Tuesday 14th April - Conference Day One
Tuesday 14th April – Conference Day One
8:30 am - 9:15 am
Registration and Morning Refreshments
9:15 am - 9:30 am
Opening Remarks - Day 1: Winning Discoverability & Trust
Giovanna B. Questioni -
Board Advisor,
The Global Council for Business Resilience (GCBR)
Designing the interface between agents and commerce.
9:30 am - 10:00 am
Opening Keynote - Beyond Hype: Organising for Agent-Led Commerce
Linda Cereda -
Global VP Marketing Data,
Nike
Agent-led shopping sits on top of everything we’ve already built - SEO, apps, loyalty, martech - but the real shift isn’t the tech, it’s the organisation. Drawing on the Nike SNKRS app and broader data, ML and martech work, this keynote looks at how to turn “agentic commerce” from buzzword into business change: new workflows, new skills, and new ways of measuring value when bots, not browsers, start deciding what customers see.
- Moving from SEO to “generative engine optimisation” with agent-ready, contextual data signals.
- Redesigning workflows, ownership and skills across email, app and loyalty teams.
- Using 12-week experiment cycles to turn automation gains into real transformation.
10:00 am - 10:45 am
Panel Discussion - From SEO to ACO: Winning Shelf Voice with Retailer & Open Agents
German Faraoni Heidenreich -
Global Director, IT & Digital,
Reckitt
Luis Torres - Head of Digital, Specialized Bicycle Components
James Galland - Head of Commerce Capabilities, VML
As retailers roll out their own agents and open platforms race to embed commerce, CPGs are scrambling to understand how "shelf voice" works in an LLM world. This panel brings together early movers to unpack what they're learning as companies ship their first agentic experiences.• Diagnosing your current "shelf voice" in LLMs and retailer agents
• What "agent-optimised" product and P2D content actually looks like in practice
• Shaping holistic media, UGC and content strategies for bots and buyers
• Navigating today's constraints (single-item carts, narrow UIs, limited analytics) while preparing for what's next
10:45 am - 11:15 am
Morning Coffee Break
11:15 am - 12:00 pm
Panel Discussion - From Digital Transformation to Agentic Commerce: Getting Your House in Order
Giovanna B. Questioni -
Board Advisor,
The Global Council for Business Resilience (GCBR)
Ioana Marchis-Rusu - Senior Emerging Technology Partner, Flutter Entertainment
Mark O'Brien - Director of Product, Shutterstock
Before anyone lets agents loose on their customers, there’s a lot of unglamorous work to do: fixing legacy platforms, connecting customer data, changing culture, and proving value with “everyday” AI. This discussion brings together leaders who are still in the thick of digital transformation, sharing how they’re getting agent-ready long before the first agent goes live.
• Fixing the basics: data, legacy platforms, and connected guest-facing journeys.
• Empowering colleagues with copilots and AI tools to unlock frontline capacity.
• Moving from walk-ins to orchestrated bookings, events, and personalised return triggers.
12:00 pm - 12:30 pm
Presentation - Building Smarter Revenue Models in AI-Shaped Commerce: Pearson’s Advertiser View
Mrunal Bhagat -
Commerce & Retail Media Strategist,
Pearson
As AI changes how people research, compare and decide what to buy, advertisers need to rethink how they understand intent, influence decisions, and measure value. At Pearson, that means looking beyond short-term performance metrics to better connect audience intelligence, behavioural signals, and commercial execution - using data not just to optimise campaigns, but to shape smarter revenue models. This session shares Pearson’s perspective on how AI is changing shopper journeys, what signals matter most, and how commercial teams can translate those signals into more meaningful business outcomes.
- Using audience and behavioural data to understand changing paths to purchase
- Looking beyond ROAS to measure value through LTV, AOV and incrementality
- Connecting insight to execution to drive stronger commercial outcomes from AI-led commerce
12:30 pm - 1:00 pm
Presentation/Case Study: New Rules of Brand Growth - Lessons from Small Brands Winning the Agentic Era that Bigger Brands can Adopt
Hannah Saunders -
Chief Growth Officer,
Nudge
Tessa Tysome - Fractional Marketing Director, Here We Flo
The core narrative is simple but provocative. Startups are not winning because they have better data or bigger budgets, they are winning because they move faster. While enterprise has optimised for reporting and analysis, smaller brands have optimised for action, using systems and increasingly agents to decide and execute in real time.
