Data AI and CMO Think Tank

The Future of Data AI and CMO

Date

June 25, 2026

Location

Chicago, IL

Community

CIO / CMO / CDO

Agenda

June 25, 2026
All times Central Time
8:30 AM-9:00 AM
Registration
9:00 AM-9:30 AM
Morning Networking
9:30 AM-9:40 AM
Opening Remarks
9:40 AM-10:25 AM
Keynote Panel
AI Evolution: How Enterprise Architecture Must Adapt for the Age of Agentic AI

As artificial intelligence continues to evolve from predictive analytics and copilots to autonomous, decision-making agents, enterprise leaders are facing a new architectural reality. Agentic AI has the potential to transform how organizations operate accelerating decision-making, automating complex workflows, and unlocking entirely new business models. But realizing that opportunity requires more than deploying new models; it demands an enterprise architecture built for intelligence, interoperability, security, and scale. 

In this session CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and architecture leaders will jointly explore both the opportunities and challenges shaping the next era of AI. From modernizing data foundations and enabling secure agent-to-system interactions, to avoiding vendor lock-in, managing governance, and ensuring operational resilience, this discussion will focus on how enterprise architecture must evolve to support AI that not only informs the business but increasingly acts on its behalf.

Panelists
Sandesh Gawali

Speaker

Sandesh Gawali

Director Strategic IT/Salesforce CTO

Salesforce

As a Senior Strategic Advisor at Salesforce, Sandesh Gawali provides expert advisory services to CxOs, guiding the decision-making process for high-stakes, transformational projects designed to elevate organizational performance. With over 20 years of experience in innovation and technology consulting, Sandesh has a proven track record of leading and delivering complex digital solutions for Fortune 500 clients across diverse industries. By leveraging a deep technical arsenal that includes data, AI, ML, cloud computing, and information security, he bridges the gap between technical possibility and strategic business value to drive sustainable growth and innovation.
Jigar Shah

Speaker

Jigar Shah

CISO

Medusind

Jigar Shah is the CISO of Medusind. He is a passionate and transformational IT, data, and cybersecurity senior executive with two decades of experience spanning the healthcare, financial, banking, and retail/consumer goods industries, as well as professional consulting. Throughout his career in strategic leadership, Jigar has developed deep expertise in overseeing large, complex, enterprise-level initiatives. His track record includes spearheading critical cybersecurity programs, cloud migrations, application development, and infrastructure overhauls for large, regulated organizations. Driven by a multidisciplinary approach, he brings a unique and powerful background combining technology, business, and law to his leadership roles.
Richard Rodriguez

Speaker

Richard Rodriguez

VP, Information Security

SG Impact Ventures

Richard Rodriguez serves as the VP of Information Security at SG Impact Ventures AG. He is a senior IT Security Leader with over 10 years of broad expertise spanning Information Technology and Security.

Richard holds multiple degrees in Information Security, International Law, and Business Administration, complemented by numerous industry certifications. Known for his strong track record in international collaborative efforts, he has extensive experience managing diverse global teams and has worked onsite across Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.

Grant Ecker

Speaker

Grant Ecker

Chief Enterprise Architect

ECOLAB

Grant Ecker is a senior technology executive leading Enterprise Architecture and Integration at Ecolab, managing a global team of architects and integration leaders. With 20+ years of experience, he drives transformation and innovation across billion-dollar IT portfolios, building proactive architecture communities and aligning technology strategy with business value. Grant is also the Founder and Chairman of the Chief Architect Network, the largest vendor-neutral community for Chief Architect executives, connecting 600+ members across 400+ Fortune 500 companies. Through this network, he leads global virtual and in-person events, sponsors specialized topic groups, promotes diversity in architecture, and shares thought leadership via publications and conferences, further advancing the profession and enabling architects worldwide to drive impactful business outcomes.
10:30 AM-10:55 AM
Keynote
Built to be Found: The New Rules of Discoverability

Search didn’t break. It fragmented – and in doing so, it rewrote how decisions are made. What used to be a linear path is now a distributed system. Users move across all of it without friction and without loyalty to a single channel. And most marketing strategies aren’t built for this new reality. Your brand is now being discovered — and decided on — across systems you do not control. Which means you’re no longer just competing for attention. You’re competing to be surfaced, summarized, and trusted. This session breaks down the new rules of discoverability — and what brands must do now to stay visible where decisions are actually being made.

