Agenda - POI 2026 Fall Hybrid Summit

POI Manufacturer Members only. Advanced registration is required. Contact Joanie Malin, POI’s Director of Client Services, to join the POI Connect Share Group – jmalin@p-o-i.org

The POI Connect Share Group meets every 6–8 weeks to discuss member needs, ongoing projects, industry trends, and advancements in solution provider capabilities. During the POI Chicago Summit POI Connect, Pam Brown will share and facilitate a discussion about POI’s Consumer Goods State of the Industry and Just Released 2026 Enterprise Planning and Execution Vendor Panorama Research & Reports. This exclusive, in-person session offers a deep dive into POI’s leading research, peer benchmarking, and the latest solution provider advancements, helping you shape your enterprise planning capabilities roadmap. Members will leave with greater confidence, equipped to engage in meaningful conversations with solution providers, consultants, and system implementation partners attending the conference, who are ready to support your journey forward.

CPG leaders walked into 2026 facing a compounding problem: input costs and tariff exposure remain elevated, retailers are pressing margin conversations harder than ever, HQ headcounts have been cut across the industry, and consumers are increasingly resistant to further list-price moves. The era of recovering costs through pricing alone is over. This C-Suite working session brings senior leaders together to confront what comes next — and to do it candidly, in a room where the easy answers have already been tried.

Participants will engage around four tensions shaping the next 18 months: (1) Cost recovery beyond price — what mix, PPA, and trade architecture moves are actually working when consumers can’t absorb more; (2) Operating with less — how RGM and commercial teams are restructuring to deliver more with fewer HQ resources, and what roles are quietly disappearing; (3) AI authority and trust — where leaders are genuinely granting agents decision rights versus where “bad AI” has eroded executive confidence in the recommendations; and (4) Retailer-supplier rebalancing — what happens to the JBP when both sides are protecting margin simultaneously. Leaders will leave with a peer-tested cost-recovery playbook and a candid view of which strategic moves are creating real separation across the industry.

*POI Transformational Leadership Council is intended for C-Suite and Senior CPG Manufacturer and Retailer leaders.

After years of accelerated investment in RGM platforms, TPM systems, AI pilots, and analytics tooling, CPG leaders are walking into 2027 planning with a question their CFO is no longer willing to defer: where is the return? Implementation success is no longer sufficient - value realization is the new bar. This hands-on workshop confronts the question directly: how do you measure, attribute, and defend the financial impact of RGM and commercial technology investments in a way the C-suite will accept?

Working in cross-functional teams, participants will pressure-test a value realization framework against their own in-flight programs. We’ll work through the four dimensions where most CPGs are leaving value on the table: (1) Baseline integrity — how to establish a credible pre-investment baseline when the comparison period included pandemic distortion, inflation, and three rounds of pricing; (2) Attribution discipline - separating what the new capability actually drove from what would have happened anyway; (3) Adoption-to-impact translation - converting usage metrics, decisions changed, and behavior shifts into P&L language; and (4) Sustaining the case - building the ongoing measurement cadence that prevents the value story from quietly evaporating in year two.

Participants will leave with a working draft of a value realization case for one of their own active programs, a peer-reviewed measurement plan, and the specific language Finance and the C-Suite respond to. The workshop is capped to ensure working-session intimacy, and pre-work will be requested ahead of the summit.

What you’ll leave with:

• A working draft value realization case for one of your own active RGM, TPM, or AI programs

• A baseline and attribution framework that holds up to Finance scrutiny

• A measurement cadence and reporting structure that sustains the value narrative beyond Year 1

• The CFO-ready language pack - the specific words and metrics that build credibility

• Peer pressure-test of your assumptions from RGM leaders facing the same conversation

For all the energy CPG manufacturers put into RGM, JBP, and trade strategy, the retailer's voice needs to be heard. This keynote brings a senior leader from one of North America’s largest retailers into the room to speak directly to the manufacturers preparing 2027 plans. What does the retailer really want from supplier partnerships in the cost-recovery era? Where are cost-justification conversations breaking down, and where are the supplier teams getting it right? What does true category leadership look like from the buyer’s desk when private label is gaining share, and retail media has become a meaningful margin contributor? How is the retailer thinking about AI, agentic commerce, and the dissolving line between trade dollars and media dollars?

