The Personalisation Paradox
Delivering AI Powered Relevance Without Intrusion
3 - 4 November 2026 | Hilton Kensington, London
Conference Day One - Tuesday 3rd November
8:30 am - 9:00 am
WELCOME, REGISTRATION AND MORNING NETWORKING
9:00 am - 9:10 am
WELCOME ADDRESS
9:10 am - 9:30 am
SETTING THE CONFERENCE AGENDA
Gianfranco Cuzziol -
CRM and Personalisation,
Advisor
Welcome to the Marketing Personalisation Summit.
As you move through the two-day agenda, our goal is simple: that every delegate leaves with clarity, confidence, and three powerful takeaways you can apply immediately within your organisation. Throughout the discussions and shared experiences, we encourage you to reflect on four essential questions:
- What does personalisation mean today?
- What is the role of AI and technology in your approach to personalisation?
- What are the key components required to successfully deliver personalisation?
- How do you measure the impact of personalisation?
By the end of the conference, you won't just have heard new ideas, you'll be able to answer these questions with purpose and direction.
9:30 am - 10:00 am
FIRESIDE CHAT: What is Personalisation Today?
Vinay Parmar -
Former Chief Customer Experience Officer,
National Express
Hazem El Taha - Global Head of MarTech, HSBC.
Andy Sage - Strategic Propositions & Partnership Lead Director, E.ON Next
Flooded inboxes. Endless social feeds. Mass marketing at scale.
For years, brands have competed for attention by being louder, faster, and more frequent. But today, customers aren't asking for more. They're asking for less. Less noise, less irrelevance, less intrusion. In its place, they want something far harder to deliver, experiences that feel thoughtful and genuinely personal. We've moved far beyond simply dropping a first name into an email subject line and calling it personalisation. Today's landscape is defined by AI-driven ecosystems, evolving privacy regulation, and a generation raised on algorithms that anticipate their needs in real time.
And yet, there's a clear tension. Nearly 50% of Gen Z consumers say they're less likely to buy from brands that deliver impersonal experiences. But only a 1/3 trust those same brands with their data. At the same time, buying behaviour has been fundamentally reshaped. Influence is no longer top-down, it's social, and often led by creators who feel more relatable than brands ever have. Platforms like TikTok haven't just introduced new channels; they've redefined expectations.
This is a pivotal moment. Not just for marketing teams, but for how brands build relationships in a world where attention is scarce, trust is fragile, and expectations are higher than ever.
So it raises an important question: In a world of AI agents, constrained data, and shifting trust, what does personalisation actually mean today?
In this opening session, we'll explore how personalisation is being redefined through three critical lenses, which we explore throughout the next two days:
- AI Ethics & the Rise of the Agentic Shopper: Explore moving beyond the hype to understand how to responsibly adapt as AI begins to act on behalf of consumers.
- Data as the Foundation of Personalisation: Shifting from fragmented, siloed data to connected, real-time ecosystems that enable seamless and meaningful customer experiences.
- Relevance Over Hyper-Personalisation: Recognising the tipping point where personalisation becomes intrusive and focusing instead on delivering value at the right moment.
10:00 am - 10:30 am
PANEL DISCUSSION: Scaling Technology-Driven Personalisation Across the Enterprise
Suraj Nagaraj -
Head of Product - Loyalty, Personalisation, Customer Experience,
Tesco
Vinay Parmar - Former Chief Customer Experience Officer, National Express
Generic campaigns: 1–3% conversion. AI-powered personalisation: 8–18%. But the real opportunity isn't better product recommendations. It's the shift from "which product should we sell this customer?" to "what does this customer need, and when?"
Personalisation at scale goes far beyond simply adding a first name to an email or sending a birthday offer. Today's AI-driven personalisation is about delivering consistent, intelligent, and individualised experiences across the entire customer journey, automatically adapting content, timing and messaging. As customer expectations continue to rise, scalable personalisation has become a business imperative as when executed effectively it can significantly increase customer loyalty, engagement and lifetime value.
