying Customer Experiences, Sales & Marketing
The beverage alcohol (BevAlc) industry faces a unique set of challenges compared to other consumer goods categories, including business fragmentation and complex routes to market. Until recently, there wasn't much in the way of a direct path to data between suppliers, wholesalers and customers, according to Alan Wizemann, chief digital officer for Southern Glazer’s Wine & Spirits.
Wizemann took attendees behind the scenes of how today’s BevAlc network came to be — from the “noble experiment” known as Prohibition to the post-repeal creation of the three-tier system designed to regulate product quality and taxation.
That siloed network has typically kept suppliers blind to consumer behavior trends. For this reason, Southern Glazer's transformed its entire organization to help build connectivity to that data so that consumers could better understand the value proposition of a brand.
"When they're drinking, what they're drinking … all that information is coming from the distributor tier. It's not coming from the suppliers or advertising campaigns," said Wizemann.
From Insight to Action: Driving In-Store Results With Smart Data
The discussion between Mora Ambrey, director of advanced analytics operations at Diageo, and Rifka Bernstein, VP of sales at Trax, highlighted the transformative power of external, in-store data in driving retail strategy and growth, particularly for major consumer packaged goods companies.
Ambrey identified Diageo's core challenge as a "blind spot" to the actual consumer perspective and in-store realities. Previously, the company relied heavily on internal sales data, distributor reports and basic third-party information. This gave the company a limited view that made it difficult to understand the competitive landscape, consumer reactions to price points and effective placement strategies.
"We needed to be able to tell the story of the consumer — why are we important to them and how are they shopping in the industry?" she said.
By partnering with Trax, Diageo increased its visibility into consumer behaviors and the store environment, transforming raw data (observation) into valuable insights (perspective).
This has led to more accurate decision-making regarding innovation, placement and pricing.
Learn more: Diageo Creates cross-industry, AI-enabled "think party" to pin down consumer trends
As an example, Ambrey referenced the booming ready-to-drink segment. Through the new data, Diageo learned that its products were getting dual placement with customers, increasing both foot traffic and visibility.
The company also discovered that retailers were spontaneously creating new shelf sections dedicated to "ready-to-serve" products, a market approach Diageo was previously unaware of. This data-driven discovery allowed the company to move from a reactive to a proactive strategy.
Mealtime, Mindsets and Market Shifts: Winning With the Changing Consumer in 2026 and Beyond
Cara Loeys, VP and industry advisor for Circana's CPG, food and beverage sector, highlighted the profound shifts in consumer behavior and market dynamics anticipated for the coming year and beyond.
The central theme is the consumer’s "value reset," in which financially-strained consumers are redefining what they wish to prioritize.
"Wages haven't kept pace with the price of goods, forcing consumers into a dramatic 'value reset.' This isn't just belt-tightening — it's a fundamental change in how and where they shop, directly impacting your bottom line," said Loeys.
She outlined key spending trends:
- The Wallet Pinch: Tighter budgets are causing a clear split. Discretionary spend is collapsing (especially in general merchandise), while critical spend is prioritized.
- The Great Grocery Migration: Traditional grocery is losing ground in "fill-your-basket" trips. Mass and club channels are taking ownership of the core shopping basket by winning on perceived value.
- New Influencers: From persistent at-home norms to the emerging impact of GLP-1 medications on eating patterns, lifestyle shifts are radically changing category demand.
- Income Polarization: Spending by low-income groups is declining while high-income spending continues to rise, squeezing the middle.
Beyond economics, there are lifestyle shifts that are accelerating change, including a greater desire for newness influenced by online trends and the emerging impact of GLP-1 weight-loss medications. The wider use of these medications, combined with an aging population and increased focus on health and wellness, is contributing to a decrease in overall calorie intake. This is driving demand for products high in protein and fiber, moving away from saturated fats, sugar and carbs.
Circana expects volatile CPG dollar growth of 3%-5% in 2026, driven by accumulating commodity costs, premium pricing from innovation and a focused strategy on finding specific pockets of volume growth amid the market shifts.
How AI Is Unlocking the Synergies Between Revenue Growth Management & Marketing
This panel discussion explored how AI is bridging the traditional gap between RGM and marketing, enabling faster, more effective business outcomes in the CPG and adjacent industries.
