CONFERENCE DAY ONE
Wednesday 14 October 2026
DAY ONE: Wednesday 14 October 2026
08.30
REGISTRATION & BARISTA COFFEE
Emma Roborgh
Founder & CEO
B2B Marketing Leaders Forum
Kristy Kelly
Managing Director
B2B Marketing Leaders Forum
INTERNATIONAL KEYNOTE: MARKETING LEADERSHIP - BUILDING HIGH-PERFORMING TEAMS THRIVING THROUGH CHANGE
09:25
Nicole German
Global CMO, Corporate and Institutional Banking
HSBC
HIGH PERFORMANCE WITH CARE: THE FOUNDATIONS OF A TEAM BUILT TO THRIVE
Marketing leaders are working in a world that is being rewired by volatility, technology and rising expectations for growth. Teams are being asked to deliver more, faster and with greater impact, often with fewer resources and less certainty. In this environment, high performance cannot be driven by pressure alone. It depends on clarity, trust, teamwork and genuine care.
In this keynote, Nicole German, Global CMO for Corporate and Institutional Banking at HSBC, will share the foundations she uses to build high-performing teams that can thrive through change. Drawing on leadership roles across technology and financial services, Nicole will share some of the most positive and most challenging experiences from her multi-decade career journey, exploring how clear goals, shared accountability and the right rhythm of business help teams focus on what matters most.
She will also introduce the Share System, her approach to connecting marketing objectives and key results to measurable business value.
Nicole will explain why technology, including AI, only creates value when teams understand the outcomes they are working towards and have the skills, confidence and trust to use new tools well. The session brings together commercial discipline and human-centred leadership, showing how the best marketing is data and insight led, but human and heart delivered.
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Nicole German is Global CMO for Corporate and Institutional Banking at HSBC, where she leads marketing across trade, payments, markets and innovation banking.
Before joining HSBC, Nicole held senior marketing leadership roles at global technology companies including LinkedIn and SAP, before moving into financial services at Scotiabank and as CMO of Tangerine Bank.
She was named one of The Drum’s Top 100 B2B CMOs in 2025. Nicole is known for building high-performing, client-centred teams that connect data-led marketing, technology and human insight to measurable business value.
AI PANEL
09:50
STATE OF AI ADOPTION ACCELERATION IN 2026
AI adoption for B2B Marketers is moving at super speeds. For this session we’ll be assuming all B2B marketers have now thoroughly adopted AI tools efficiently, making impact on efficiency, operational processes, marketing structures & change management.
- From adoption roadmaps to strategic consolidation, focus on workflows & operations and change management
- The AI Marketing Organisation of the future and the roles of AI Marketing/ GTM Engineers and why they are essential to your marketing organisation
- How individuals are KPI’ed on AI usage and productivity
- The AI and Agentic marketing stack – How to build it and how to get it right
- From Assistants to Agents: How AI Agents are transforming B2B marketing performance
- How to build AI agent teams that deliver human-quality work.
- Practical examples of how best-in-class, AI native marketing teams are using AI to dial up their marketing productivity, creativity, and performance
- Benchmark how AI enabled your team is vs our panelists and rest of audience
Colin Png
CMO & SVP APAC
SAP
Ljubica Radoicic
VP Marketing APAC & Emerging Markets
Thomson Reuters
Sameer Thakkar
Vice President – Marketing
SAS
Moderated by Rajhev Rajkumar
Director Strategic Growth
CAPITAL-e
MARKETING LEADERSHIP
10:15
Ab Gaur
President APAC
WPP Enterprise Solutions
FROM CMO TO CRO – MARKETING’S ROLE IN OWNING REVENUE
In today’s B2B landscape, CEOs are demanding that CMOs go beyond soft metrics and step into real revenue accountability. This session explores how leading enterprises have bridged the attribution gap and repositioned marketing as a true co-owner of growth — not just a supporter.
- The Attribution Gap: Why traditional lead-gen metrics (MQLs, reach, awareness) fall short in the boardroom.
- CEO Expectations: What executive leadership now demands from modern marketing.
- B2B Success Stories: How companies like Red Hat, TUV-SUD, and IBM have built marketing-sales co-ownership models.
- Mindset Shift: From campaign-based thinking to pipeline ownership and business outcomes.
- KPIs that Matter: Designing shared metrics across marketing, sales, and revenue teams.
You will learn:
- How to elevate the CMO role from storyteller to strategic growth driver.