Together with:

Spinutech
10:55 AM-11:15 AM
Networking Break
11:15 AM-11:50 AM
Fireside Chat
Human + Machine Intelligence: Redefining Decision-Making in the Age of AI

As AI becomes embedded across every layer of the enterprise, organizations are rethinking how critical decisions are made, who makes them, and how quickly they can act on insight. The future of competitive advantage will not come from human expertise or machine intelligence alone, but from the ability to combine both at scale. Join senior executives for an exclusive discussion on how leading organizations are integrating AI-driven insights with human judgment to improve decision-making across operations, customer engagement, risk management, and innovation. Together, we’ll explore how to build trust in AI, establish the right governance and accountability frameworks, and create a culture where humans and intelligent systems work together to drive faster, smarter, and more strategic business outcomes.

12:15 PM-1:00 PM
Panel
Brand Is a Story Companies Tell Themselves. Customers Have Already Moved On.

Every brand has a story it tells about itself. The question is whether anyone outside the building believes it. In an era of radical transparency, peer reviews, and AI-generated alternatives, customers are forming opinions faster than brands can shape them — and often without ever engaging with official messaging at all. This session challenges the assumption that brand is something you build and control, and asks what actually drives preference, loyalty, and choice when the traditional levers no longer reach. If brand as we know it is becoming an internal fiction, what replaces it — and who owns it?

Panelists
Chris McGuire

Speaker

Chris McGuire

President

AMA Chicago

For more than twenty-five years, Chris has been helping financial powerhouses like Visa, Northwestern Mutual, U.S. Bank, Capital One and TD Bank discover ways to motivate consumers to act. His experience has involved working for industry leaders like McGuffin Creative Group, Leo Burnett, and DraftFCB. Before joining McGuffin, he launched a digital agency Slant Marketing and grew it to over 25 people. An expert in marketing, Chris has often been quoted in trade publications and has been a featured guest on podcasts offering insights into how technologies impact consumer interactions with brands. He is currently serving his second term as the President of the AMA Chicago chapter and has also been on the ANA Promotion Committee. He was elected and served as Chair and Secretary for more than ten years on the local school council at Newberry Math and Science Academy. During his free time, you’ll find Chris on the tennis courts, attending events around the city and hanging with his lovely wife and two adorable daughters.
Jorge Orozco-Cordero

Speaker

Jorge Orozco-Cordero

Sr. Director Brand Strategy

Capital One

Born in Costa Rica, raised in New York, and built in Chicago — Jorge is a brand creative executive who has spent his career making large organizations creatively distinct. At Capital One he's leading brand integration for the largest bank merger in two decades. Before that, eleven years at Discover: Super Bowl ECD, enterprise design system, $1B in customer value. He served on the Google AI CMO Council, is a McKinsey executive fellow, and a recent soccer convert. Proud owner of Brando — a dog his son Javier insists does not outrank him.
Christine Mau

Speaker

Christine Mau

VP Brand & Creative

Medline Industries

As a brand strategist and global design leader, advocate and educator, Christine has built a career leveraging the power of brand strategy and design thinking within organizations, agencies and institutions all over the world. As a leader, she brings vision, paired with the tenacity and resiliency needed to deliver it. She is considered an innovator and change agent wherever she goes. She serves as the VP Brand & Creative for Medline Industries. Founded in 1966, Medline Industries is a national manufacturer and distributor of health care supplies and services. Medline provides products and services to the entire continuum of care, including hospitals, extended care facilities, surgery centers, commercial laundries, home care dealers, home care agencies, physician offices. Medline is located in Northfield, Illinois.
Daniel Hennessy

Speaker

Daniel Hennessy

VP Creative

The Aspen Group

Daniel Hennessy is an Executive Creative Director and builder of in-house creative studios, currently serving as VP Head of Creative at The Tag Group. His career spans JWT London, McCann, Leo Burnett, and eight years as Regional Creative Director at Dyson, where he built and ran The Americas Centre of Excellence. He specializes in translating complex technology and engineering into cultural narratives — and occasionally disappears to write television.
1:00 PM-1:45 PM
Lunch
1:45 PM-2:10 PM
Keynote
You Can't Improve What You Can't See: The Case for Agent Analytics

When Amplitude built its own AI agent, it ran into a problem it didn't expect: a decade of analytics expertise and none of it applied. Sessions looked healthy. Funnels said "activated." Users were furious.

