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 entered 2026 facing a compounding problem: input costs and tariff exposure remain elevated, retailers are pressing margin conversations harder than ever, HQ headcount cuts have spread across the industry, and consumers are resistant to further list-price increases. This fall, one of the world’s most powerful beverage brands was pulled entirely from the shelves of one of America’s largest grocers, reportedly over price. The era of recovering costs through pricing alone is over, and the patchwork of tools most companies use today, each built to solve one function’s challenge, cannot answer the questions that come next.

This working session, built, presented, and facilitated by POI, Enterra Solutions, and PwC, addresses what keeps the C-suite up at night and offers a different answer: the executive nerve center, a single cockpit where leaders and their tools see the enterprise as one. It is a leadership conversation about decisions, decision rights, and economics, with technology as the enabler. Participants will work through four questions shaping the next 18 months: (1) Where do your current capabilities stall across people, process, and technology, and what is the gap costing you? (2) Cost recovery as one optimization: mix, PPA, trade, and retail media managed as a single portfolio with one currency of return (TCIO). (3) AI authority with fewer hands: where leaders are granting decision rights, and what glass-box accuracy must prove before a recommendation earns trust. (4) The shared cockpit (where people and tools work side by side): what the JBP becomes when manufacturer and retailer, their people and their technology, work within one standard version of the truth instead of two, to serve a shared shopper and consumer.

Leaders will leave with a private maturity self-assessment, a one-page view of where their organization stands today and where it needs to go; a candid peer read, shared in aggregate, of where AI decision rights are real; and the path to the nerve center’s founding co-build cohort convening in January 2027.

The POI Transformational Leadership Council is designed for C-suite leaders and the senior CPG manufacturer and retailer executives who present the business case to the C-suite leaders.

As manufacturers advance RGM, TPM, and commercial planning, competitive advantage increasingly depends on the quality and speed of the signals informing decisions. New sources of first-party transaction data, consumer insights, experimentation, retail media intelligence, and real-world shelf visibility are helping commercial teams better understand what happened, why it happened, and what to do next.

POI State of the Industry research shows that the next frontier is not simply having more data—it is connecting trusted signals across the commercial ecosystem and turning them into faster, more precise decisions and actions. Hear how leading manufacturers are connecting consumer behavior, promotion response, switching, on-shelf availability, and execution signals to improve decision-making and create greater agility across the commercial organization.

This session will explore how these intelligence capabilities complement existing RGM and TPM investments, helping manufacturers move beyond systems of record toward more responsive systems of action. Discover what it takes to sense, decide, activate, measure, and learn faster—and translate better intelligence into better business outcomes.

Re-connect with Industry Peers around fun and entertainment. This provides the perfect backdrop for connecting with fellow CPG leaders, sparking conversations, and strengthening your professional network. This is your chance to network in a truly unforgettable setting while enjoying an evening that will leave you reimagining what is possible!

The Sale: Winning the Long Game with Your Customers, Your Team, and Yourself
In a CPG market where every supplier has data, every retailer has leverage, and every negotiation tests credibility, the commercial leaders who win long term are those their customers trust. Drawing on The Sale, the bestselling business fable he co-authored with Jon Gordon, former SEC quarterback Alex Demczak shows how integrity-based selling turns transactional relationships into joint business partnerships that withstand hard conversations. Attendees leave with a practical framework for building trust across their teams, customers, and trade partners, and for making it the one competitive edge no rival can replicate.

What does genuine brand-retailer alignment look like in practice, versus the version that lives on a slide in the JBP? This candid fireside chat brings the retailer's voice to the POI stage through a leader whose career spans the CPG manufacturer side, the merchant's desk, and measured retail media. The conversation explores why the view from the retailer's side of the desk isn't so different from the manufacturer's, how fragmented planning across trade, media, and merchandising leaves growth on the table, and what the best suppliers do differently to connect all three into one orchestrated plan. Leave with a clear picture of how great partnership gets built, funded, and measured together.

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.

As trade investments continue to represent one of the largest expenditures for consumer goods companies, organizations are under increasing pressure to improve visibility, accelerate decision-making, and maximize promotional ROI.

