What I’m hoping to take away from The MarTech Summit Madrid

By Andrew Poole - Specialist Marketing Consultant - Sojourn Solutions Next week I’ll be attending The MarTech Summit Madrid, taking place on 19 May 2026 at VP Plaza España Design. And, judging by the agenda, it looks like exactly the kind of event Marketing Operations needs right now: Less theoretical hand-waving, more practical conversation about how marketing teams are actually dealing with AI, data, customer experience, automation, sales alignment, and trust.  

Because let’s be honest, MarTech has reached that slightly awkward stage where everyone is talking about transformation, but a lot of teams are still wrestling with the basics: Fragmented data, bloated stacks, manual campaign processes, unclear ownership, and the terrifying sentence, “we’ve started using AI in the workflow.”

Lovely. What could possibly go wrong?

That’s why I’m looking forward to the event. Not just for the sessions themselves, but for the conversations around them. The best takeaways from events like this are rarely just what appears on a slide. They’re the hallway chats, the raised eyebrows, the “we’re seeing that too” moments, and the occasional brutal truth from someone who has already made the mistake you were about to make.

AI is everywhere now. The question is whether it’s useful, safe, and governed.

Unsurprisingly, AI runs through a lot of the Madrid agenda. There are sessions on agentic AI, AI-powered customer engagement, AI in sales enablement, AI-driven creativity, and AI accountability. That in itself says something important: AI has moved beyond the experimental corner of marketing. It is now being discussed as part of the operating model.  

That shift matters.

For Marketing Operations teams, AI is not just a shiny productivity tool. It is starting to touch campaign planning, content production, personalisation, sales enablement, data activation, customer journeys, and decision-making. The upside is obvious: Faster delivery, better use of customer data, more scalable execution, and fewer humans spending their lives checking whether someone used the correct UTM parameter for the 947th time.

But the risk is just as obvious, at least to anyone who has ever worked near a MAP, CRM, or customer database.

AI connected to marketing systems is not harmless. It can make poor recommendations. It can expose sensitive data. It can reinforce broken processes. It can automate bad decisions at scale. And, without the right guardrails, it can turn “we saved time” into “who approved that?” very quickly.

So one of the big things I’ll be listening for is how seriously brands are treating AI governance. Not in the vague “we need a policy” sense, but in the practical sense: Who owns AI use inside Marketing Operations? What can AI access? What can it change? What needs approval? What gets logged? What happens when it gets something wrong?

The event’s session on AI & Accountability, focused on building trust while innovating with AI, looks particularly relevant here, especially as it includes governance, ethical standards, transparency, and evolving regulation as discussion points.  

That’s where the conversation needs to go. Not “should we use AI?” That ship has sailed, docked, unloaded, and is now selling merchandise. The better question is: How do we use AI without quietly building a risk machine inside the marketing stack?

The MarTech stack is becoming an operating system, not a toolbox.

Another theme I’m interested in is the growing overlap between customer experience, digital experience, data, and Marketing Operations.

The agenda opens with a panel on leveraging MarTech to deliver unified, personalised customer journeys, with discussion points around real-time, data-driven personalisation, seamless omnichannel interactions, and synchronising digital and customer experience efforts.  

That sounds like a customer experience conversation. But really, it’s an operating model conversation.

Because you cannot deliver joined-up customer journeys with disconnected teams, unclear data ownership, and platforms held together with duct tape, hope, and one person called Sandra who knows where the campaign naming convention document lives.

Personalisation at scale sounds glamorous. The reality behind it is much less glamorous: Data structure, field governance, consent management, segmentation logic, lifecycle definitions, platform integration, QA, reporting, and documentation.

In other words: Marketing Operations.

That’s why I’ll be looking for how different brands are approaching the mechanics behind the experience. It’s easy to talk about seamless journeys. It’s harder to build the operational conditions that make them possible.

The strongest marketing teams now understand that MarTech is not a collection of tools. It is infrastructure. And infrastructure needs ownership, maintenance, standards, and a clear link to commercial outcomes.

Customer data is still the foundation. AI has just made the cracks more visible.

There is also a session on orchestrating customer engagement at scale, focused on unifying customer data, activating real-time insights, and balancing automation with human strategy.  

That balance is going to be increasingly important.

