Conference Agenda

Welcome: Built to Last Starts Now

Keynote

We’ve spent the last four months building — virtual sessions, new tools, new thinking. Today we find out what sticks. This isn’t the start of the AI conversation, it’s the reckoning. The businesses built to last aren’t the ones that had the right technology. They’re the ones that made the right decisions. This is where we start making them.

Fresh Eyes: What the Floor Tells Us About Where Print Is Heading

Moderated Roundtable

Every person in this room just spent a day on the most important show floor in the industry. This session turns what you saw into signal. Before the show, every attendee receives a one-page “passport” with five categories to find on the floor: new substrate, automation technology, AI application, workflow tool, and one wildcard. A pre-selected group commits in advance to share something specific. The pre-show survey gives facilitators signal before the first person walks in.

• What technologies and capabilities have changed since last year’s show
• Where the automation pressure is actually coming from
• AI on the floor — who’s serious and what does it look like in practice
• What the floor is not showing you that you should be paying attention to

FORMAT: Pre-show passport card distributed to all attendees + pre-assigned presenters committed to share + pre-show survey informs facilitators

The Marketing Machine: How to Be Found Before the Conversation Starts

Presentation

The way buyers discover, evaluate, and choose vendors has fundamentally changed. The businesses built to last have marketing that works while they sleep — content, digital presence, and reputation that puts them in consideration before a conversation ever starts.

• How buyers are finding and vetting vendors before they ever make contact
• What Google AI Overviews are doing to your traffic — and what to do about it
• Building marketing as a business capability, not a series of one-off events
• AI tools that are changing what small marketing teams can actually do
• What content your buyers are looking for that you should have on your website

The Intelligence Advantage: AI as a Leadership Decision

Keynote

After four months of virtual sessions and a day on the show floor, the question has shifted. It’s no longer whether AI matters — it’s what kind of leader you’re going to be about it. This session brings the strategic thinking framework that moves owners from experimenting to deciding.

• Why AI adoption fails when it starts in IT instead of the corner office
• The decisions that define how AI lands in your business — governance, data, culture
• What the businesses pulling away from the field are doing differently right now
• How to evaluate AI opportunities using the DRIVE framework

Protecting What You Know: Turning Institutional Knowledge Into Competitive Advantage

Moderated Panel

The companies built to last don’t let their best thinking walk out the door when people leave or roles change. This session is about capturing, systematizing, and deploying what your business knows — and how AI has changed what’s possible here in ways that weren’t available even two years ago.

• How institutional knowledge becomes a liability when it only lives in people’s heads
• Practical approaches to capturing and systematizing what your business knows
• Where AI creates real leverage in knowledge management — and where it doesn’t
• Turning your operational knowledge into a competitive moat

FORMAT: Panel discussion with facilitated member input

The Breaking Point

Moderated Session

Every business that’s built to last had to break something first — a process, an assumption, a way of operating that worked until it didn’t. This session names it. Members identify what’s breaking in their business right now: margin, workflow, people, leadership, technology. The frame isn’t failure — it’s diagnosis. You can’t fix what you won’t name.

• What’s actually breaking in your business right now — say it out loud
• The difference between a breaking point and a business in decline
• Where AI can absorb pressure — and where it can’t replace a leadership decision
• How peer companies in this room are working through similar inflection points

FORMAT: Facilitated member discussion

Built to Last: The DRIVE Session

Workshop

Define. Review. Identify. Validate. Execute. Two days of honest conversation about growth, margin, AI, and pressure — now we get specific. The DRIVE framework is applied to real business problems from this room. Two live case studies show exactly how it works in practice: AI analysis of sales team performance and AI analysis of customer accounts — both done from a simple spreadsheet, no system integrations required. Then every attendee identifies their own one project to take home.

• DRIVE framework walkthrough with two live case studies from the room
• Case study 1: AI analysis of sales team performance using a spreadsheet export
• Case study 2: AI analysis of customer accounts — white space, trending down, expansion opportunities
• Individual work: every attendee identifies the one problem they want to fix and applies the framework to it

FORMAT: Framework presentation + two live case studies + individual application + written commitments collected for follow-up

Friday Kickoff

Kickoff

Short. Sets the room for the final push. What we built yesterday, what we do with it today.

The Intelligence Advantage: Using AI to Create Better Sales Conversations

Presentation

The companies that win the next decade won’t use AI to replace salespeople. They’ll use it to help their teams learn faster, uncover opportunities sooner, and create more value in every customer conversation. This session demonstrates how owners and sales teams can use AI to research markets and accounts, identify customer challenges, uncover growth opportunities, and develop more relevant outreach. By dramatically reducing research and planning time, AI helps sellers spend less time gathering information and more time understanding buyers, asking better questions, and shortening the path to a decision.

• Build an AI-powered research process that helps sellers understand markets, accounts, challenges, and opportunities in a fraction of the time
• Identify customer challenges, administrative drag, and growth opportunities before the first conversation
• Develop insight-driven outreach and prospecting cadences that earn engagement by being relevant
• Uncover expansion opportunities within existing accounts and identify problems buyers may not recognize
• Use AI to increase sales productivity by reducing research and planning time while improving the quality of customer conversations

The Decade Ahead: Where Are You Building To?

Moderated Discussion

Not a prediction session. A positioning session. What does the business that wins the next ten years actually look like — and are you building toward it? Member-driven conversation grounded in two days of honest work.

• What’s changing in the next decade that you cannot ignore
• Where the real competitive separation will come from
• The AI-enabled business in 2030 — what does it look like from the inside
• Are you building to sell, to scale, or to last — and does your strategy match?

I’m Building This

Closing

Every member states their DRIVE commitment out loud. Not what you’re thinking about. Not what you’re hoping for. What you’re building — specific, starting Monday.

FORMAT: Standing share-outs, one per company.