Join Primo Brands, Cognizant, and XTEL as they share how a TPM and RGM transformation helped establish a modern commercial planning foundation that connects people, processes, data, and technology. Through standardized ways of working, enhanced governance, improved reporting, and AI-enabled analytics, Primo Brands is modernizing how trade investments are planned, monitored, and evaluated.

The session will explore how the organization is enabling automated post-event analysis, expanding insight generation, increasing cross-functional collaboration, and creating a scalable platform for future revenue growth optimization. It will also highlight the role of AI-Powered Promo Calendar Optimization in helping teams determine the right promotion timing, sequencing, and investment allocation to improve promotional effectiveness and support sustainable growth. Attendees will hear lessons learned from the transformation journey and practical approaches for leveraging TPM, analytics, and AI to drive smarter commercial decisions.

Four decades from the buyer's side: lessons from retail, foodservice, and the evolving supplier/manufacturer-distributor partnership.

Drawing on more than 40 years of merchandising and supplier/manufacturers-partnership experience, this session will offer a merchant's perspective on what sets high-performing suppliers/manufacturers apart in today's foodservice environment. The session will explore how foodservice differs from retail, the evolution of joint business planning, the role of digital platforms and data-driven insights, and how supplier/manufacturers-distributor collaboration must evolve to drive sustainable growth. The central theme is that the most valued suppliers/manufacturers are those that help grow categories, solve customer challenges, and create value beyond the transaction.

The presentation challenges suppliers/manufacturers to rethink their role from product vendor to growth partner. Success in the next decade will belong to suppliers/manufacturers that understand operators, leverage insights, collaborate strategically, and help drive category growth alongside their distributor partners.

Promotions are more than a number
We can understand consumer behavior better than ever before. We can analyse consumer choice, both at the shelf and online. So why do we still judge a promotion by lift over baseline alone, when consumer engagement with a brand or product is much richer than a single number? This session explores what becomes possible when we measure the whole story. It looks at how first-party data has deepened our understanding of consumer behavior and AI has made it easily accessible through intuitive workflows. We will discuss the way that understanding can reinvent how we define and measure promotional performance, moving from one number to a full view of your promotion performance and the value it created. And it grounds the idea in real examples where a richer understanding of consumers is already leading to smarter, more effective promotions.

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), in which pricing, assortment, and trade investments are designed in concert to deliver total value. Attendees will learn how leading organizations are beginning to think about aligning RGM, Category Management, and Sales Finance to shift 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.

The quality of an RGM model is only as strong as the data behind it. As companies push for greater accuracy in pricing and revenue decisions, the real differentiator isn't the algorithm alone, it's the historical depth and breadth of data feeding it. In this session, Attendees will learn how RGM capabilities are built on proprietary access to historical data from larger, mid-market companies — data that provides a stronger foundation for training and validating models against real-world revenue dynamics. The conversation will include how a Natural Foods Company is achieving success — from the data foundation to the resulting precision in pricing and revenue decisions.

Attendees will leave with a clearer view of how data depth translates into model accuracy, and what to prioritize when implementing an RGM capability built for long-term, compounding advantage.

TPM and Retail Execution deliver the most value when planning and execution are no longer treated as separate processes. In this session, Mars leaders across TPM and Retail Execution will explore how connecting trade plans, field execution data, retailer insights, and performance signals can create a more complete view of in-market activity and help teams respond faster.

The discussion will examine how manufacturers can bring together TPM and Retail Execution data and insights to improve visibility from plan through execution, identify gaps earlier, adapt commercial actions in-flight, and strengthen collaboration across sales, field, finance, and RGM teams. Mars will also share lessons around data harmonization, process alignment, adoption, governance, automation, and AI as organizations move toward a more connected commercial ecosystem.

Attendees will gain practical perspectives on how connecting TPM and Retail Execution can close the loop between planning and the marketplace, helping teams become more agile, improve execution, and continuously strengthen future plans.

