The Automation Conference That Put Humans In The Spotlight
Would you believe me if I shared that the most compelling argument for human connection came from a conference built around AI-powered marketing? Having attended Iterable's Activate Summit last week in LA, the irony was not lost on me.
When creativity, connection, and a attitude of reciprocity become fundamental traits that only people can supply, the tools stop being the point.
Before the keynote, and the first panel took the stage at Iterable's Activate Summit in Los Angeles, Priya Gill told me something that set the tone for everything that followed.
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She said she has a strong aversion to the phrase "customer obsessed." Too many companies use it while remaining primarily oriented around their own bottom line. Iterable, she said, doesn't have customers. Instead they have partners.
This relationship benefits both because each are genuinely invested in each other's success.
In her first 30 days as CMO, Gill spoke with leaders across the customer base, and every single one used the word partner unprompted.
This philosophy embedded itself in the conversations I had, and sessions I sat in on, taking note that the most advanced in the marketing industry, are rooting themselves firmly in connection and trust.
The Energy In The Room
Activate Summit is Iterable's flagship conference, and on paper it looks like most, between keynotes, breakout tracks, product announcements, and an evening offsite. The agenda ran three parallel tracks spanning strategy, applied, and peer roundtables across a full few days in Los Angeles.
The keynote with CEO Sam Allen, and CPO Nick Beil made a clear and substantive case for AI-managed marketing as a present-tense reality. Live data activation pulling from external systems in real time, AI agents optimizing journeys as they run, native RCS launching this summer to enable two-way mobile conversations without an app. The capability curve is real and it's steep.
And yet when I asked Gill what she actually wanted people to walk away with, she didn't mention a single product feature. She named two things. First, insights they can action on, and connection.
She was specific about the second one. Nobody has written the playbook yet. In the absence of a playbook, the most valuable resource available to a marketing leader is a peer who's slightly further along and willing to be honest about what worked and what didn't.
Connection is really underrated right now. The things you're going to learn the most from are your peers.
— Priya Gill, CMO, Iterable
She described her customer advisory board session from earlier that day. They presented research, shared what Iterable was trying, and asked what others were doing. The conversation ran long. Then a two-hour lunch followed, and even that wasn't enough time. People were still talking through everything they'd covered earlier.
That's not a data point about a conference. That's a signal about what leaders are actually hungry for right now.
Foundations Of Connection
I didn't plan to leave Activate thinking mostly about human connection. I expected to leave thinking about AI agents, data infrastructure, and the mechanics of personal relevance at scale.
And sure, these conversations happened and they were substantive. But the moments that kept resurfacing in the debrief conversations I had at the end of each day, were more off-the-cuff.
There was the a private lunch hosted by Forrester's Shar VanBoskirk, where twenty leaders sat around tables, working with crayons and craft paper to articulate their challenges in a playful way.
Next, a roundtable where candor shifted to personal anecdotes, and shared fiction novels. Then, there was a teppanyaki dinner at Maison Kasai where the conversation graduated beyond work, and retained the thread of connection throughout.
Lisa Bodell, who ran a session on simplicity, made the mechanism behind this explicit.
Organizations accumulate complexity when simplicity is overlooked.
And leaders, Gill shares, have to actively create the permission for their teams to subtract, because organizations left to themselves will always add.
The same principle applies to how leaders manage their own time and attention. The space for meaningful conversation doesn't appear by default. Someone has to build the space for it to happen deliberately.
Iterable was the conduit for connection. This is where the off-agenda programming delivered. And the fact that it landed harder than the main stage content is not a critique — it's the whole point. The tools and capabilities on the main stage are there to free up the time and cognitive space for the conversations happening at dinner. Automation exists to make room for the human.
A Marketing Paradox
There's a paradox built into this moment in marketing that I keep mulling over. AI has changed how content gets shipped. This may feel like an advantage until you sit with the fact that producing more stops being the differentiator. Brands spending right now on volume are largely competing to be ignored at greater scale.
What can't be produced at volume is trust. A genuine familiarity bridged by something shared that stems from relatability, and presence. People rely on insight from someone who has run the same experiment and is sharing what happened. Iterable released a report that shared how 70% of marketers acknowledge the need to change, and yet aren't making the changes because the risk feels too high.
Gill's advisory board session illustrated is that the risk feels smaller once you've had a head-to-head with a peer who's already been there. This type of conversation makes the unknown feel navigable.
Jay Livingston, former CMO of Shake Shack and a speaker at the summit, alongside Benoit Vatere, put the human dimension of in focus when I asked what's left for us as AI absorbs more of the volume work.
He believes in us doubling down on our authentic creativity, along with our moral compass.
We are building these artificial intelligence systems. The responsibility for training them on the right values, for making sure they work for us, sits with the people using the tools right now. Not in a future where the stakes are higher, but now, while we still have the most leverage over the outcome.
We have to be the moral compass for training the AIs. The time's now.
— Jay Livingston
Capturing The Value of Peer Connection
Priya Gill wanted people to leave Activate with insights they could act on, and connections they could return to. I left with both, and with something I hadn't quite anticipated which is a clearer sense of why those two things matter more right now than at almost any other moment in marketing.
Now, our focus becomes about readiness, trust, and the courage to change the programs that need changing
Closing that gap doesn't happen through better technology. It happens through the kind of conversation where someone two seats away tells you what they tried, what it cost them, and what they'd do differently. It happens in the rooms we build deliberately, and in the dinners that run too long.
An automation company spent two days making the case for its platform, by leaning into the value of in-person connection. The most lasting argument it made was for the irreplaceable value of putting people in a room and getting out of the way.
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