This is a candid conversation about the partnership both sides claim to want but rarely build. Attendees leave with the retailer’s unvarnished view of what separates a great supplier from a tolerated one — and the specific moves that will shape the next JBP cycle.

If RGM looks the same in three years as it does today, someone has fallen behind. This panel of senior RGM leaders confronts the questions every team is wrestling with privately: Which capabilities and roles will quietly disappear? What becomes table-stakes that isn’t today? Where are we over-investing right now? And how is RGM expanding beyond pricing and promotion to become the connective tissue of total commercial value? Drawn directly from the questions POI’s RGM Share Group members are bringing to their executives, this is a candid, unvarnished conversation about the shape of the function in 2029 — and what to start, stop, and continue today to get there.

This session opens with a first look at POI’s 2026 State of the Industry RGM research. These peer benchmarking data shows where the industry actually sits on capability maturity, lever activation, organizational positioning, and AI adoption versus where it claims to sit. The findings are direct: most organizations are activating fewer levers than they think, total commercial investment remains siloed across trade, shopper marketing, retail media, and digital budgets, and the gap between top-quartile and median performers is widening fast.

With the State of the Industry data as the evidence base, Pam & Jack then unpacks what the leading organizations are doing differently - specifically, how they are moving toward Total Commercial Investment Optimization (TCIO): treating trade, shopper marketing, retail media, and digital as one portfolio rather than four budgets. Expect direct talk about the structural, financial, and political barriers to getting there, and the specific wins teams have achieved by taking even a single step toward true total-spend optimization. Attendees leave with both the benchmarking context to position their own roadmap and the practitioner playbook to advance it.

Trade Promotion Excellence is a phrase every CPG commercial leader uses — and one almost no one defines the same way twice. Is it forecast accuracy? ROI per event? Settlement integrity? Adoption rate? The truth is it’s all of those things, layered, sequenced, and earned over years of disciplined investment in capability, governance, and behavior change. This session unpacks what excellence looks like in 2027, drawing from the practitioner journey of a CPG that has crossed the chasm — and the leaders who have helped them get there.

Marketing Mix Models lived in Marketing. ROAS lives in Media. Trade ROI lives in Sales Finance. They all measure “return,” none of them reconcile, and the boundaries are dissolving faster than the org charts can keep up - particularly as retail media blurs the line between trade dollars and marketing dollars. A growing number of CPGs are moving MMM/MMA ownership into RGM, putting all commercial investments on a single decision table. This keynote walks through what that shift looks like in practice — the political battles, the measurement reconciliation work, and the meaningful unlock that follows when one team is finally accountable for the total commercial investment portfolio.

Achieving growth today requires Revenue Growth Management and Category Management to align as a single, integrated commercial engine. This session explores the shift from reactive decision-making to Proactive RGM (PRGM), where pricing, assortment, and trade investments are designed together to deliver total value. Attendees will learn how leading organizations align RGM, Category Management, and Sales Finance to move from backward-looking optimization to forward-looking planning, using AI-enabled insights to model outcomes, pressure test strategies, and act with greater precision. The result is a more intentional, connected approach to growth that drives stronger returns, sharper execution, and sustainable competitive advantage.

Every RGM leader is about to walk into a 2027 capital cycle conversation, and the questions waiting for them are sharper than ever: What did the investment actually return? Why should we fund the next phase? Where is the discipline you promised when we approved Year 1? This Friday session brings together RGM practitioners who have successfully defended their capability spend through one or more capital cycles — and the specific moves that earned them their next dollar.

