Kick off the day with coffee and informal networking. Attendees can meet peers, partners, and Progress experts before the sessions begin.

The future isn’t coming. It’s already here and it’s redefining how people engage and build trust with brands in an AI-driven world.

Welcome to Progress MartechNEXT!
In this opening, Sara Faatz, Senior Director of Awareness and Community for Progress and the host of the 10 Minute Martech podcast, will share Progress’s vision for a world where shifting user behaviors are driving the urgent evolution of the CMS - transforming from a system of record into a system of intelligent engagement – and share what is possible with the technology today.

A wide-angle view of marketing technology in 2026: what's shifting in the landscape, what's happening to the stack, and why AI agents — working for marketers, engaging customers, and increasingly acting on behalf of customers — are the most consequential force reshaping how marketing gets done. Includes a look at the architectural changes enabling it all, and why context is quickly becoming the difference between generic automation and genuinely intelligent marketing.

We’ve already lived through the era of “15 minutes of fame.” The internet and social media made it possible for anyone to be seen—but personalization was mostly surface-level, driven by rules that mimicked relevance without truly delivering it.

Now, AI is ushering in a new phase: 15 minutes to build. With the right approach to context engineering, anyone can rapidly prototype ideas, test concepts, and create powerful solutions in minutes—not months. Experimentation has never been faster, cheaper, or more accessible.

But the real shift is what comes next: 15 minutes of fortune. The advantage no longer comes from just building quickly—it comes from building what matters. The winners will be those who can identify the right problems, design for real users, and translate experiments into measurable business outcomes.

In this session, you’ll learn how to move beyond rapid prototyping and into value engineering—the emerging discipline of turning AI-driven experiments into revenue. We’ll explore how to follow the money, reverse-engineer value into customer experience, data, AI, and martech, and ultimately transform speed into sustainable growth.

Search is being rewritten in real time. AI overviews and answer engines increasingly deliver the answer before anyone reaches your site, and ranking on page one is no longer the finish line. This session cuts through the noise to explain what is actually changing, how buyers now discover and vet companies, and what marketers must do to stay visible when an AI writes the first response. You will leave with a practical understanding for building content and site structures designed for AI discovery, plus a clear view of which old SEO habits to keep, fix, or retire.

Most companies have invested heavily in martech and still cannot connect it to revenue. This session shows how to turn a sprawling stack into a pipeline engine by aligning data, marketing, and sales around the metrics that matter, and where AI now removes friction across the funnel. Understand how to priortize the handful of changes that move revenue the fastest.

Join the speakers for a lively panel discussion that will connect the dots across the day’s themes - from changing user behavior to the rise of Generative CMS to agentic orchestration and more. Expect candid insights, practical takeaways and forward-looking perspectives on how organizations can cut through complexity, align technology with strategy and deliver meaningful customer experiences. We’ll wrap the day by tackling your biggest questions and exploring what’s next in the rapidly changing martech space.