What happens when AI moves beyond identifying what needs to be done and starts getting the work done? Join us for a real-world look at Operationalized Agentic Retail Execution with a leading global confectionery manufacturer. Together, we’ll explore how AI Agents are being deployed at scale to make store-level decisions, guide merchandisers through the work, trigger corrective actions, and verify execution - all within the store visit.

The shift is more than automation. By connecting DETECT → DECIDE → ACT → VERIFY → LEARN, Retail Execution becomes a continuous, closed-loop process.

The result: verified execution, an instant closed loop, and AI-ready data alongside 50% reductions in visit time and supervisor workload, and the ability to launch new market initiatives across the field force in just one day. See what happens when AI stops recommending the work and starts operationalizing execution.

For most CPG brands, TPM and RGM live in separate systems, separate teams, and separate conversations, and in indirect and foodservice channels, that disconnect is worse. Data is delayed, distributor incentives drift from brand strategy, and trade dollars move through layers that are hard to see or measure. Join Confido and Dr. Praeger's for a practical look at what it actually costs to operate with disconnected systems, and what it looks like to close the gap, connecting spend decisions to growth outcomes in channels that have historically resisted it.

Gain exposure to innovative technologies and partnerships that drive investment efficiency and power business growth. POI Lightning Talks consist of 14 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.

In this session, we will showcase process improvements, and how Second Nature Brands is strengthening governance, standardizing trade execution, and improving cross‑functional collaboration better ROI tracking, spend control, and alignment with revenue growth management (RGM). Additionally, Attendees will learn how Second Nature Brands moved from a legacy TPM and manual Excel spreadsheets to a structured, commercial TPx platform to enable smarter trade investments, using data‑driven insights to optimize promotion mix, timing, and effectiveness. Finally, we will Share lessons learned, including practical takeaways for other CPG brands looking to modernize trade promotion strategy.

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.

What do a leading tool manufacturer and a global consumer products company have in common? Despite operating in different industries with distinct commercial models, both recognize the strategic importance of investing in Trade Promotion Management (TPM) capabilities to improve commercial effectiveness and drive profitable growth.

Join leaders from Milwaukee Tool and Kimberly-Clark North America for a candid executive roundtable bringing together two unique perspectives: one from an organization just embarking on its TPM transformation journey, and another from a leader who has experienced multiple TPM transformations.he conversation will explore what is driving organizations across industries to prioritize TPM investments, the expectations and challenges that come with embarking on these journeys, and the lessons learned from those who have navigated them before.

Looking ahead, the leaders will share what excites them most about the future of TPM, including the opportunity to move beyond transactional capabilities toward more connected commercial planning, advanced analytics, and AI-enabled decision-making.

Attendees will gain practical insights into how leaders approach TPM transformation, what experience has taught them, and how organizations can position themselves to realize greater value from these investments.

When sales reps or merchandisers visit stores, they need to know what promotions are available to upsell, if there is a promotion going on, what the promoted price is suppose to be and what merchandising needs to be set up or audited. The effort for account managers and sales ops to manually communicate this to field reps is enormous. In this session, we will discuss the benefits of automating this integration as well as the potential challenges in doing this. We will also discuss what best in class retail execution can look like when this is done well.

CPG leaders are converging on key pillars to defend profitable volume, including price-pack architecture, premiumization, portfolio reshaping, and disciplined cost-to-reinvest. Integrated Business Planning is the operating model that turns these strategies into executable plans. This session shares the inside story of Project Trike, Nestlé Purina’s enterprise-wide initiative to orchestrate planning from sourcing to consumer delivery. Purina and Deloitte explain how they moved from siloed, manual processes to one connected, AI-enabled plan across commercial, supply, demand, and financial planning. It covers the people, process, and platform decisions that made adoption stick.

After this session, attendees will be able to:

Connect recent CPG industry themes to an AI-driven orchestration model unifying sourcing, supply, demand, commercial, and financial planning.
Understand how dedicated cross-functional teams, empowered decision rights, and a people-first mindset drive unified planning adoption.
Discuss the next frontier of orchestrated planning, including agentic AI’s growing role in autonomous, always-on decisions.