Yet despite major investment in data platforms, AI technologies, and customer engagement tools, many organisations still struggle to scale beyond isolated pilots or limited marketing use cases. A significant gap remains between those organisations successfully operationalising AI-driven personalisation and those unable to move beyond ambition into execution.
In this session, we will explore the real business value of AI-driven personalisation at scale, the common barriers organisations face, and the practical steps required to overcome them. The discussion will examine the critical challenges preventing scalable execution, including fragmented data ecosystems, organisational silos, legacy infrastructure, governance and privacy concerns and the difficulty of aligning personalisation initiatives with wider business objectives.
Key Discussion Points Include:
- Why AI-driven personalisation at scale is now a strategic business priority
- How leading organisations are scaling personalisation across the enterprise
- Practical strategies for overcoming operational and technological barriers
10:30 am - 11:00 am
PANEL DISCUSSION: From Vision to Reality - Overcoming Organisational Barriers to Personalisation
Vinay Parmar -
Former Chief Customer Experience Officer,
National Express
Virginie Faucon - Global Chief Marketing Officer, AXA Health International
Marketing teams aspire to deliver seamless, personalised experiences that build loyalty, increase customer value, and drive repeat purchase. Yet for many organisations, there remains a significant gap between the ambition of personalisation and the reality of delivering it effectively.
So how can brands create meaningful, human experiences without making customers feel like just another number?
In this candid panel discussion, industry leaders will explore what it really takes to achieve personalisation with purpose. Together, they'll unpack the common barriers holding organisations back and share practical advice on how to overcome them to make personalisation a core part of your marketing strategy.
Challenges discussed include:
- Breaking down non-unified customer data
- Navigating the loss of third-party data
- Managing complex technology integrations
- Ensuring personalisation doesn't just sit with a siloed marketing team
11:00 am - 11:30 am
MORNING REFESHMENT BREAK
11:30 am - 12:00 pm
CASE STUDY: From Next Best Action to Next Best Experience: Building the Business Case for True 1:1 Personalisation
Erdo Dwiputra Rakasiwi -
Head of Global CRM,
Philip Morris International
For more than a decade, marketers have talked about one-to-one personalisation. Yet for most organisations, personalisation remains stuck in static segments, manual rules and broad audience cohorts.
At Philip Morris International, Erdo Dwiputra Rakasiwi has spent the last three and a half years challenging that reality. Operating at the intersection of CRM strategy, AI personalisation and digital products, he has led the deployment of an AI-powered Next Best Action engine. The impact has been significant as Philip Morris achieved a twofold improvement in consumer conversion rates, demonstrating how AI can move customer engagement beyond campaign management and into intelligent decision-making.
But according to Erdo, this is only the beginning.
In this candid case study, he shares the realities of implementing personalisation at scale inside a global FMCG organisation and explore Philip Morris' next ambition of securing organisational buy-in and investment to evolve from Next Best Action to fully scaled 1:1 personalisation powered by AI.
Attendees will learn:
- How Philip Morris deployed an AI-powered Next Best Action engine and achieved a 2x improvement in conversion performance.
- What it takes organisationally to operationalise AI-driven personalisation inside a global enterprise.
- How AI is making true one-to-one content creation commercially viable for the first time.
- Strategies for building executive buy-in and securing investment for AI-driven personalisation programmes.
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
ROUNDTABLE DISCUSSION GROUPS
Pull up a chair and join one of our interactive roundtable discussions for an open, honest, and energetic exchange of ideas with fellow attendees. Choose the topic that matters most to you, join the conversation, and share challenges, successes, tips, and experiences.
After 40 minutes of lively discussion, each table will deliver a quick-fire recap of the biggest insights, boldest ideas, and key conclusions from their session
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
GROUP A: The Privacy Trade-Off - How Far Should Brands Go in Using Personal Data to Maximise Relevance?
Exploring whether true personalisation is fundamentally at odds with privacy and whether most brands are already pushing beyond what customers would knowingly accept.
12:00 pm - 1:45 pm
GROUP B: Are Brands Misreading What Customers Actually Value?
Challenging the assumption that customers want deeper personalisation, versus simpler experiences, better pricing, or basic convenience.