The core challenge remains hyper-personalization at scale across all channels. Steve Chitwood, SVP, interactive strategy, HGS, highlighted that while these business problems are persistent, AI is finally offering faster and more effective solutions. This transformation is evident in the CPG space, where companies are increasingly adopting customer data platforms to consolidate complex data and expose actionable insights across various activation channels.
This move addresses the "enormous growth in content" required by true personalization, a process that has historically been cumbersome, said Chitwood.
For companies such as Beam Suntory, AI’s value lies in early trend detection. Kris Ivicic, its VP of global analytics and sales technology, noted that in the volatile alcohol industry — which faces political pressures such as the temporary removal of American products in Canada — it’s crucial to "grab the consumer insight at the first hundred impressions."
By using social listening and data scraping (including foot traffic and social media images), the company aims to interpret emerging signals early enough to set the trend rather than merely follow it.
Learn more: Suntory Global Spirits to ramp up decision-making with generative AI
Amy Donahue-Kelley, global MarTech and AI lead for Shure, emphasized the need to break down functional silos. Marketing should not unilaterally invest in technology solutions. Instead, she advocated for a unified approach where service, sales and marketing collaboratively invest in technology to accelerate value realization across the business.
Ultimately, the power of AI lies in its ability to quickly adjust core business plans — including investment, marketing and digital advertising — eliminating weeks of lost time and enabling rapid activation in dynamic cycles. This ensures that the technology directly addresses a solid business problem and delivers immediate impact.
The Path to Self-Optimization
Brands are redefining how they plan, execute and refine their systems in an effort to optimize efforts and keep pace with consumer expectations, which can shift far faster than traditional marketing cycles.
Megan Lindstrand, VP, marketing and consumer experience, Combe, and Dan Klein, CEO and co-founder of Tiesta Tea, discussed how their organizations are embracing AI, automation and real-time data to create more adaptive, insight-driven systems.
For Lindstrand, self-optimization means building marketing systems that make decisions automatically. “You’re moving from optimizing after the campaign to optimizing while the campaign is running,” she explained. At Combe, that means instrumenting every workflow, from the creative to media investment, with closed-loop measurement and ongoing experimentation.
Klein shared their approach of using integrated dashboards that provide visibility into performance metrics across Tiesta Tea’s growing beverage business. “It’s hard to optimize what you’re not tracking,” he said.
The panelists discussed how automation is reshaping content and product development.
Lindstrand described how Combe leverages “iterative experimentation” and uses micro social ads to test everything from claims to pricing to inform product and creative decisions pre-market.
Klein described using data to identify flavor trends, optimize packaging and improve shelf visibility to capture that “half-second” of consumer attention.
Both agreed that the biggest barrier to self-optimization is culture, not technology.
“You can buy the dashboards, but if behavior doesn’t change, you haven’t optimized,” Lindstrand said.
Klein agreed that human authenticity must remain at the center.
“AI can’t replicate emotion,” he said. “Optimization isn’t just about being efficient, but about staying real while working smarter.”
Empowering Teams for Excellence With AI
Marketers are using AI and other technologies to dismantle siloed functions and reshape collaboration across organizational teams.
As part of this, consumer goods companies are employing generative tools, democratizing data and upskilling employees, using AI as a transformative tool, according to Karen Schwartz, global VP for Bic's blade excellence category, and Josh Blacksmith, Kimberly-Clark's senior director of global integrated marketing and experiences.
The pair shared insights during the panel moderated by Conair's SVP and global CIO, John Harding.
For Schwartz, the promise of AI lies in its ability to break down silos and align teams at the same starting point.
AI also plays a role in data democratization, giving marketing and sales teams equal access to insights compiled from decades of consumer research and development data, according to Blacksmith.
Keynote: Data-Fueled, Human-Led, AI-Enabled: The Experience Enterprise of Tomorrow
For Ekta Chopra, CDO at E.l.f Beauty, artificial intelligence is about empowerment, not replacement, and digital innovation is not only about technology but humanity.
In her keynote, she outlined how E.l.f. Beauty continues to push boundaries by uniting data, AI and human creativity.