This talk is about the gap between traditional product analytics and what you actually need to build and improve AI agents. We'll cover why non-deterministic products break conventional observability, what it means to measure agent quality at scale, and how connecting agent interaction data to downstream business outcomes (retention, conversion, churn) changes how you think about AI ROI. We'll share what we learned building Agent Analytics from the inside, including the failure taxonomy, online eval framework, and the finding that users with high-quality agent sessions retained at 2.3x the rate of those who hit task failures.

If you're shipping agents and relying on gut feel and scattered logs to know if they're working, this talk is for you.

Together with:

Amplitude
2:15 PM-3:00 PM
Panel
The Junior Bench Is Gone. The Senior Roles Are Changing. So Who Survives?

The marketing org is being dismantled and rebuilt in real time. Entry-level roles are disappearing as AI absorbs execution work. Senior roles are being rewritten around judgment, strategy, and AI fluency. And the titles that didn't exist two years ago — Creativity Leads, AI Architects, Prompt Strategists, Brand Risk Officers — are now showing up in job descriptions. Leaders name what they have cut, what they have transformed, and what they are building from scratch. And they face the question nobody wants to answer out loud: if the junior bench disappears, where do tomorrow's CMOs come from?

Panelists
Kristen Delphos

Speaker

Kristen Delphos

VP Head of Communications & Public Affairs

UL Research Institutes

Kristen Delphos is vice president of communications and public affairs for UL Research Institutes. Delphos leads communications strategies that support UL Research Institutes’ growth and influence. Delphos’ work also further establishes relationships with key external stakeholders — from policymakers and regulators around the world to academic partners and nongovernmental organizations — in connection with other UL enterprise leaders and in support of the enterprise mission of working for a safer world. Before joining UL Research Institutes, Delphos served as vice president and head of global marketing and communications at Dematic, developing and implementing an integrated strategy to support brand, marketing, and communications for the company’s automation solutions. She has more than 15 years of experience in developing and leading communications programs across the transportation, energy, manufacturing, and consumer sectors, having held global communications leadership roles at other Fortune-ranked companies, including ABB, GE Industrial Solutions, ADT, and UPS. Delphos holds a B.A. in economics from the University of Massachusetts. She is a member of the Forbes Communications Council and was part of the Atlanta Women’s Foundation’s Inspire Atlanta class of 2020, where she earned the top fundraising achievement. Delphos has an interest in health and well-being and is certified as an integrative nutrition coach and in mindfulness-based stress reduction, including facilitating workplace mindfulness.
Jackie Kuehl

Speaker

Jacqueline Kuehl

Exec Director Digital Marketing Concentration

DePaul University

Jacqueline Kuehl is the Executive Director, Digital Marketing Concentration at the DePaul University. Jacqueline inspires people and grows business with plans that work. She excels at pinpointing the exact barriers to growth and turning that around. She brings an energetic, engaging, entrepreneurial spirit with a unique blend of analytic skills and creativity. Her career consists of creating, building, and growing marketing within a company, whether large or small. She loves to see results in action to make a real impact and have fun in the process.
Laura Whitehead

Speaker

Laura Whitehead

EVP Marketing

iManage

Laura Whitehead is the EVP of Marketing at iManage, the knowledge work platform for legal and professional services. With over 25 years in B2B tech marketing, she has spent the last eight years building iManage's global marketing function — and is now leading the charge on transforming it with AI.
3:05 PM-3:50 PM
Panel
From Analytics to Autonomous: What the AI-Native Business Looks Like Across Data, Brand, and Customer

As AI rapidly evolves from dashboards and predictive analytics to generative and agentic intelligence, leaders across data, marketing, and customer experience are being challenged to rethink how their organizations create value, manage risk, and compete in real time. The role of the modern enterprise leader is no longer centered on reporting and insights alone — it now requires building trusted data ecosystems, enabling AI at scale, ensuring responsible governance, and turning intelligence into measurable business action. Join senior data, AI, marketing, and CX executives for an exclusive discussion on how leading organizations are modernizing their strategies, operationalizing AI across the enterprise, and balancing innovation with security, cost, and accountability in an increasingly autonomous digital economy.

