Tickets Available! CMX Summit - April 30 & May 1, 2026 - RedWood City, CA
Community has long been celebrated for connection and belonging- but connection alone doesn't drive growth. Leaders don't fund vibes; they fund impact. In this keynote, Suzanne Shaw introduces The Community Signal Engine - a bold framework that turns engagement into intelligence, intelligence into alignment, and alignment into measurable growth.
Drawing from experience across sales, product, operations, and GTM leadership, she reveals how Al can uncover the hidden signals inside community conversations - surfacing expansion opportunities, predicting retention risk, and accelerating innovation.
This session challenges leaders to rethink community not as a support function, but as a strategic growth engine. You'll walk away with:
We've been debating how to "prove community ROI" for years - and yet many leaders still find themselves justifying their existence.
That's not a measurement problem. It's a positioning problem. In this candid hot take, DeMario Bell challenges the industry to stop treating community like a program and start building it as GTM infrastructure.
He'll share why so many roles get stuck in executor mode, how to create healthy strategic tension with leadership, and what it actually takes to operate as an advisor - not just an operator.
Drawing from real experience aligning community to executive priorities at scale, this session offers a practical blueprint for moving from experiment to influence.
If you've ever felt the tension between being asked to execute and wanting to influence, this conversation is for you.
Community advocacy is earned media. We've just been too humble to say it out loud.
As the line between social and community keeps blurring, advocates are out here driving reach, shaping brand perception, and building trust that paid teams are spending millions trying to replicate - and we're reporting it in Slack.
This session is a direct challenge to community practitioners to stop translating their results into feel-good metrics and start speaking the language that actually moves budgets and resources. Your program is already doing the work. The question is whether leadership can see it.
In 2023, Ed started with scrappy meetups and free pizza just to get people in the room. Fast forward 18 months: 86 events, 2K+ attendees, and $3M in pipeline influence - all while being a team of one.
This talk breaks down the exact playbook Ed used to transform community events from a "nice-to-have" into a scalable revenue engine generating over $50 for every dollar invested.
You'll learn Ed's processes for Al-powered event operations, how he curates VIP experiences that convert, and the tracking framework that finally proved community ROI to the executive team.
Whether you're just starting out or scaling your program, you'll leave with actionable tactics to turn your community into your company's most efficient growth channel.
Al is changing how content is discovered, shared, and valued, but what does that mean for community leaders? This panel dives into actionable strategies for making your community and its members more discoverable in an Al-driven world.
Learn what to focus on, from content structuring to engagement tactics, to ensure your community's impact and influence extend far beyond your platform.
Always-on communities are built for access. Cohort-based programs are built for outcomes. The problem is most communities are designed for the first, while being asked to deliver the second.
After building and scaling global community programs and training hundreds of companies, including Canva and Google, Paz Pisarski has seen a consistent pattern: always-on communities are great at providing content, but cohort-based programs are where transformation happens at scale.
When you introduce a defined start and end date, shared goals, and a group of humans moving through the same experience together, something shifts. Friendships deepen. Accountability increases. Results become measurable.
The good news? You don't have to choose one or the other. The most impactful community programs borrow the best bits of both. If you want to drive real ROI, behaviour change, and meaningful outcomes from your existing community, this session will give you a practical framework to steal the best tactics from cohort models and apply them to what you're already doing.
In a market where competitors can replicate your features, match your pricing, and outspend your ads, community is often positioned as the ultimate differentiator. But most community programs aren’t actually defensible, because they’re not designed to be.
In this hot take, Monica Rodriguez challenges community leaders to rethink how they build and operationalize their programs. Drawing from her experience evolving HoneyBook’s Pros program, she explores why many communities fail to create real competitive advantage, what it takes to turn members into true partners, and how leading organizations are building ecosystems that competitors can’t replicate.
Attendees will leave with a clearer understanding of what makes a community truly defensible, and what needs to change to achieve that.