Building directly on Friday's CFO keynote and Wednesday's Value Realization workshop, panelists share the metrics, narratives, and reporting cadences that actually change the answer in the budget room: how they translated adoption signals into P&L language, how they structured the “avoided cost” conversation with Finance, and how they built the year-over-year continuity that prevents the investment story from quietly resetting every January. Join the Friday workshop to drive deeper into building a personalized 2027 plan.

Gain exposure to innovative technologies and partnerships that drive investment efficiency and power business growth. POI Lightning Talks consist of 12 five-minute talks sequentially presented without interruption. The point of each lightning talk is to briefly present the latest and most interesting technological advancements (TPM, RGM, Artificial Intelligence, Agentic AI, Advanced Analytics, IR, Retail Execution, Digital, E-commerce, etc.). Walk away with an understanding of vendor capabilities and their differentiating attributes so you can maximize your engagement throughout the POI Summit.
Presented by: Leading Solutions Providers

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how commercial decisions are made. As pricing, promotion and assortment recommendations become more democratized and directly available to Sales, Marketing and Category teams, the role of an RGM team shifts away from generating analyses and toward enabling better strategically aligned decisions across the organization.

This creates a new mandate for Revenue Growth Management. Historically, RGM created value by producing scarce insights. In an AI-first world, insights become abundant. The new source of advantage is ensuring AI is applied with the right strategic context, governance and commercial judgment. RGM therefore evolves from an analytical center of excellence into the architect of enterprise decision making and not the optimizer of commercial tactics.

Realizing this opportunity requires far more than deploying AI tools. Organizations must redefine the roles and expectations of both RGM and commercial teams, establish new decision rights and governance, embed AI into business planning processes and build the capabilities needed for humans and AI to work together effectively.

RGM is on the move across the industry — into Sales at some companies, into Finance at others, standalone at a third group, each with its own pros and cons. Layer on widespread HQ headcount reductions, and the question gets sharper: where does RGM produce the most value, what decision rights actually come with the title, and how do you operate effectively when the team is smaller than the workload? This practitioner-led session unpacks the live trade-offs — reporting structure, decision authority, KAM/NAM capability building, and what to delegate versus protect when resources tighten. Attendees will leave with a peer-tested decision framework for their own org-design conversations.

After years of SKU proliferation, the industry is entering an assortment-simplification cycle — and the smartest organizations are using the reset to bring RGM upstream into the innovation process. Rather than evaluating innovation after launch, RGM teams at leading CPGs are now shaping which bets get funded, which formats and packs get built, and which products quietly get killed before they hit the slot fee. This session unpacks how RGM is influencing the innovation pipeline, how teams are measuring innovation beyond first-year revenue (incremental household penetration, margin, share), and how to make the fewer-bigger-bets philosophy stick.

Every CPG executive deck in 2026 features a slide about agentic AI. Far fewer feature a slide on whether the underlying capabilities are ready to support it. The uncomfortable truth across the industry is that most agentic deployments are being layered onto data lakes that aren’t harmonized, TPM systems that still rely on spreadsheets at the seams, and promotion optimization processes that can’t consistently produce a clean baseline. Agents amplify whatever they sit on — including the gaps. The result is the “AI Junk” problem executives are increasingly calling out: confident outputs built on shaky inputs, eroding trust faster than the technology can rebuild it.

This session steps deliberately back from the agentic conversation to address the question most organizations are quietly skipping: Are the three foundations in shape? We’ll work through specific maturity tests that separate AI-ready foundations from AI-vulnerable ones — and the sequencing decisions that determine whether the next two years of investment compound or collapse. Attend the deep dive workshop on Friday on Data Harmonization for added value.

Indirect channels remain one of the hardest parts of CPG commercial planning — data is delayed or incomplete, distributor incentives don’t always align with the brand’s, and a meaningful share of trade dollars disappears into a visibility black hole. This session brings together practitioners from manufacturers with significant distributor and foodservice exposure to share what’s actually working: how to align across multiple stakeholders without losing speed, how to make decisions with imperfect data, and how to evaluate whether indirect trade investments are delivering. Attendees will leave with concrete approaches to bringing direct-channel discipline to an indirect-channel reality.