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.

Consumer products companies are under mounting pressure to justify every trade dollar spent, yet many still rely on fragmented tools and manual processes that limit efficiency, constrain time spent with customers & obscure true promotion ROI. This panel brings together finance, IT, and consulting leaders to explore how leading FMCG organizations are anticipating evolving from legacy trade promotion environments to integrated, cloud-native platforms that mix human interaction and oversight with Agentic AI support & execution. Panelists will discuss the organizational, technical, and change-management hurdles of transformation, the potential role of AI assistants & agents to improve efficiency, solve process gaps, harness insights & signals from end-to-end processes and how the evolution of Agentic AI technology could lead to improved business outcomes and improved ROI from trade promotional spend.

Successful Trade Promotion Management (TPM) initiatives are not defined by a successful go-live—they are defined by sustained business value. While organizations invest significant effort in selecting software and executing implementations, many overlook the leadership, governance, and organizational decisions that ultimately determine long-term success. Attendees will leave with practical lessons, proven leadership practices, and common pitfalls to avoid—insights they can immediately apply to maximize the return on their TPM investment.

Approximately half of the session will be dedicated to an interactive Q&A, giving attendees the opportunity to discuss real-world challenges and exchange experiences with peers.

Trade is one of the largest investments a CPG organization makes and one of the hardest to connect, measure, and optimize when deductions, trade planning, forecasting, and ERP processes operate independently.

In this interactive workshop, participants will explore how AI and connected data are changing the way Consumer Goods organizations plan, measure, and reconcile trade. Through real-world examples, facilitated discussion, and practical exercises, attendees will examine how POS, shipment, promotional, and deduction data can come together to improve forecasting, strengthen promotion ROI visibility, and create a more connected path from trade plan through financial reconciliation.

Participants will have the opportunity to benchmark their own organizations, identify where disconnected processes and data are creating friction, and explore where AI and automation can deliver the greatest near-term value. Attendees will leave with a clearer view of the capabilities, data connections, and organizational readiness required to move toward a more intelligent, connected trade ecosystem.
Facilitated by: POI and Confido

Every annual planning cycle presents a choice: copy-paste last year’s spreadsheets or build a data-backed plan that RGM, Sales, and Finance can all sign off on. Many trade and RGM initiatives stall not because the commercial intent is wrong, but because planning relies on disconnected manual worksheets, unverified assumptions, and questions that are asked too late in the process.

Drawing directly on POI’s State of the Industry research, this interactive working session addresses the spreadsheet trap head-on. We’ll explore the key industry benchmarks, examine how leading CPG peers achieved measurable ROI across forecast accuracy, planning efficiency, deduction recovery, and scale, and define the four core pillars of a finance-ready commercial plan.

Through a live, whiteboard-led collaborative exercise, participants will work in small groups to pressure-test the upcoming 2027–2028 planning process. You will identify the critical questions your team must ask across RGM, sales, trade, and finance to move from reactive spreadsheet tracking to strategic joint business planning.

What You’ll Leave With:
· Industry Benchmark Insights: A baseline understanding of where top-performing CPGs sit regarding trade efficiency and ROI.
· Real-World Case Study Framework: Proven proof points from CPG peers in forecast accuracy, trade efficiency, and revenue recovery.
· Actionable User Story Blueprint: Prioritized operational requirements ("As a [Role], I want...") generated during the interactive table exercise to guide your internal planning.
· Take-Home Planning Deliverables: Complete access to the Building the Business Case for a TPx Solution Guide workbook and the TPM Implementation Best Practices Fact Sheet to audit organizational readiness post-summit.
Facilitated by: POI and TELUS Consumer Goods

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, sell-in and sell-through volumes, customer and product hierarchies, master data, trade promotion data, settlement and deduction data, prices and allowances, external drivers, and shopper marketing/retail media signals — and identify where the cleansing investment compounds versus where it stalls.

Workshop A (Hybrid): From Fragmented Data to Autonomous Action: How AI Is Transforming Planning and Reconciliation for CPG Brands