Collaborative virtual events, user groups, and meetups are so back. In this hands-on workshop, you’ll gain practical experience constructing a community events strategy.
Brian will guide you through frameworks, processes, and learnings to develop successful, scalable, and sustainable programs. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have the beginnings of a strategy to deliver value to your community and your organization.
Key Outcomes:
Enterprise communities have long followed a familiar playbook - but in today's fast-moving digital landscape, is that model still working?
Join leading community professionals as they argue the merits and limitations of traditional approaches, explore emerging strategies, and debate how community programs must evolve to drive real business impact and member value in 2026 and beyond.
The tech industry taught us that frictionless equals good. But what if that's exactly what's killing our communities?
This hot take challenges the default assumption that we should make everything easy for our members.
Drawing on research from Oxford anthropologist Tamas David- Barrett and a real case study from MUTUO's work with a wellness brand in Mexico, Santiago will show how intentionally adding friction led to 1,000% more engagement and transformed a dead community into a thriving one.
You'll leave with a powerful question to ask yourself about your own community.
Most companies still think community managers are just engagement drivers or moderators. They’re wrong. The best community managers operate like Renaissance minds: connecting marketing, product, sales, and customer success to turn community into a strategic asset.
In this talk, Avi will share real examples from building communities at a large startup, a company Google acquired for $32 billion, and in her current role at Orchid Security. You’ll see how aligning community work with company priorities and cross-functional pain points can drive measurable ROI, influence product decisions, and elevate community from a support function to a strategic partner.
You’ll Learn:
For years, community-led growth raised expectations for what community could do. But it didn't change how most companies actually run.
Community still sits inside teams like marketing or customer success, operating as a parallel system rather than part of how those teams drive adoption, retention, and revenue. So even when it's working, it rarely shows up where the business makes decisions.
Josh Zerkel, Head of Marketing & Community at Gradual and builder of large-scale programs at Asana and Evernote, will challenge the current framing of community-led growth and explore what changes when community is designed directly into the go-to-market system.
In this session, you'll learn:
If your community disappeared tomorrow, would the business actually feel it? This session is about making sure the answer is yes.
When your community is growing fast and your team is small, something has to give unless you build smarter.
At Sandboxx, a 2-person community team has welcomed 175,000+ individuals over the last year, most arriving in the thick of it, their loved one just shipped off to basic training and they needed answers fast.
As service members graduate and military life evolves, so does the mission: building a community that supports military families and supporters across the entire military lifecycle, not just the basic training window.
To do that at scale, the team debuted Community Pro, a premium membership with a range of features including eight purpose-built Al teammates: branch-specific Pocket Guides, a letter writing companion, and a corporate-sponsored financial agent available to all community members through an official brand partnership.
This session shares real member stories, real conversations, a practical three-question framework for knowing where Al belongs in your community and where it does not, and honest lessons from a small team.
Come for the real stories. Leave with a framework you can use Monday morning.
Bring your ideas, questions and challenges!
In this participant-driven session, community leaders help shape the agenda by voting on the topics that matter most.
Attendees will break into discussion groups to share insights, strategies, and experiences, and then groups can present their findings on stage, giving everyone actionable takeaways and new perspectives.
After a full day of learning and inspiration, it's time to unwind!
Join us for Happy Hour and Dinner on-site.
Mingle with fellow attendees, chat with our amazing sponsors, and swing by their booths to snag some swag!
After happy hour + dinner, head on over to Sodini's with Ricky and Sunny from the Bevy team to keep the party going with karaoke!
Address: 727 El Camino Real, Redwood City, CA 94063
Many community teams are adding Al tools like support bots and auto-moderation, but they're still measuring success the same old way-counting posts, comments, and time spent.
The problem is these metrics were designed for people talking to people, and Al changes everything: a member who goes back and forth with a bot eight times looks "engaged" even though they never got help.
This session teaches a simple framework for measuring what actually matters: did members get what they came for, how many tries did it take, and what happened when Al failed?
