Agenda - POI 2026 Spring 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 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 are facing a perfect storm of rising costs, shifting shopper behaviors, disruptive competitors. This session brings together senior leaders to explore bold strategies that turn uncertainty into opportunity and set the course for sustainable, profitable growth. How Consumers shop, changes daily, is your business ready? At consumer goods companies, as part of their digital transformation, AI is beginning to work behind the scenes, function by function, across the enterprise: generating marketing content, adapting pricing and promotion strategies plus coordinating supply chains. Today, many actions remain siloed, but the future direction is clear — toward systems that learn, interconnect and adapt in real time for enterprise optimization. Leaders attending this workshop will engage around these shifts, including roadmaps navigating how more “agentic” enterprises could meaningfully change how work and workflow is structured.

These agents won’t just accelerate execution. They can compress layers of activity, connect signals across departments and enable human teams to focus on strategy, creativity and long-term value. We’ll share examples of results for discussion on how teams work with AI agents, not just use them. In one example, collaboration happens in real time, not in handoffs, as humans and technological tools build on each other’s strengths for sustainable growth, beneficial for both Retailers and Manufacturers.

In many CPG organizations, AI is still experienced as point automation—isolated features that streamline single software tasks (flagging, classifying, suggesting) for a single process or team. Useful, yes—but not holistic. And always one step away from adoption failure. When AI is connected across forecasting, pricing, trade investment, and execution, it not only delivers incremental efficiency but also creates a step-change value.

In this hands-on workshop, we’ll map where AI already lives in your enterprise revenue management stack—forecasting, elasticity/price modeling, anomaly detection, and accrual checks—and identify what is typically preventing real impact. Through agentic frameworks and live use cases, we’ll design workflows based on Observe → Recommend → Execute, with clear guardrails, approvals, and auditability, and explore how teams evolve into human orchestrators who steer and validate AI-driven decisions.

What you’ll leave with:
- A draft Observe–Recommend–Execute workflow for a priority RM use case
- A short governance checklist (controls, escalation, accountability)
- Clarity on role shifts and ways of working to scale responsibly

As we write this, some headlines are reading the global economic effects of oil at $200 per barrel. The era of frictionless globalization is over. What replaces it is more complex — and consequential — than headlines suggest. As a majority global middle class emerges, the United States and China now compete to write the rules, build the networks, and deploy the autonomous intelligence that will define 21st century commerce.

This isn't your grandfather's Cold War. It's a brand war at civilizational scale, waged through value chains, scarcity of resources, human, and AI-driven decisions. America is rebalancing its role: less universal market-maker, more competitive market-player. Government’s Western Hemisphere pivot is strategic repositioning in a world where network effects and leading AI capabilities determine who wins the global middle class. Attendees will gain insights from experts discussing from first-hand experiences how the United States navigated the last Middle East conflict in Iraq to how the United States and their allies might do so today in the era of AI.

Revenue Growth Management (RGM) tools promise powerful insights, but their impact depends on whether organizations truly adopt the new ways of working they enable. While most implementations focus heavily on ensuring system readiness, this session explores how effective change management turns RGM implementations into lasting capability by building organizational readiness. Focusing on people, process, and purpose, we will discuss practical approaches to building engagement, embedding new decision routines and aligning teams around the value of RGM. We discuss common pitfalls to driving adoption and key success factors to ensure that your new RGM system becomes part of everyday commercial decision-making and not just another underutilized tool in the stack.

During a portion of the Networking Break
Engage first-hand via short, interactive sessions held during high-traffic networking breaks. Experience solutions through live or guided demonstrations, clear messaging, and real-world use cases. Designed to be concise and accessible, they provide a focused look at how tools and capabilities work in practice, highlighting practical applications and business value while creating opportunities for direct engagement and discussion. Attend the Sponsor Spotlight:
A) Presented by: Confido
B) Presented by: Enterra Solutions
C) Presented by: SAP

As POI's 2026 State of the Industry research makes clear, cross-functional misalignment remains one of the most persistent pain points in CPG - finance, sales, trade, and demand planning each operating from their own version of the numbers, and spending more time reconciling than deciding.

Join Confido and MUSH for a ground-level look at what it actually takes to get four departments operating from a single source of truth. MUSH will share their journey consolidating accounting, trade promotion management, sales forecasting, and demand planning onto an integrated platform, highlighting what changed operationally, culturally, and commercially when everyone stopped fighting over the data.

Three years into widespread business adoption of AI, many CPG companies have accumulated real experience embedding AI across TPM, TPO, RGM, and retail execution. The next challenge isn’t adding more individual models, it’s learning what to replicate, what to avoid, and how to move from isolated, AI-infused insights to governed, automated execution that consistently delivers value.