- What structures and behaviors build CEO trust and marketing credibility.
- How to activate true cross-functional alignment between marketing, sales, and customer success.
Session sponsored by:
10:50 – 11:20
MORNING COFFEE & NETWORKING BREAK
11:20
Choose one of three tracks: Book your team, split up and share learnings:
DEMAND GEN, PIPE ACCELERATION & AI
Track hosted by:
In today’s high-pressure climate, marketing teams are being asked to do the impossible: deliver more pipeline, faster conversions, and higher revenue, often with flat or shrinking budgets.
During this session our panelists will discuss:
- The State of B2B Pipeline Today: key metrics, trends, and pressure points reshaping how we define pipeline success
- Accelerating conversion: where the funnel breaks—and how high-performing teams fix it fast
- Profitable growth without compromise: proven tactics to hit (and exceed) pipeline targets without a bigger budget
- Team Design in AI-Driven World: structuring teams for scale in an era where AI can amplify impact – or create new silos
- Building a high-performing demand engine for long-term revenue growth
- Regional demand centre in a global tech org — Team structure, KPIs, processes & channels
- Which channels are delivering the strongest results in your APAC demand centre right now — and which ones are you quietly deprioritising?
- Demand gen programs for local & vertical requirements
- Empowering regional marketers to break new ground & lead global programs
- New logo acquisition vs upselling to an existing customer base – balancing investment and focus across both
- How and where is AI making the biggest impact in your demand gen:
- Human processes vs automation with AI
- Using AI to generate actionable insights from data
- The impact of AI on hyper personalization and nurture at scale
- Demonstrating ROI: how to measure and enhance positive outcomes when using AI to drive better demand gen
Namrata Kapur
Director Growth Marketing, APAC, IBM
Herlinda Xu
VP Marketing APAC, TeamViewer
Sharon Tan
Marketing Director, Asia, Thomson Reuters
Moderated by:
Andy Nathan, Head of Sales APJ, ProspectBase
BUYER SIGNALS, LOYALTY & AI - LESSONS FROM B2C
Track hosted by:
Case study: The B2B2C Playbook Every B2B Seller Is Missing
B2B2C companies do three things almost every B2B still can’t. They see a real signal from the actual end customer, not just an account or an order placed by someone else in the chain. They carry one loyalty identity for that customer across every channel they touch. And they point AI at that combined signal instead of guessing. Most B2B has none of the three, whether it sells direct through its own sales team or through a distributor, reseller, or retail partner, and it shows up as forecasts that are already wrong and demand shifts a competitor notices first.
TP built exactly this inside a global sportswear brand’s Asia retail network: an AI system that reads real-time end-market signal, social conversation, reviews, local search, before it ever shows up in a reorder, plus a single loyalty identity that follows the customer across the brand’s own stores and every retail partner’s store. The result is the B2B2C playbook running inside a traditional two-tier distribution business. This session shows how it was built, and how the same three moves apply to any business selling through someone else.
Key takeaways:
- The three things B2B2C companies do that most B2B sellers still don’t: real customer signal, one loyalty identity, AI pointed at both
- How a sportswear brand ran this playbook inside a traditional distribution model, and what changed
- How to build one loyalty identity across brand-owned and partner-run stores without a channel conflict fight
Panel: What B2B Can Learn from Consumer-Led Growth
Past studies of APAC B2B buying journeys have found the same uncomfortable thing again and again: buying groups do most of their evaluation before a vendor ever hears from them, and often choose a winner before the first sales conversation happens. Consumer-led businesses have spent a decade building for exactly that reality, they never got a first conversation either, so they built systems to read behavior, timing, and loyalty signal instead, and pointed AI at acting on it before a human gets involved.
The case study you just heard showed what that looks like inside a traditional distribution business. This panel opens it further: how do you spot new growth before a segment gets crowded, what should B2B actually borrow from consumer-led growth without copying the B2C playbook outright, and what changes once AI lets you act on real buyer signal instead of a lagging indicator like a purchase order or an MQL.
Key takeaways:
- How leaders spot new growth before a buying group already has an answer
- What B2B can learn from consumer-led models, and where copying the B2C playbook breaks
- How AI changes what’s possible once you’re reading real signal instead of a lagging indicator
Marissa Metsa Virri
Regional Marketing Lead, Asia Pacific & Latin America, Cynosure Lutronic
Moderated by:
Daniel Wei, Chief Operating Officer, TP Infinity
CONTENT, BRAND & AI
Track hosted by:
The UGLY truth: Why you are losing brand relevance, sales velocity and market share – and what to do about it.
