Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo™ 2026 will host today a panel of industry leaders who will tackle the growing data-management challenge that corporate marketers must confront in the AI era.
The conversation—The ROI Blueprint: Rebuilding Marketing for the AI Era—takes place as boards, CEOs, and CFOs push their marketing teams to do more with less and marketers continue to struggle to defend their spending and prove ROI.
These strategists and innovators represent a diverse cross-section of business models, industries, and perspectives but all agree that today’s fragmented marketing technology—planning, budgeting, and measurement systems—is ill-equipped to reap the benefits of AI.
The panel will address questions including:
- What are the critical data streams marketers must harness and how can they be reconciled without an expensive overhaul of my infrastructure?
- Agentic AI promises to solve many of the world’s big-data problems, why should marketing be any different?
- Why has the marketing function been relegated to the corporate kids table in so many companies? And how can we regain an authoritative voice in the c-suite?
- After decades of trying and failing to provide a compelling, and provable, picture of marketing ROI, what will it finally take to break through?
“AI hasn’t solved marketing’s ROI problem—it has raised the stakes,” said Uptempo CMO Marie Bahl. “You cannot get trustworthy answers out of an agent pointed at fragmented, unreconciled data.”
“The marketers who win in this era will be the ones who get their information architecture right first—IA before AI,” Bahl said. “That’s the conversation I want to have with leaders operating at this scale, because every CMO is staring down the same question right now.”
The session will close with a forward look at what becomes possible once a new foundation and information architecture are in place: a preview of Decision Intelligence, Uptempo’s vision for systems that act as a thought partner to marketers. Decision Intelligence is a marketing-specific AI capability that turns connected, governed data across plans, budgets, spend, and performance into trusted, in-context guidance on what is happening, why it matters and what to do next.
Panel Session
Title: The ROI Blueprint: Rebuilding Marketing for the AI Era
Date and Time: Tuesday, June 9, 2026, 2:45 p.m. MT
Location: Adams Ballroom D, Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center, Denver
Panelists
Paul Ambraz, Vice President of Marketing and Communications, IBM
Leanne Kirkby, Senior Director, Chief of Staff to the CMO & Global Marketing Operations, Indeed
Ben Henderson, Director, Marketing Investment Planning, AT&T
Moderator: Marie Bahl, Chief Marketing Officer, Uptempo
Meet Uptempo at Booth 105
Following the panel, attendees and press are invited to continue the conversation with the Uptempo team at Booth 105, where marketing leaders can see how Uptempo connects planning, budgeting, spend, and performance into one trusted foundation they can act on.
About Uptempo
Uptempo is the enterprise platform for marketing decision intelligence—transforming fragmented plans, budgets, and performance into a structured foundation that makes data usable, decisions defensible, and AI actionable. By connecting marketing investments to what they deliver, organizations can continuously prove, optimize, and defend ROI in real time, across both human and AI-driven work. Uptempo is used by over 625,000 marketers at more than 250 global enterprises, including HubSpot, Cisco, and Unilever. For more information, visit www.uptempo.com.
Gartner and Gartner Marketing Symposium/Xpo are registered trademarks and service marks of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates in the U.S. and internationally and are used herein with permission. All rights reserved.
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