The heart of the E.l.f strategy is connected commerce and personalization at scale. E.l.f.'s Beauty Squad loyalty program exceeds 6 million members and serves as a real-time data engine, allowing the brand to authentically connect across digital and physical touchpoints.
“The future of growth lies at the intersection of data, humanity and intelligent technology,” she said.
AI Unleashed: Maximizing Business Impact
Sue Sonday, VP of commercial technology at Reynolds American, discussed the company's business-outcome-driven approach to AI implementation, emphasizing a strong data foundation before deploying advanced models.
The technology strategy is laser-focused, with 40% of the investment budget directly tied to solving specific business problems sponsored by functional leaders.
"We can't just be doing things because they are interesting or cool. So what we've done with our AI initiative is we have a business sponsor, and the initiative is rooted in a business problem we are looking to solve," she said.
Facing the immense complexity of managing 6,000 state and contract pricing combinations across numerous spreadsheets, the company prioritized automation first. Over ten months, it built a custom solution for scenario modeling, transitioning RGM out of Excel into an automated system. This created a cleaner data foundation necessary for future AI and machine learning-optimized pricing.
Key AI/ML Use Cases:
- Trade Knowledge Management: The company uses out-of-the-box Salesforce capabilities to offer a ChatGPT-like experience that gives sales reps instant access to FAQs and information for over 200,000 retailers, mitigating the impact of high rep turnover.
- Intelligent Inventory Prediction: Leveraging AWS, the team initially cleaned up disparate data (retail scan, ship-to-retail/wholesale) to predict inventory outages. After an initial failure, its in-house data science team refined the model to achieve 90% efficacy. The future goal is to share these predictions with sales reps for consultative customer conversations.
Sonday stresses that moving from one-off use cases to connected system capabilities, though quantifying the productivity gains from tools like Copilot, remains a challenge.
Share Group: What Shoppers Really Want: Turning Consumer Feedback Into CPG Growth
The share group focused on how consumer goods companies can leverage unstructured consumer feedback for growth.
Mitch Christopher, Dan Cropsey and Donna Perlstein from Revuze set the stage for how unstructured consumer feedback data is currently being used in the consumer goods space, and where challenges and opportunities still exist.
Unstructured consumer feedback consists of free-form words, slang, sarcasm and abbreviations shared by consumers across various platforms. Unlike clean, quantitative data, it's often biased and not packaged for easy ingestion.
When harnessed, this feedback can explain purchase behavior, validate understanding of choice drivers and offer clues about future trends.
Attendees worked together in groups to organize their thoughts around unstructured data — how their own organizations are approaching the data quandary and any strategies they're considering.
Overall, there was a significant focus on precision marketing — creating higher quantities of segments and more precise content strategies. However, it heavily relies on strong data practices, and companies are struggling to move beyond simple social team usage of unstructured feedback to fully integrate it across the enterprise.
Lunch + Sales & Marketing Research Study Panel
Using the recently released Sales & Marketing Tech Study as the backdrop of the conversation, experts from Publicis Sapient, Sciemo and UpClear explored the strategic role of data, AI and human accountability in optimizing sales and marketing for CPGs and retailers facing intense margin and pricing pressure.
The consensus was that successful AI integrations begin with strategy and not just technology. Companies must first define their desired outcome and then identify the specific data required to achieve it, said Tomas Thire, CEO of Sciemo.
Xavier Armanno, managing director, data monetization at Publicis Sapient, added that the data foundation must be robust and flexible enough to support intended use cases, requiring companies to evaluate their current tech landscape and address existing gaps.
"Data works as the fuel, but what does that structure look like?" he posed.
While marketing applications typically receive the most attention when it comes to AI, panelists stressed that applications in other areas, while less visible, could be more impactful.
Armanno argued for supply chain and inventory analysis, stating that ingesting external socioeconomic and raw material data allows companies to proactively head off costly interruptions.
Thire spoke about the benefits of AI-enabled precision in pricing and promotion optimization, stating that detailed analysis of thousands of data points can reveal that a significant portion (up to one-third) of promotions may be ROI negative, allowing for immediate corrective action.