Buyers are searching differently and selecting suppliers earlier than ever before. Solution discovery now spans LLM’s, Social, Reddit, Youtube, Discord, Google and respected tech publishers – yet most enterprise tech companies are still optimizing for yesterday’s demand gen behavior and missing the mark on building brand authority and mindshare. The result? You’re either invisible at early discoverability stages or forgotten at later stages and bleeding budget chasing ineffective, wasteful after-the-fact tactics – most likely both. And the takeaway? Your marketing efforts and dollars are optimized for traffic and mind share that is already gone. You’ve lost the deal before the pitch even begins.
This track will explore where discoverability and demand capture actually happens today. You’ll learn why abandoning SEO fundamentals for AI-indexing shortcuts backfires, how to build genuine brand authority across fragmented discovery channels, and most importantly how to better align your marketing investment strategy to capture demand before competitors even know a deal is forming.
Panel: From content creation to brand intelligence with AI
AI is rapidly changing how B2B organisations develop brands, produce content and engage increasingly complex buying groups. What began as a tool for faster copywriting and design is now influencing the entire content lifecycle—from research and ideation to personalisation, production, distribution and performance optimisation.
But greater speed and scale bring new challenges. As more brands use the same models, data and creative shortcuts, how do marketers avoid generic content, protect distinctiveness and maintain a consistent brand voice? Where should human judgement, creativity and subject-matter expertise remain central? And how can marketing leaders establish the governance, operating models and capabilities required to use AI responsibly without slowing innovation?
This session will explore how leading B2B marketers are using AI to increase creative capacity, improve content relevance and strengthen brand execution across markets and channels. It will also examine the risks of content proliferation, brand dilution and declining trust—and what marketing teams must do to ensure AI makes their brand more valuable, not simply more visible.
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Where AI is having the greatest impact across brand and content workflows
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How to combine human creativity with AI-enabled production and personalisation
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How to protect brand voice, quality, originality and intellectual property
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What new skills, governance frameworks and operating models marketing teams require
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How to measure whether AI-generated content is improving brand and commercial outcomes
VC John
CMO, KPMG
12:40-1:55
NETWORKING LUNCH
1:55
Industry Focused Deep Dive Group Sessions
CHOOSE 1 SESSION MOST RELEVANT TO YOUR CURRENT CHALLENGES AND AREAS OF INTEREST
As one of the forum highlights, join your industry peers for these group discussions with your competitors and peers.
You’ll be discussing challenges and pressing topics that are most relevant to you and B2B marketers in your specific industry.
B2B MARKETING IN IT/TECH/SAAS/CLOUD
Track hosted by:
Build Your Day Zero Influence: The Hidden Rules of the AI-Enabled Tech Buyer
AI has raised the stakes without changing the rule: 94% of buyers now use LLMs during the buying process, and AI-generated shortlists have become a primary entry point. However, buyers bring the brands they already trust into that conversation. The day one shortlist isn’t built on day one, it’s revealed.
Drawing on INFUSE’s award-winning Outlook research, this session gets to how tech marketing leaders in APAC can reach buyers in the dark funnel and influence the shortlist before it forms – and what that means for how they set direction, invest, and lead their teams over the next few years.
Case study: Marketing Beyond Demand Generation
The Intelligence Engine Behind Revenue:
A practical case study of transforming the field marketing department into a revenue custodian driven by insights, intent signals, and how to use the knowledge to drive revenue.
Burzeen Vakil, Head of International Marketing APJ & EMEA, Elastic
Panel discussion
Speakers share what they’re doing now and where they’re taking their strategy into 2027.
- Brand vs. demand: why 53% of marketers are increasing brand investment, and how it earns consideration before evaluation begins.
- How brand authority and discoverability earn a place on the day one shortlist before buyers begin searching: 33% of buyers prioritize brands they already recognize.
- The changing buyer: shorter cycles (avg. 7 months) but larger buying groups (avg. 9 stakeholders, 35% struggling to align internally.)
- Closing the buying-group gap: 42% of marketers multi-thread, yet only 6% personalize by role with AI and 34% can’t identify their champions.
- Managing the global-to-region-to-local balance: keeping a consistent brand while earning trust in APAC’s more consensus-driven buying culture.