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
GROUP C: Hyper-Personalisation and the Revenue Myth: Driving Growth or Just Redistributing Demand?
Debating whether advanced personalisation genuinely creates incremental value or simply shifts purchases that would have happened anyway.
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
GROUP D: Nudging or Manipulating? The Uncomfortable Ethics of Behavioural Personalisation
Unpacking where influence becomes exploitation, and whether brands are designing experiences to serve customers or to control them.
12:00 pm - 1:30 pm
GROUP E: When AI Gets It Wrong - The Accountability Gap in Automated Personalisation
Tom Newbury -
Director, CRM,
Ticketmaster
Interrogating who takes responsibility when algorithms misfire, create bias, or damage customer trust and whether current governance models are fit for purpose.
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
GROUP F: The Personalisation Framework Playbook
Many brands invest in personalisation campaigns before establishing the right strategic foundations. Join this discussion to unpack what makes a successful personalisation framework, and why omnichannel delivery and real-time data are critical to creating seamless, relevant experiences across web, mobile, email, and beyond.
1:00 pm - 2:00 pm
NETWORKING LUNCH
2:00 pm - 2:30 pm
CASE STUDY: Laying the Foundations for Hyper-Personalisation: Leveraging Your Customer Data and MarTech to Ensure No Signal is Missed
Benjamin Cheadle -
Head of Customer and Marketing Analytics,
JLR
Data challenges often torment customer-facing teams. With the rapid advancements in AI, overcoming these data hurdles has become more urgent than ever. To truly unlock the potential of hyper-personalisation, businesses must centralise data collection and move beyond siloed approaches.
Join this session to learn how JLR is consolidating customer data from various sources to create a unified customer view. This comprehensive approach enables a deeper understanding of customer behavior, preferences, and needs, leading to significantly more effective personalisation strategies.
The team from JLR will discuss how historically, personalisation has been viewed through a narrow lens, primarily using data collected within marketing-led domains. However, true hyper-personalisation demands a broader perspective. This session will explore how to leverage data across the entire commercial domain and integrate it from broader enterprise sources to drive exceptional personalised experiences and enhance decision-making.
Key Discussion Points:
- Overcoming Data Silos: Discover practical tactics for unifying customer data across diverse teams, tools, and channels, ensuring a comprehensive 360-degree customer view.
- Operationalising Personalisation: Learn how to transform data insights into real-time, personalised experiences across both digital and physical touchpoints.
- Measuring Success and ROI: Explore key performance indicators for proving the tangible value of data integration in your customer experience initiatives.
2:30 pm - 3:00 pm
INTERACTIVE POLLING SESSION
We pause the agenda to reconnect as a community and reflect on the key insights and takeaways from the conference so far. Through a series of quick-fire interactive questions, attendees will have the opportunity to benchmark where they are in their personalisation journey compared to peers across the room and identify common challenges and priorities.
This session also provides an opportunity for delegates to post questions directly to the audience encouraging open discussion and peer-to-peer learning.
3:00 pm - 3:30 pm
CASE STUDY: Building the Foundations for Meaningful Personalisation
Janis Thomas -
Chief Marketing Officer,
Clothes Doctor
Personalisation has become one of marketing's most talked-about strategies but are brands moving too quickly into tactics without truly understanding the customer behind the click?
In this session, Janis Thomas, CMO at Clothes Doctor, explores why the foundations of successful personalisation are built long before a customer lands on your website or enters a store. Drawing on practical ecommerce experience, Janis will share how to uncover the different experiences customers want to feel, how to gather and connect insight beyond simple behavioural data, and how to design personalisation strategies that feel human rather than invasive which are grounded in strong strategic foundations.
The session will also examine how businesses can move beyond surface-level tactics to build the internal structures, culture, and operational processes required to deliver truly customer-centric experiences at scale.