XTEL and Leading CPG Panelists will discuss where AI can create the most immediate impact across pre-event validation, spend leakage detection, scenario generation, and post-event learning loops. The panel will also explore the foundations required to scale responsibly: establishing practical guardrails (approval thresholds, audit trails, role-based controls) and evolving teams into human orchestrators who steer, validate, and continuously improve AI-driven decisions across the end-to-end revenue management

As one of America’s major poultry distributors, Perdue Farms manages a massive trade portfolio where fragmented systems and manual processes once created a visibility "black hole." Having finalized the TPM design phase and entering into build, this session will outline the goals of Perdue’s next-generation TPM, plus will share how Perdue, PwC, and Salesforce have partnered through cross-functional workshops, structured governance, and early integration work with other enterprise systems to ensure a smooth implementation roadmap. Looking ahead, we will highlight key build-phase priorities that will shape a scalable, future-ready TPM foundation.

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.

CPG's have automated for years yet commercial teams still operate across disconnected tools and manual analysis. Agentic AI now brings orchestrated intelligence that turns isolated insights into guiding smarter decisions, sooner. In market today, not as a future aspiration.

Grounded in an Answer, Solve, Act approach, this session illustrates how agentic intelligence can deliver real-time answers to commercial questions, diagnose the drivers behind them, and recommend next actions directly within Sales and RGM workflows.

We’ll focus on what this shift looks like in practice: scalable, field-ready capabilities that extend advanced intelligence to every account and every team. For leaders navigating modern commercial complexity, this represents the next step in operationalizing data and decision support across the organization.

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, Gen AI, Advanced Analytics, IR, Retail Execution, Digital, Ecommerce etc). Walk away understanding vendor capabilities and their differentiating attributes so you can maximize your engagement throughout the POI Summit.
Presented by: Leading Solutions Providers

As AI agents increasingly mediate how consumers search, evaluate, and purchase products, the traditional digital “shelf” is shifting from retailer pages to algorithm-driven recommendations. In this new environment, a limited set of default suggestions will determine who wins the basket. For CPG leaders, this represents a structural shift in how pricing, promotion, and assortment strategies must be designed and executed.

Visibility and conversion will increasingly depend on structured product data, trusted claims, and clearly defined price-pack architectures that AI agents can consistently interpret across channels. As agents optimize for value, relevance, and total basket economics in real time, CPG organizations must rethink how trade investments, promotional mechanics, and pricing tiers are signaled and understood by machines—not just merchants and shoppers.

Shopping journeys will begin with occasions and intent rather than brand preference, with agents dynamically assembling baskets to meet consumer goals. This session will explore the implications for RGM, TPM, and commercial strategy, outlining how leaders can protect margin, drive trade-up, and earn inclusion in AI-curated baskets—while building the data and governance foundations required to compete in an agentic commerce landscape.

The strategies and benefits of RGM continue expanding into customer planning for as long as we can remember. The concept of RGM not being stuck in front office back office as just analytics is nothing new. That said, there are several examples across our client base where RGM is at the center of Integrated Business Planning (IBP). The question is: what do these organizations do differently? We will share 5 concrete differences which we believe are changing the game on how RGM is elevated internally and externally, and will look to two of Mars’ global RGM transformation leaders across the business and technology to share their business ambition and underlying operating model for global scale.

During a portion of the Networking Break
Engage first-hand via short, interactive sessions held during high-traffic networking breaks. Experience solutions through live or guided demonstrations, clear messaging, and real-world use cases. Designed to be concise and accessible, they provide a focused look at how tools and capabilities work in practice, highlighting practical applications and business value while creating opportunities for direct engagement and discussion.
Attend the Sponsor Spotlight:
A) Presented by: Visualfabriq
B) Presented by: Salesforce
C) Presented by: Confido

In this session, senior leaders from AlixPartners and Lamb Weston share how they partnered to embed advanced analytics directly into Sales workflows—moving teams beyond “What’s the next promo?” to “How do we grow this category together?” By democratizing complex metrics into clear, conversational performance narratives and standardizing category frameworks, the teams empowered Sales to confidently lead discussions around share, lift drivers, discount effectiveness, merchandising impact, and competitive context.

- Learn how building super users, defining strong governance, and ensuring leadership accountability can create sustainable behavior change.

- Walk away with a practical playbook to transform Sales from order-takers into strategic customer advisors.

In this session, senior leaders from Panos Brands, Nutrabolt, and PSignite share best practices and personal expertise on how to drive TPMx transformation and adoption.