At the same time, consumer behaviour is shifting. People are no longer just searching, they are asking, and machines are answering. Visibility is moving from share of search to share of recommendation. If a product is not surfaced by AI, it is not considered.
The session will explore how startups are already building for this invisible shelf, continuously testing, learning and adapting across pricing, content, media and operations through connected systems. It will also unpack why enterprise struggles to keep up and what needs to change, moving from dashboards to decision layers, from campaigns to systems, and from manual workflows to continuous execution.
Ultimately, the brands that win will not be the ones with the biggest budgets, but the ones that are easiest for the machine to choose.
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
Lunch
2:00 pm - 2:40 pm
Panel Discussion - Strategic Decision-Making: Trust, Control & Build-vs-Integrate
Paul Morris -
Senior Director EMEA Performance Marketing & Web eCommerce,
RS Group
Mrunal Bhagat - Commerce & Retail Media Strategist, Pearson
Ed Bradley - Chief Growth Officer, Virtualstock
Agentic commerce demands two decisions at once: how you earn trust (evidence, consent, bias controls) and where you build vs partner. We’ll pressure-test operating models that protect customers while moving fast.
• Identifying journeys needing owned agents vs integratable third-party tasks.
• Defining consent, provenance, bias tests, and escalation thresholds upfront.
• Balancing control, data rights, speed-to-value; agree hybrid off-ramps.
2:40 pm - 3:10 pm
Presentation - Designing Choice & Confidence in Agentic Commerce: Behavioural Lessons from Auto Trader
Nick King -
Market Research Director,
Autotrader
For twenty years, Auto Trader’s consumer psychologist has studied how people really decide what to buy – across 450,000 cars, thousands of retailers, and millions of monthly visitors. From the move from print to web to AI-powered search, one pattern is clear: features don’t change behaviour, benefits and confidence do.
This session explores what that means for agentic commerce: how to design agents that genuinely help uncertain buyers, reframe big leaps like EVs, and balance retailer needs with consumer trust.
- Using behavioural insights to design prompts and flows that reduce buyer anxiety.
- Reframing complex, high-stakes decisions around lived benefits, not technical features.
- Building discovery journeys that support under-confident buyers, especially women, not just enthusiasts.
3:10 pm - 3:40 pm
Afternoon Coffee Break
3:40 pm - 4:20 pm
Closing Panel Discussion - Security & Abuse Guardrails for Autonomous Actions
Andrew Harrison -
Agentic & GenAI Governance Advisor,
ABN AMRO
Pascal Hetzscholdt - Senior Director, AI Strategy & Content Integrity, Wiley
Robert Chilvers - VP Data & AI, dLocal
Farooq Sheikh - VP, Global Industries and Solutions, Cloudflare
Agentic AI doesn't just automate tasks - it makes decisions, executes transactions, and acts on behalf of customers at speed and scale. That's a competitive advantage. It's also a largely unmapped attack surface.
This session examines what happens when autonomous agents go wrong - through adversarial manipulation, unexpected failure modes, or actions that fall outside the boundaries anyone thought to define. The panel moves beyond threat awareness to what effective guardrails look like in production: how they're designed, where they break down, and who owns them when they do.
- Mapping the agentic abuse surface: prompt injection, credential misuse, and actions that are technically permitted but commercially damaging
- Designing controls that constrain agent behaviour without killing the autonomy that made deployment worthwhile
- Establishing accountability when an agent - not a human - initiates a transaction that goes wrong
4:20 pm - 4:50 pm
Presentation - Retail Media in an Agent World: Tasks, Auction Dynamics & Private Label
Roald van Wyk -
Global Creative Commerce Lead,
IPG
Keywords fade; tasks win. Understand how auction dynamics, private label, and marketplace rules evolve when agents decide.
• Translating creative to task-oriented response objects.
• Optimizing retail media for agent evaluation, not clicks.
• Coordinating brand-retailer signals to avoid conflicting guidance.