Every RGM team knows which customers and events erode value year after year — and yet the trade dollars keep flowing. The gap isn’t analytical; it’s governance. This session walks through the decision frameworks leading CPGs use to allocate trade budget against performance criteria, the rules of engagement that let them defund underperforming activity without losing the account, and the cultural shift required to make “stopping” as easy as “spending.” Practitioners share what worked, what backfired, and the specific scorecard mechanics that gave Sales leaders confidence to defend tougher decisions in JBP conversations.
• Designing Pay-for-Performance trade allocation that Sales will actually execute
• Defunding underperforming customers and events without breaking the relationship
• The governance framework — RACI, escalation, and exception management

Commercial investment continues to climb, while visibility, alignment, and ROI remain fragmented across trade, pricing, retail media, shopper marketing, and category management. In this hour, a panel of RGM industry leaders will define Total Commercial Investment Optimization, the next chapter of Revenue Growth Management, and will share how leading CPGs are orchestrating every commercial dollar as one portfolio against the P&L. You will leave with a unified definition of TCIO and its building blocks, a clear view of where value leaks when functions operate in silos, the governance models that make orchestration work, and a practical 30-60-90-day plan to activate it. The takeaway is simple: TCIO is not about spending less, it is about making every commercial dollar work harder.

At the conclusion of the reception on Thursday, attendees can go out on the town and network in groups with a solution provider host. Night on the Town Dinners give CPG and Retailer Peers a unique and complimentary opportunity to connect with each other in an intimate networking setting. Whether you attend a 6-person dinner or a 25+ guest gathering it’s a fun way to engage with other POI Community Members, strengthen relationships, and enjoy a meal after a day of deep learning. Now’s the time to select a Host, and the POI Team can help!

Bringing true CPG innovation to retail shelves requires far more than a great product—it demands a collaborative commercial pitch built around how retail buyers actually evaluate margin, volume, and category space.

Attendees will learn how to structure collaborative, buyer-ready pitches that protect brand equity, optimize back-margins, and ensure new product launches win sustainable retail distribution.

Headline Keynote Takeaways:

Collaborative Category Growth: How suppliers and retail buyers can move from transactional negotiations to joint category planning that expands overall volume.
The Buyer’s Decision Matrix: Unlocking how category managers evaluate new product innovation beyond basic margin percentages to find mutual commercial alignment.
Price Pack Architecture (PPA) Traps: Structuring transparent, collaborative margin waterfalls from factory gate to net pocket margin that eliminate surprises for both parties.
Balancing Brand vs. Private Label Space: Working with retailers to ensure branded innovation actively complements—rather than competes against—their private label range strategies.
From Pitch to Partnership: The 5 essential elements every supplier must bring to the table to build trust and turn initial range listings into long-term commercial partnerships.

Kyle Thomas has built commercial engines at three different places: a decade leading inside Coca-Cola’s Emerging Brands division, the operating plan and organization that carried C4 Energy from tens of millions to nearly $1 billion at Nutrabolt.

In this candid fireside conversation, Kyle Thomas takes on the questions RGM leaders most want their own C-suite to answer: what real executive sponsorship of RGM looks like beyond the kickoff meeting, how a leadership team knows when a scaling brand is ready for TPM and RGM tooling and when it is not, what process discipline must exist before automation is layered on top, and how a DTC-native brand rebuilds its commercial engine as retail becomes the growth driver. Expect direct talk about the moments executive support gets tested: capital allocation against marketing, tool selection under pressure, and hiring ahead of scale.

The C-suite playbook for sponsoring RGM: mandate language, decision rights, and operating cadence
A readiness test for tools and systems: what must be true before the software arrives
The leadership behaviors that separate funding RGM from just endorsing it.