The panelists will share how to kick off a transformation project well from the beginning, how to avoid failure, the most difficult aspects of driving adoption and how to overcome the obstacles, and what makes TPMx systems actually ‘usable.’

Walk away with practical TPMx deployment insights on how to kick off and manage the complex change transformation and project aspects that are essential for a successful TPMx implementation.

What's the secret to growth? The consumer goods and retail sectors are entering an unprecedented era of consumer intelligence, providing a new answer to the timeless challenge facing every CPG manufacturer. Companies can now understand how consumers discover products, what alternatives they consider, and the journey they take before adding items to cart - offering a revealing look into motivations and purchase triggers. This session will highlight a few critical trends to watch, from evolving consumer shopping patterns to category dynamics, examine the transformative capabilities surfacing these insights, and showcasing how forward-thinking companies are converting these signals into strategic initiatives and tangible outcomes.

In this session, senior leaders from Edgewell, Mars, and Nutrabolt will share how to shift from discussing customer P&Ls to effectively operationalizing them. The panel will cover P&L ownership and how they aligned their organization around shared accountability for both net sales and profitability. They will also discuss the cultural shift needed to move from a top-line volume focus to a profitability mindset. If you're beginning your P&L journey, you won’t want to miss the panel insights that highlight the data and system limitations the teams overcame to ensure cross-functional usability. Scaling customer P&Ls beyond a tool or specific accounts is challenging, and the panel will share best practices and deep insights on how they successfully achieved this across people, processes, and systems.

Here’s where all your questions are answered, as you’ll head home with the strategies and tactics to build or refine your Transformation roadmap. Experts will share “how to” move to your next level of success and bring back specific action items to your teams. Space is assigned seating.

Workshop A (Hybrid): “How to install Price Pack Architecture as a Discipline in Your Organization”
In this interactive workshop we’ll engage participants on how to move from scattered Price Pack Architecture (PPA) tweaks and isolated willingness-to-pay conjoint studies to a single, coherent PPA program that sits at the center of commercial decision-making.

In this interactive workshop, we walk step by step through the necessary concepts for designing a holistic PPA framework and embedding it into portfolio, pricing, promo, innovation, and JBP processes so PPA becomes a repeatable, data-driven system that improves mix, margin, and growth.
Facilitated by: POI
Colin McQuay, Sr. Director, Nestle USA,
Harry Ergan, Corporate Vice President, Revenue Management, AJINOMOTO

Workshop B (In-Person): Making Strategy Stick: Executing Complex Programs That Deliver in Market
Even the most ambitious strategies fall short without flawless execution. For manufacturers, the real challenge isn’t defining the plan-it’s making it stick across functions, regions, and go-to-market channels.

In this highly interactive session, Matt Suggett will explore how leading manufacturers successfully translate complex strategies into measurable in-market results. Through real-world examples and peer discussion, you’ll uncover what separates programs that stall from those that scale.
Facilitated by: POI and Matt Suggett, Partner, Simon - Kucher Consumer Goods & Retail

Workshop C (In-Person): Total Investment Optimization – Blending Trade, Retail Media & Digital for ROI
The lines between trade spend and marketing investment have officially blurred—yet most organizations still manage them in isolation. This disconnect is limiting ROI, reducing visibility, and constraining growth.

This POI-led workshop will have us challenge traditional approaches. We will discuss —where trade, retail media, and digital are orchestrated as a single growth engine. Through State of the industry research and peer discussion, participants will learn how to shift from fragmented spending to optimized, insight-driven investment decisions that deliver measurable business outcomes.

Treat total commercial spend as a portfolio—not disconnected budgets
Align investments to consumer, shopper, and retailer moments
Enable in-flight optimization through better data, analytics, and governance
Facilitated by: POI and Carey Wong, SVP, Global Head of Consumer Goods

Workshop D (In-Person): Driving Adoption, Efficiency, and Effectiveness with Trade Management
Workshop Participants will take a practical look at how growth focused CPG brands are working to solve Trade Promotion challenges. You’ll advance your journey to unify TPM, sales forecasting, and demand planning – creating a single, trusted version of the truth that's essential for holistic enterprise planning.

Workshop Participants will take away

· How to eliminate planning silos and align trade, sales, and demand signals across your organization

· Participants will engage around what it looks like in practice to run TPM, sales forecasting, and demand planning from a single integrated platform and how it changes cross-functional trust and decision-making speed

· Actionable steps CPG finance and commercial teams can take to move from reconciliation-heavy workflows toward a unified, accountable planning foundation.
Facilitated by: POI and Confido