This highly interactive session will end with round table discussions diving deeper into these topics with your peers.
Joyce Moy
VP Marketing APJC, Cisco
Rashish Pandey
VP Marketing & Communications, APAC, Fortinet
Burzeen Vakil
Head of International Marketing APJ & EMEA, Elastic
Moderated by:
Mukesh Rajpurohit, VP APAC, INFUSE
B2B MARKETING IN BANKING/FINANCIAL SERVICES/INSURANCE
Track hosted by:
Panellists will share their main challenges and opportunities as B2B marketers in Banking, Financial Services & Insurance
During this interactive panel we’ll discuss:
- How B2B marketers in banking, financial services and insurance can create cut-through in highly competitive and highly regulated markets.
- Why differentiation is becoming harder when products, services and messaging increasingly look and sound the same.
- How AI-generated content is accelerating sameness, and what brands need to do to remain distinctive.
- How to connect brand investment to tangible commercial outcomes, including acquisition, customer growth and revenue influence.
- How marketers can shift from traditional awareness metrics to broader measures of business impact.
- The role of human-centred storytelling in building stronger B2B brand differentiation.
- How major sponsorships and events can move beyond awareness to drive relationships, leads, product launches and commercial opportunities.
- How financial services brands can use utility, value and customer experience to stand out in crowded markets.
- Why behavioural economics matters in BFSI marketing, especially when customers and buying committees do not make purely rational decisions.
- How to navigate long and complex B2B buying cycles involving procurement, internal approvals, risk reviews and budget friction.
- How to balance short-term ROI pressure with long-term brand building.
- How brand can become a strategic business platform for trust, culture, purpose and organisational transformation.
- The rise of “Finfluencers” and new channels
- Balancing CX and personalisation vs Data Protection
- Managing compliance, regulatory requirements and risk
- The impact of ESG, macro forces and marketing’s role in data governance, cybersecurity and privacy threats and breaches
- How marketing teams are approaching AI adoption and maturity inside BFSI organisations.
This highly interactive session will end with round table discussions diving deeper into these topics with your peers.
B2B MARKETING IN PROFESSIONAL SERVICES
Track hosted by:
I Fire-side chat with VC John, CMO, KPMG: Stakeholders (Partner) management when driving the marketing growth agenda
II Panellists will share their main challenges and opportunities as B2B marketers in professional services
- Stakeholders (Partner) management when driving the marketing growth agenda
- How commercial mindsets drive strategy, marketing and BD in Professional Services
- AI adoption and the use of AI agents in Professional Services – where are we at?
- Building brand and managing transformation, change and growth in professional services
- The importance of brand and positioning in an undifferentiated industry
- Engaging your people (engineers, lawyers, accountants etc) as your brand ambassadors and thought-leaders
- The “sales” and marketing alignment and relationship in professional services
- Advancing the marketing department as credible, growth and revenue driver for the business
- Connecting the dots between business strategy and marketing execution
- How do you lift your team to be strategic and commercially focused
- Client experience and leading through change
- Creating significant thought leadership – from conception, build, and leverage (or even monetize) more effectively
This highly interactive session will end with round table discussions diving deeper into these topics with your peers.
VC John
CMO, KPMG
Moderated by:
Rajhev Rajkumar, Director Strategic Growth, CAPITAL-e
B2B MARKETING IN MANUFACTURING, ENERGY, HEALTH & TRANSPORT
I Case study:
Global growth & GTM strategies, sales enablement & ABM programs for priority mining accounts, ensuring marketing contributes directly to revenue growth, customer retention, and strategic account development.
Sara Bezzan, Global Director Marketing, Maspro (Mining component manufacturing)
II Panellists will share their main challenges and opportunities as B2B marketers in Manufacturing, Energy, Health & Transport
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Strengthening the marketing team’s capabilities to articulate marketing’s strategic value and building trust with stakeholders
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Advancing the marketing department as credible, growth and revenue driver for the business
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Building brand and managing transformation, change and growth
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How do you lift your team to be strategic and commercially focused
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Adapting and leveraging Account Based Marketing (ABM)
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CX: who is driving it and what does it look like?