Panelists
Sabrykrishnan Loganathan

Speaker

Sabrykrishnan Loganathan

Sr. Dir. Head of Enterprise AI

Peloton Interactive

Sabrykrishnan Loganathan is the Senior Director, Head of Enterprise AI at Peloton Interactive. He is a innovative technology executive with 18+ years of experience driving enterprise-wide digital and AI transformation. Currently Sabrykrishnan is leading $300M+ digital revenue streams and Gen-AI initiatives impacting 30,000+ users across 250+ locations.
Sandeep Nema

Speaker

Sandeep Nema

Head of Enterprise Architecture / Director

Cook County

With over 12 years of hands-on leadership experience in enterprise architecture, IT strategy, and governance, Sandeep Nema is a proven leader who translates organizational vision into action through innovative technology solutions. He has led Architecture for Digital and AI Integrations, streamlining digital experiences while managing IT strategy and technology roadmaps. With a hands-on approach to operational excellence, Sandeep builds high-performance teams recognized for technical expertise and communication. He has spearheaded resilient integration platform modernization, domain-driven design, and event-driven architecture to enable seamless omnichannel customer experiences. Additionally, he introduced DevSecOps and Agile methodologies to improve delivery efficiency and quality. His expertise also encompasses vendor management, contract negotiation, executive presentations, and business continuity.
Sugato Bose (1)

Speaker

Sugato Bose

Chief Enterprise Architect

Medline Industries

Sugato Bose is the Senior Director and Chief Enterprise Architect at Medline Industries, where he leads technology strategy and modernization across a global, highly regulated landscape. With over 25 years of experience across Life Sciences, Supply Chain, and CPG, Sugato is an expert at balancing high-stakes transformation with operational resilience. He currently oversees a multi-billion dollar platform scope, including SAP S/4HANA, Manhattan-class WMS, and Azure-based cloud data platforms. Accountable for the architectural risk posture of Tier 1–5 platforms, Sugato has delivered up to $90M in value through standards-driven portfolio rationalization. He is a pioneer in embedding practical AI and agentic workflows into enterprise execution, ensuring that innovation translates into measurable business outcomes. A leader of globally distributed teams, Sugato’s core philosophy is that architecture must create clarity, turning complex strategies into scalable, high-performance platforms.
3:50 PM-4:05 PM
Afternoon Networking
4:05 PM-4:45 PM
Panel
Brand Without Revenue Is a Hobby. Revenue Without Brand Is a Race to the Bottom.

The tension between brand and performance has defined marketing debates for a decade. But the CMOs winning today have stopped choosing sides — they own the full loop. This session explores how the best marketing leaders are connecting brand investment to demand generation to revenue outcomes, without sacrificing long-term positioning for short-term numbers. The conversation focuses on what it actually takes to make brand and revenue speak the same language inside an organisation — and how AI-driven attribution and mixed-media modeling are finally giving the CFO answers the CMO can defend.

Panelists
Ranga Bodla

Speaker

Ranga Bodla

VP Field Engagement & Marketing

NetSuite

Ranga Bodla is the Vice President, Field Engagement and Marketing at NetSuite. Founded in 1998 NetSuite is a cloud computing company that offers software and services to manage business finances, operations, and customer relations. NetSuite is headquartered in Austin, TX.
Michael Loesel

Speaker

Michael Loesel

VP Marketing

Hinge Health

Michael Loesel is the VP of Marketing for Hinge Health. Michael builds high-growth healthcare marketing organizations that drive revenue and P&L impact from scale-up through IPO. As VP of Marketing at Hinge Health, he leads enterprise marketing and go-to-market alignment within a B2B2C ecosystem, while spearheading the adoption of AI tools to boost team productivity and creative output. Throughout his career at Hinge Health, Optum, GE Healthcare, and Allscripts, Michael has consistently transformed underleveraged marketing departments into strategic, accountable functions. He combines commercial discipline with modern marketing stacks - including ABM, analytics, and AI-enabled workflows - to bridge the gap between clinical storytelling and data-driven results.
Mark Mansell

Speaker

Mark Mansell

Head of Marketing

Carelon

Mark Mansell is the Head of Marketing for Carelon. Mark is an enterprise leader who builds and scales revenue engines inside complex, multi-business platforms. Operating at a portfolio CMO scope, he brings a decade of experience in regulated, high-stakes environments where product, pricing, sales, and narrative must work as a unified system. Partnering with presidents and leadership teams, Mark excels at turning commercial complexity into clarity to drive growth, protect revenue, and scale new businesses.
4:45 PM-4:50 PM
Closing Remarks & Raffle Giveaway
4:50 PM-5:50 PM
Cocktail Reception

Together With

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