10 of the most thought-provoking quotes from the September MarTech Conference

The September MarTech Conference featured six panel discussions around the theme of data and AI and featured speakers from brand such as Adobe, Google, Expedia Group, Ford Motor Company, SAS, Snowflake and more.

All the September sessions are now available on demand at the link below. And another MarTech Conference is coming up on Nov. 4, where we’ll focus on AI and agents.

Here are 10 quotes from the September event that got us thinking when we heard them.

“There’s almost a need to have the corollary to employee reviews and one-on-ones where there’s actually accountability to what decisions these [AI agents] are making… Can they back up decisions that were made? Can they explain what they’re doing? And can we, as people who are now leading these virtual employees, do we feel comfortable with their level of work and the quality of it?”

— AJ Sedlak, marketing technology and governance lead, Ford Motor Company, in the session “How to Get Your Organization Aligned for the AI Age: Positioning Marketing, Ops and IT for Success.”

“If I’m in marketing and I’m not talking to my sales brethren, and I’m not talking to my service brethren and aligning on how we’re engaging customers and how we’re taking surveys, what are the right touchpoints, how are we aggregating our data — we’re making an enormous mistake and we’re propagating that siloed problem.”

— Sav Khetan, vice president, product marketing, Tealium, in the session: Building a Customer-Centric Culture with Data and AI.”

“We found through that research that 7% of organizations have a well-established governance framework, 5% have training around how to use AI, and 9% believe that they’re fully prepared to comply with regulations. So what does that leave us? That leaves us a major gap between usage and readiness.”

— Jonathan Moran, head of martech solutions marketing, SAS, in the session “How AI Decisioning Will Change Your Marketing.”

“I see organizations spend months and years building something in the hopes that it’s going to solve everything, but then overlook the small baby steps they need to take to fix one specific customer issue versus trying to have a whole transformation program that takes multiple years.”

— Jiaxi Zhu, head of analytics, Google, in the session “Building a Customer-Centric Culture with Data and AI.”

“Marketing teams own data acquisition consent. They own the integration of consent, the propagation of these signals to different systems. And so as we move into this new world, marketing needs to be at the same table with privacy and governance teams to make sure they have an appropriate level of ownership.”

— Alex Cash, director of strategy, consent & preferences, OneTrust, in the session “Navigating the Chaos of Consent, Compliance, and Customer Trust in an AI World.”

“One of the paradigms that’s emerging is this idea of agent-to-agent, where a consumer or a business could instruct an agent to go perform some task on its behalf. This introduces a whole new idea of how systems and communities and businesses talk to each other, and it’s gonna have potentially a really big impact on the marketing data that marketers are able to acquire.”

— Alex Cash, director of strategy, consent & preferences, OneTrust, in the session “Navigating the Chaos of Consent, Compliance, and Customer Trust in an AI World.”

“Tomorrow’s marketer needs to be part data scientist, part ethicist and part storyteller. In the next 18 months, marketing leaders will need to blend fluency in AI-driven tools, fluency in understanding ethical and legal implications, and fluency in human-centered storytelling.”

— Anthony Coppedge, agile marketing executive, Anthony Coppedge Consulting, in the session “Navigating the Chaos of Consent, Compliance, and Customer Trust in an AI World.”

“More tools don’t mean better marketing. The fact is, marketing and the martech stack isn’t really about having all of the tools — it’s about having the right tools.”

— Annette Franz, CEO, CX Journey Inc., in the session “Building a Customer-Centric Culture with Data and AI.”

“We’re entering a whole new age of leadership, not just a whole new age of AI.”

— Ali Schwanke, founder/marketing strategist, Simple Strat, in the session: “How AI Decisioning Will Change Your Marketing.”

“Because of AI, we can’t get away with cutting corners anymore — it forces us to finally practice the best standards we’ve been talking about all along.”

— Jessica Kao, director, B2B GTM transformation advisor, Adobe, in the session “How to Get Your Organization Aligned for the AI Age: Positioning Marketing, Ops and IT for Success.”

Listen to an audio overview of the September 2025 MarTech Conference

Use the player below to listen to an AI-generated overview of the conference sessions.

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