Key Discussion Points Include:
- Moving beyond behavioural tracking to collect meaningful customer insight that enables effective personalisation
- Breaking down internal silos and operationalising customer personas across internal teams and channels
- Using tools such as heatmaps, journey analysis, and customer research to better understand intent and friction points
Creating personalisation that feels valuable rather than invasive by recognising that the customer journey begins before the website experience
3:30 pm - 4:00 pm
AFTERNOON REFRESHMENT BREAK
4:00 pm - 4:30 pm
PANEL DISCUSSION: Trust, Control, and Transparency in Personalisation
David Balko -
Chief Marketing Officer,
Wren Kitchens
As personalisation becomes more powerful, it also becomes more visible and more sensitive.
Customers today understand that their data is being used to shape experiences. As a result, the question is no longer whether brands personalise, but how responsibly they do it. In this environment, trust has become the defining currency of customer relationships.
This panel explores a critical tension at the heart of modern marketing: how brands can deliver highly relevant, AI-driven personalisation while maintaining transparency, consent, and control. Far from being a constraint, ethical personalisation is emerging as a competitive advantage. Brands that are open about data usage, consistent in communication, and honest in their value exchange will not only improve conversion, they will build long-term loyalty and customer advocacy.
During this discussion we explore how to achieve transparent personalisation which builds customer trust, focusing on:
- Be Honest About Data Usage: Explore how brands can clearly communicate what data is collected, how it is used, and what value the customer receives in return.
- Communicate Clearly and Consistently: Discuss how consistent communication across channels reinforces credibility in personalised experiences.
- Encourage Feedback: Discover how giving customers visibility, choice, and control over their personalisation settings strengthens trust and improves the underlying data quality driving AI systems.
4:30 pm - 5:00 pm
CASE STUDY: From Basket to Boarding Pass: How Personalisation Differs Between Retail and Travel
Simone Cesco -
Head of Loyalty Launch,
TUI
With more than 20 years of experience in Brand, Loyalty, CRM and Customer engagement, Simone Cesco has built and delivered personalisation strategies across two very different sectors.
During a 13-year career at Nectar and Sainsbury's, Simone played a key role in the evolution of Nectar into one of the UK's leading digital loyalty programmes, helping shape its customer engagement, personalisation and member value strategy. He contributed to major initiatives including member pricing and personalised pricing propositions designed to deliver more relevant experiences for customers.
Today, Simone is leading loyalty rollout activities across TUI's international markets. Moving from grocery retail to travel has given him a unique perspective on how personalisation strategies need to adapt to different customer behaviours, purchase cycles and data environments.
In this session, Simone will explore what marketers can learn from applying personalisation principles across both grocery retail and travel, highlighting the opportunities and challenges of creating relevance at scale.
Attendees will gain practical insight into:
- Why grocery retail provides a unique environment for personalisation, with frequent customer interactions and rich behavioural data.
- How personalised pricing and targeted rewards can improve the relevance and customer engagement.
- Why travel presents a fundamentally different personalisation challenge.
- The evolving role of AI, advanced analytics and emerging agentic experiences in delivering relevance at scale.
- What marketers can learn when transferring personalisation strategies across industries.
5:00 pm - 5:30 pm
CLOSING PANEL DISCUSSION: Real-Time Personalisation: The Next Frontier in Marketing?
Nessa O’Gorman -
Director, Product Management,
Expedia
In an era of digital saturation, "real-time" has evolved from a competitive advantage to a baseline customer expectation. However, achieving true real-time personalisation requires more than just fast technology; it demands the seamless orchestration of data collection and creative execution, delivered at the speed of a click.
This panel brings together industry pioneers who have moved beyond the pilot phase to achieve real time personalisation at scale. Our speakers will share stories from the trenches of implementation, discussing how they navigated technical friction and strategic hurdles.
Attendees will walk away with a definitive roadmap for shifting from reactive to predictive marketing as our experts deconstruct the three primary barriers to real-time success:
- Fixing the Data Foundation: Making sure your systems talk to each other so you can identify your customers in real-time
- The Privacy-Personalisation Paradox: Navigating stringent 2026 global privacy standards while delivering the hyper-tailored experiences customers crave.
- The "Contextual vs. Creepy" Framework: Establishing "human-centric" logic within your AI to ensure interactions feel like a helpful rather than an intrusive shadow.
