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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The best CPG finance and ops teams aren’t just connecting their systems — they’re automating the manual handoffs between them. Join this session to take a practical look at how AI is changing the way brands approach holistic planning, trade, and other back-office operations. From agentic workflows that resolve trade spend without manual intervention to supply plans that update in real time as commercial inputs change. Attendees will learn what this looks like in practice, what results are achieved — and what it actually took to get there.

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.

Successful TPM transformation requires far more than implementing a new platform. In this session, Mars will explore the critical decisions and practices that turn TPM implementation into sustainable business value—from establishing cross-functional requirements and harmonizing data to simplifying processes, driving adoption, and embedding governance. The discussion will examine how manufacturers can balance global standards with business and market needs while using modern TPM capabilities, automation, and AI to reduce complexity and improve decision-making. Attendees will gain practical lessons to avoid common implementation pitfalls, accelerate time to value, and build a TPM foundation that can evolve with the organization’s broader RGM and commercial transformation ambitions.

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.

Hyper-growth creates a different challenge for Revenue Growth Management. The business is scaling quickly, the market is evolving just as fast, and the capabilities needed tomorrow may look very different from the ones companies traditionally built over decades.

In this session, Celsius Holdings shares how it is building RGM capabilities while the business is still accelerating — establishing the right foundations in data, analytics, processes, decision rights, and ways of working without slowing down the growth engine. Rather than recreating a traditional RGM model, the opportunity is to build with the future in mind: prioritizing the capabilities that matter most, embedding RGM into commercial decision-making, and taking advantage of modern technology and new ways of working without being constrained by legacy approaches.

The conversation will explore the choices that come with building RGM in a fast-moving environment: what to build now versus later, where rigor creates value versus friction, how to balance speed with discipline, and how a company can use a clean-sheet opportunity to leapfrog more established RGM models.

Attendees will leave with a practical perspective on how to build an RGM capability designed not simply for the business of today, but for the scale, complexity, and competitive environment of tomorrow

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.

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, 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.

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.