While AI can be a powerful tool, Kurt Kaiser, senior director at UpClear, emphasized the ongoing need for human accountability in any tech process.
"They need to provide quality inputs," he said. "All of these tools are going to help improve processes, but anywhere there is human input, there needs to be human accountability."
Agentic Commerce: A Walkthrough of the Future
Luca Cian, professor of AI strategy and psychology expert with the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, focused on five fundamental psychological barriers consumers must overcome before fully trusting and adopting AI shopping agents.
The first two barriers relate to competency and understanding. AI is believed to be a black box, and thus consumers view AI skeptically for subjective or hedonic tasks (e.g., choosing wine or fashion).
The second barrier is the belief that AI can’t understand subjectivity. Consumers view AI as highly competent for utilitarian products such as a dishwasher, trusting it to make functional, performance-based decisions.
The third barrier is inflexibility, as consumers believe AI is static, generic and unable to adjust to their unique, evolving needs.
The last two barriers are overgeneralization — such as algorithmic transference, where a bad experience with one AI poisons trust in all others — and excessive autonomy.
To combat these perceptions, Cian suggested that companies emphasize adaptive learning and brand the system as personalized ("catered to your unique needs") rather than just AI-enabled.
He provided two strategic paths for retailers and CPGs navigating the rise of AI agents:
Ride the Wave: This grants early positioning and access to a massive user base. Walmart is one such company leveraging this approach with its partnership with OpenAI. However, it risks data asymmetry (OpenAI analyzing customer data) and disintermediation (customers bypassing Walmart's owned channels).
Control the Ecosystem: This involves keeping the technology internal. For example, by bringing influencer curation directly onto its My Sephora Storefront platform, Sephora collects 100% of valuable first-party data (purchase history, preferences, etc.) and owns the customer relationship. The challenge, however, is that this walled garden approach can make the brand invisible to third-party generative AI discovery agents used by new customers.
Overall, the solution isn't a technological one, but psychological, reframing the benefits of AI in a way that communicates trust and value for consumers.
Creating Emotional Omnichannel Connections With Consumers
Ellen Webb, VP, shopper analytics and insights, PepsiCo, and Meera Patel, senior director, global advanced analytics omnichannel, Kellanova, shared how their organizations are breaking silos and rethinking commerce to deliver personal, consistent and emotionally resonant experiences for consumers moving between digital and physical touchpoints.
Webb described PepsiCo’s “end-to-end mindset,” emphasizing that consumers “don’t think in channels, they think in needs.” Her team integrates in-store execution with advanced analytics and retail media insights to ensure every shelf and digital space tells a unified brand story.
Patel echoed this approach and described how Kellanova restructured its teams, merging e-commerce under sales, to strengthen shared goals and holistic KPIs. Both agreed that this approach has resulted in data-driven segmentation and frictionless creative that connects messaging across all touchpoints.
Using data with empathy to balance personalization with consumer trust was another shared theme. Patel called it “personalization with purpose,” while Webb urged brands to pair data with human analysis to ensure relevance without intrusion for the consumer. They agreed that retail media has evolved to become more than a performance channel, but a space for storytelling that builds brand loyalty and opportunity for conversion.
In the future, they predict that physical stores will become dynamic fulfillment hubs enabled by AI and adaptive planograms that personalize shelves in real time. They foresee the key to success in unified commerce, where data, creativity and human connection align to make each brand interaction feel intentional and personal.
Operating Models That Power Experience-Led Growth
When consumer expectations shift as quickly as digital trends, operationalizing a consumer-centric strategy is one of the most pressing challenges for global brands.
Michael Boswell, vice president of customer experience at Breakthru Beverage Group, Ariel Dalton, SVP of commercial at Danone North America, and Nicole Vinson, VP of global marketing excellence at Kellanova, explored how companies are redesigning legacy structures and creating new operating models to drive growth anchored in consumer experience, agility and connectivity.
For Boswell, consumer data is the centerpiece of a modern operating model. For Kellanova’s Vinson, agility starts with dismantling silos.
Dalton emphasized that success depends on connectivity.
“When your internal systems are connected and your external partnerships are aligned, the consumer wins,” she said.
