- Doors
- 9 AM
- Venue
- The Times Center
- Format
- Single track
- Keynote
The AI Brain
Noah Brier, Co-Founder, Alephic
Noah opens the day with a working perspective on the AI brain: how these systems shape our thinking, creativity, and work.
Fusing Creativity and AI
Mike Houston, Head of Creative AI, Amazon
Jo Shoesmith, Chief Creative Officer, Amazon
Mike Houston and Jo Shoesmith explore how creative judgment and AI come together in the work of a creative team.
- Keynote
Scaling Brand Creative with Runway
Jamie Umpherson, Chief Creative Officer, Runway
Jamie Umpherson and Gabor Petlyanszki show how Runway helps advertisers get more from each brief and how Meta uses AI to plan and run campaigns. They’ll share examples of workflows that changed over the past year.
- Break
Morning coffee break
A 15-minute break after Runway, followed by the next creative sessions.
Deliberately Imperfect
Mikkel Holm, Chief AI & Innovation Officer, BARK
Mikkel Holm shares real BARK creative work—from handwritten ads to deliberately imperfect imagery—and how working with AI’s limitations can produce more interesting results.
Building a Divergence Model
Pip Bingemann, CEO, Springboards
Pip Bingemann introduces Flint, Springboards’ divergence model, and a companion model for productive stupidity—experiments to make AI less predictable and open up more surprising creative directions.
AEO
Tom Critchlow, Forward Deployed Engineer, Alephic
Tom Critchlow argues the real AI search question isn't how often your brand gets cited, but whether it still matters when an assistant is doing the work. As people hand more of their discovery and decisions to agents, brands have to figure out how to show up for both the human and the agent acting on their behalf, and what to hold on to when the customer relationship runs through someone else's interface.
- Sponsor Showcase
Emberos: AI in Practice
Justin Inman, Founder & CEO, Emberos
In six minutes, Justin Inman introduces emberos, an operating system for AI brand management. Its Brand Knowledge Graph, agents, and CreatorGraph connect creator content and digital signals to AI answers so teams can understand, shape, and measure how AI represents their brands.
- Break
Lunch break
An hour for lunch and conversation before the afternoon sessions.
- Fireside
Noah Brier in conversation with Mark D’Arcy
- Noah Brier, Co-Founder, Alephic
Mark D'Arcy, Corporate VP and Global Creative Director, Microsoft AI
Noah and Mark open the afternoon with a conversation about integrating AI into the operations of work, connecting the morning’s creative ideas to how teams put them into practice.
- Sponsor Showcase
VantagePoint AI in Practice
Andy Crossen, Chief Product Officer, Partnerize
Andy Crossen introduces VantagePoint™, Partnerize’s measurement, verification, and economic governance platform for machine-mediated commerce. A walkthrough follows what appeared, what content contributed, whether the evidence is verified, how contribution should be valued, and what action follows.
Making AI Part of How Work Gets Done
Aaron Dignan, Vice President, Product & AI, Rocket Money
Aaron Dignan looks at what it takes to make AI part of everyday work, drawing on his background in product, AI, and organizational change, and on what really shifts when a team moves from experimenting with AI to working with it every day.
Putting AI to Work for the People Who Run Your Stay
Danelle Williams, Vice President, Marketing Technology & Enablement, Hilton
James Gross, Founder, Alephic
Hilton’s Danelle Williams explores how AI can make brand expertise more useful to hotel teams. Starting with Rapid Review, she’ll discuss how AI-assisted workflows could reduce repetitive work, speed up human review, and deliver better information to guests.
- Demo
Inside the Dstillery & Canvas Workflow
Michael Beebe, Chief Executive Officer, Dstillery
Paul Woolmington, CEO, Canvas Worldwide
Michael Beebe and Paul Woolmington walk through a campaign-optimization workflow from Dstillery and Canvas, showing how their teams put AI to work on real media decisions.
- Break
Coffee break
A 25-minute coffee and conversation break before the final block.
- Demo
Codifying a Brand for Agents
Amy Winther, Principal Designer, Block
Amy Winther shows ghost, Block's approach to agentic brand infrastructure: how to codify a brand for AI agents by combining design systems, markdown files, and skills.
- Pecha Kucha
Writer Partner Talk
Ranjan Roy, VP, Industry Lead for Retail, WRITER
Ranjan Roy represents Writer in a fast-paced presentation about AI at work.
- Fireside
Jesse Vincent interviewed by Shareen Pathak
Jesse Vincent, Founder CEO, Prime Radiant
Shareen Pathak, Product, Shopping AI, Amazon
Jesse Vincent created Superpowers, the open-source skills framework that gets coding agents to work out what you actually want before they start building. At Prime Radiant he now runs a hybrid team where AI colleagues (a PM, a go-to-market lead, engineers) have their own names, roles, and Slack accounts, and occasionally run their own postmortems. Shareen talks with Jesse about what managing agents has in common with managing people, why the real failure isn't bugs but work that misses your intent, and what changes when an AI has a job instead of a task.
- Demo
Control-center demo
Justin McCarthy, Founder and CEO, Diffusion AI, Inc
Justin McCarthy demonstrates Ambition, a voice-in/visuals-out system for creative collaboration. Generative interfaces, images, and video help teams capture and refine ideas; Diffusion’s Software Factory and Demand Factory execute the agreed ambition.
- Fireside
Reflections on the Day
- Noah Brier, Co-Founder, Alephic
- James Gross, Founder, Alephic
- Mark D'Arcy, Corporate VP and Global Creative Director, Microsoft AI
Noah, James Gross, and Mark reflect on the day’s sessions, connect the creativity and operations themes, and discuss what participants can take back to their own work.