You'll learn to run a quick 30-minute check of real conversations to spot the difference between genuine success and fake activity that hides frustrated users.
You'll walk away with a worksheet for testing any Al feature, a guide for explaining results to leadership, and warning signs that show when Al is hurting your community instead of helping it.
This is a practical tool for community teams who need to prove whether their Al is actually working.
Most community teams know Al can speed up content creation - but speed alone doesn't create impact.
In this session, Marily Nika shows community professionals how to move beyond theory and become builders: using accessible Al tools like Google Al Studio and Gemini Gems, you'll generate on-brand multimedia content, automate workflows, and build end-to-end Al agents that amplify your community's voice.
Through a hands-on 40-minute workshop, you'll follow along with live demos and build in real time. Then join a 20-minute fireside chat with Derek to explore practical strategies and discover how Al can transform content creation, engagement, and community impact across teams of all sizes.
By the end, you'll leave ready not just to work faster, but to design Al-driven experiences that actually move the needle for your community.
Most speakers will tell you what worked for them or a few colleagues, but very few can tell you what's worked across hundreds of community professionals at companies of every size and growth stage.
As VP of Community and Growth at Gainsight, Jon works daily with community leaders across the industry, giving him a perspective few people have: not one career story, but thousands of data points. Every day he's in the room watching it happen: the hits, the misses, and everything in between. In this rapid-fire end-of-day keynote, he aggregates it all into the honest, direct takes he wishes more people heard sooner. He knows who's rising, who's pivoting successfully, and what separates them from everyone else.
What you'll take away:
Join this future-focused workshop that helps community leaders prepare their communities for an Al-driven world by improving the quality, reliability, and structure of their knowledge.
Rather than chasing engagement metrics or Al features, the session focuses on what truly matters today: community hygiene.
Participants will learn how Al changes the role of community from conversation space to knowledge system, how poor hygiene quietly undermines trust and value, and how to make targeted improvements that allow communities to safely support Al, scale expertise, and deliver long-term enterprise impact.
We're entering a moment where in-person experiences matter more than ever.
In the age of Al and digital overload, brands are investing in community events to bring people together offline - but not everyone knows how to design a gathering people actually want to come back to.
Too often, success is measured by registrations, attendance, and social media impressions, which can make events look successful on paper while masking a deeper problem: people don't return.
In this hot take, Jessie Jacob argues that registrations are one of the weakest metrics in community building and that return is the signal that reveals true engagement.
Drawing from her experience designing and scaling global community programs, she shares how shifting focus from vanity metrics to return rates, leader engagement, and consistent gatherings can reveal the real health of a community. Because in community, the goal isn't getting people to show up once - it's giving them a reason to come back.
Most community programs optimize for activity. But activity doesn't shape perception - people do.
In this session, Veronica "Vero" Heino challenges leaders to rethink community's role: not as an engagement channel, but as a deliberate system for shaping trust and influence.
Your most influential members are already driving how your brand is discussed across platforms and peer networks - the question is whether you're intentionally guiding and elevating that influence.
Vero will share practical ways to activate the right contributors, reduce noise, and connect community efforts directly to reputation and measurable business impact. If trust is your most valuable asset, it's time to design for it.
For many community professionals, the path to a dream role is anything but linear. Guilda Hilaire faced five rejections for the job she wanted—and when she finally got through the door, the position had already changed. Rather than give up, Guilda took matters into her own hands, creating a global community program from scratch, building trust across eight managers, and designing initiatives that drove measurable impact.In this keynote, Guilda will share her story and actionable lessons for anyone looking to take ownership of their career and make an outsized impact. You’ll learn:
Packed with real-world examples—from advocacy programs to customer “Rewind” initiatives—attendees will leave ready to navigate career pivots, design their own path within an organization, and create programs that matter. This session is ideal for community leaders who want to take bold action, advocate for themselves, and show the strategic value of community at their company.
We will be honoring the winners of the CCIAs live onstage!
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