AI does not magically fix weak data. If anything, it exposes it faster. Poor data quality, duplicate records, inconsistent lifecycle stages, vague consent rules, and incomplete customer views all become more dangerous when AI starts using them to generate recommendations, trigger actions, or personalise experiences.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions around AI in marketing: That you can bolt it onto a messy operation and somehow leapfrog the hard work.

You can’t.

Well, technically you can. But then you have simply created faster chaos.

Congratulations, your disaster now has automation.

The companies that get the most from AI are the ones with the cleanest foundations: Aligned processes, trusted data, properly integrated systems, and clear decision rights. That may sound boring, but boring is often where the money is.

Especially in Marketing Operations.

I’ll be interested to hear how mature teams are approaching this: Whether they are investing in data readiness before AI adoption, how they are measuring data quality, and whether they are treating AI as a strategic layer rather than another isolated tool.

The human side of MarTech might be the most important bit.

One session that stands out is the fireside chat on building digitally-ready, future-fit teams for the next era of work, which includes digital upskilling, critical competencies, and how teams can embrace AI meaningfully.  

This is a conversation marketing leaders need to have more honestly.

The future of MarTech is not just about better platforms. It is about whether teams are structured, skilled, and supported enough to use them well.

Most Marketing Operations teams are already stretched. They are expected to manage platforms, support campaigns, fix reporting, troubleshoot integrations, keep data clean, support sales, explain attribution, govern consent, handle new tech, and now somehow become AI adoption specialists on top.

That is not a skills gap. That is an expectations problem.

So I’ll be listening for how organisations are actually preparing their teams. Are they creating new roles? Upskilling existing teams? Redefining Marketing Operations as a strategic function? Or just telling everyone to “embrace AI” and hoping nobody asks for budget?

Because AI adoption without organisational change is just theatre. Potentially expensive theatre. With a vendor-branded lanyard.

Sales and Marketing alignment still matters. Sorry.

There is also a late-afternoon panel on integrating Sales and Marketing across the customer lifecycle, with discussion points around financial return, pipeline acceleration, collaboration, training, and what foundational steps leaders would prioritise if starting again.  

This is another area where I’m hoping for practical insight.

Sales and Marketing alignment has been discussed for years, often with the emotional intensity of two departments trapped in a group project neither of them asked for. But the arrival of AI, more complex buying journeys, and more integrated customer data makes alignment even more important.

If marketing is using AI to prioritise accounts, personalise campaigns, generate insights, or shape nurture journeys, sales needs to trust the logic behind those decisions. If sales does not trust the data, the scoring, the segmentation, or the handoff process, AI will not solve alignment. It will just create a more sophisticated argument.

The real opportunity is to use MarTech, data, and AI to create better shared visibility across the customer lifecycle. Not more dashboards nobody opens. Not another MQL definition that collapses under scrutiny. Actual operational alignment: Shared signals, shared definitions, shared accountability, and shared understanding of what is working.

That is where Marketing Operations can play a major strategic role.

What I’m really hoping to bring back

For me, the value of attending The MarTech Summit Madrid is not just hearing what vendors, brands, and leaders think is coming next. It is understanding what is already happening inside marketing teams now.

I’m hoping to come away with a clearer view of:

• How brands are moving from AI experimentation to AI governance.

• How marketing teams are connecting customer experience, data, automation, and operations.

• Where organisations are investing in skills, structure, and operating models.

• How mature teams are measuring MarTech’s contribution to growth.

And, perhaps most importantly, where the gap still exists between what marketing technology promises and what teams are actually able to deliver.

Because that gap is where the real work sits.

The MarTech conversation has become bigger than platforms. It is now about how marketing functions operate, how decisions are made, how customer data is trusted, how AI is controlled, and how teams turn technology into measurable business value.

That is exactly the kind of conversation Marketing Operations should be leading.

So yes, I’m looking forward to the event. The agenda is packed, the themes are timely, and the conversations should be useful.

And if I come back with a notebook full of ideas, a few uncomfortable truths, and at least one example of someone pretending their data is “almost there,” then frankly, it will have been time well spent.

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Andrew Poole is a Specialist Marketing Consultant at Sojourn Solutions, where he spends much of his time thinking about Marketing Operations, MarTech, AI governance, and why perfectly good marketing teams are still being held hostage by broken processes and suspicious spreadsheets.