- Demand Generation, Events & Digital, getting the balance right
- Measurements & ROI and How do we measure ROI for retention and up/cross sell of existing customers
- The impact of ESG, macro forces and marketing’s role in data governance, cybersecurity and privacy threats and breaches
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B2B E-Commerce – Moving B2B Business throughout digital channels with B2B e-commerce
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Supplier marketing – Driving better engagement and fuelling marketing performance with suppliers
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Sales & marketing alignment with large national and regional sales teams
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AI adoption – where are we at?
This highly interactive session will end with round table discussions diving deeper into these topics with your peers.
Sameera Lal
Regional Marketing Director ASEAN, Korea, ANZ, GE Healthcare
Yingting Wang
Senior Director of Investor Relationships & Marketing, Singleron Biotechnologies
Marissa Metsa Virri
Regional Marketing Lead, Asia Pacific & Latin America, Cynosure Lutronic
Sara Bezzan
Global Director Marketing, Maspro
03:25
AFTERNOON COFFEE & NETWORKING BREAK
GROWTH
03:55
Jake Hird
EVP Strategy & Growth
Dentsu B2B
NEXT ERA OF B2B GROWTH WILL BE BUILT THROUGH IMAGINATION, NOT OPTIMISATION
B2B has spent the last decade becoming better at capturing demand.
The next decade will belong to companies that know how to shape it on their own terms.
We will share how B2B leaders can move beyond incremental optimisation to build demand through stronger points of view and experiences that create preference long before the buying cycle begins.
Session sponsored by:
FROM EVENT STRATEGY TO ENTERPRISE GROWTH
04:20
From Event Strategy to Enterprise Growth: Building a High-Performance Event-Led Growth Model
For B2B marketing teams, events represent one of the most significant investments —yet their contribution to growth is often fragmented, difficult to attribute and disconnected from the broader go-to-market strategy.
This panel will explore how our speakers are evolving events from isolated activities into integrated Event-Led Growth models that supports the entire customer lifecycle—from market creation and executive engagement to pipeline acceleration, customer expansion and long-term brand preference.
The session will examine how senior marketing leaders are:
- Balancing the event portfolio across C-suite roundtables, owned events, partner programs, tradeshow sponsorships, webinars and digital experiences—aligning each format to a distinct audience, buying stage and commercial objective.
- Integrate events into the broader go-to-market strategy, ensuring sales, marketing, customer success and leadership teams are aligned around the role events play in creating, progressing and expanding revenue opportunities.
- Connect event engagement data across channels and systems to build a more complete view of buying-group behaviour, account progression and customer intent before, during and after each experience.
- Strengthen ROI, attribution and investment decision-making by moving beyond registrations and attendance to measure event influence on pipeline, revenue, customer growth, brand preference and long-term commercial impact and roadmap for securing leadership buy-in
Attendees will leave with a strategic framework for building a more connected, balanced and accountable event portfolio—one that enables marketing leaders to demonstrate value, optimise investment and establish events as a sustained driver of enterprise growth.
Will Kataria
Country Head & Senior Director
Cvent Singapore
Session sponsored by:
THE FUTURE OF B2B MARKETING
04:45
Andy Lark
Renowned Technology Futurist, Specialist in AI, Global Marketer, Adjunct Professor & Founder, Group Lark
THE FUTURE OF B2B MARKETING
The Future of B2B Marketing: Surviving the AI Apocalypse – A Marketing Reboot for the Quantum Era
Buckle up for a provocative, unfiltered deep dive into the most significant inflection point marketing has faced since the birth of the internet. In this fast-paced, no-BS keynote, global tech advisor and seasoned CMO Andy Lark delivers a wake-up call on the urgency for AI acceleration for B2B marketers.
Drawing from his work with Silicon Valley AI startups, Fortune 500 CEOs, and global B2B CMOs, Andy argues that marketers are running out of time to adapt—or risk becoming obsolete. He debunks outdated models (funnels are dead), dismantles the myths around AI job creation, and showcases jaw-dropping examples of marketing productivity exploding 50X through intelligent agents and compounding platforms.
Equal parts exhilarating and unnerving, Andy’s session will challenge your assumptions, inspire action, and set your sights on thriving through transformation.
05:10pm
END OF DAY ONE & NETWORKING DRINKS
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We’re seeing a large skills gap today in B2B marketing, and it’s conferences like these that help fill that gap as this is the only place they’re going to get this kind of education`` - Carlos Hidalgo – Customer Experience Strategy, B2B Demand Generation and Change Management Expert (USA)
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Marketing stand for growth, or they stand for nothing - Thomas Barta