Friday’s opening Fireside chat surfaces the strategic case for customer P&Ls. This workshop turns that case into a working build. Most CPG teams can describe customer P&Ls in principle, but few have operationalized them in a way that changes commercial behavior week to week and fewer still have done it without an army of analysts cleaning data behind the scenes.

Working from a tested POI customer P&L template, participants will design their own working model in real time. We’ll tackle the four implementation killers head-on: which cost lines to include (and which to deliberately leave out), how to allocate enterprise costs without starting a finance civil war, how to reconcile trade investment to the customer level when systems disagree, and how to govern the P&L so it sustains in Year 2 and beyond. Participants bring one focal customer; they leave with a defensible, finance-credible P&L architecture for that customer and a 90-day rollout plan for the next three.

What you’ll leave with:
• A working customer P&L architecture for your largest or fastest-growing account
• A defensible cost-allocation methodology leadership can sign off on
• A trade-investment-to-customer reconciliation approach
• A 90-day rollout plan to scale beyond your first customer P&L
Facilitated by: POI

Every TPM deployment lives or dies on the business case. Many TPM, EPx, or RetailX proposals are pushed back not because the technology is wrong, but because the case presented to Finance reads like a wish list of internal estimates. This hands-on workshop addresses the most common reason TPM business cases stall: they aren't anchored in benchmarks that the room outside RGM will recognize.

Drawing directly on POI's 2026 State of the Industry research, participants build their own TPM business case in real time, using the same benchmarking data that informed Thursday's SOTI session. We'll walk through the industry maturity profile (where most CPGs actually sit on the RGM Maturity Framework today), the lever-activation gap (the majority of organizations are operating with only one or two of the five RGM levers truly active), the forecast-accuracy spread between top-quartile and median performers, and the trade-efficiency lift that consistently appears in TPM deployments executed well. Participants leave with the four-quadrant business case structure - capability uplift, efficiency capture, risk reduction, and growth enablement – ready to be populated with their own organization's numbers benchmarked against the industry.

What you'll leave with:
• A four-quadrant TPM business case structure populated with your own organization's numbers
• Industry-benchmarked baseline metrics that Finance will recognize
• A risk-adjusted ROI framework — including downside scenarios and proof-point milestones
• A one-page executive summary template for your CFO or capital committee conversation
Facilitated by:

Every other AI conversation at this summit assumes the data is ready. In most organizations, it isn't. Data lakes that aren't truly harmonized. POS and syndicated feeds that haven't been reconciled. Trade master data with conflicting naming conventions across systems. Customer hierarchies that don't match between Sales and Finance. These are the issues that quietly corrupt every BI dashboard and every AI recommendation built on top of them.

This hands-on workshop confronts the unglamorous but decisive work most organizations defer: the diagnostic, cleansing, and harmonization that must happen before AI and BI can be trusted. Participants will walk through the practical data-readiness framework that separates AI-supportable foundations from AI-vulnerable ones. We'll work through the specific data domains that matter most for RGM and TPM — POS and syndicated data reconciliation, customer and product hierarchies, trade master data, settlement and deduction data, external drivers, and shopper marketing/retail media signals — and identify where the cleansing investment compounds versus where it stalls

Dallas is the only POI summit on the calendar that falls within the window when most CPGs lock in their next-year RGM and AOP plans. This Exclusive workshop takes deliberate advantage of that timing. It is a structured, three-hour working session built to send senior RGM leaders home with measurable progress on the plan they will present and gain approval on within 30 days.

Participants will work in facilitated small groups across the five RGM levers to pressure-test their 2027 priorities against the POI framework, peer benchmarks, and the SOTI data presented. We’ll work through the structural decisions that get punted every year: which levers to escalate, which to deliberately defund, where to add capability investment, where to retire it, and how to sequence the year so January doesn’t arrive with an unbuildable plan. Each participant leaves with a 2027 RGM plan-on-a-page they can put in front of their leadership team Monday.