MAICON 2026: Putting AI to Work in Marketing

This year, MAICON is built around marketers and business leaders who are trying to work out where AI actually fits into their teams.

The program is split between two main breakout tracks. Applied AI focuses on hands-on tactics, workflows and real use cases, while Strategic AI looks at leadership, adoption and the decisions companies are making around AI. Attendees can follow one track or move between the two.

There’s also an AI Transformation Stage, with conversations around adoption, change management, executive buy-in and measuring whether AI is actually having an impact.

And then there are Build Sessions.These are working sessions where attendees bring a laptop and build something themselves - an AI application, agent, workflow, automation or another business solution.

Speakers this year include Karen Hao, Kevin Roose and Andrew Yang, alongside people from Zapier, Veeam, Seer Interactive and Trust Insights.

Two sides of the same AI conversation

The split between Applied AI and Strategic AI makes sense for where a lot of teams are right now. On one side, there are practical questions.

Which tools are useful? Which tasks make sense to automate? Where can AI save time? How do you build a workflow people will actually use?

On the other side, there are bigger questions around how a company adopts those tools. Someone still has to decide what gets introduced, how teams are trained, how the work changes and how to tell whether a new process is actually better than the old one.

MAICON gives space to both. The Applied AI sessions stay close to the work itself. The Strategic AI sessions move into leadership and decision-making. The AI Transformation Stage sits somewhere between the two, looking at what happens when companies try to move AI from individual experiments into the way a team works every day.

Bring a laptop and build something

The practical side goes beyond the breakout sessions.

MAICON starts on October 13 with five pre-conference workshops. They cover ChatGPT, Claude, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and an AI Co-Executive workshop led by Marketing AI Institute founder Paul Roetzer.

The workshops are built around using the tools for actual business work. That can mean research, planning, content development, analysis or decision-making. The focus is also on building workflows around the way a team already works, rather than learning a long list of prompts and stopping there.

The AI Co-Executive workshop takes a slightly different angle. Participants build an AI system they can use as a thought partner for planning, testing ideas and working through decisions.

None of these sessions require a coding background. That’s an important part of MAICON. The conference was created for marketing and business leaders and practitioners, with the focus on applying AI inside organizations rather than getting deep into the technical side of building AI models.

The people behind the tools

The program also leaves room for conversations that go beyond individual platforms. Karen Hao, author of Empire of AI, New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose and Andrew Yang are part of this year’s speaker lineup.

They’re joined by people working directly with AI inside companies, including Dan Slagen from Zapier, Jessica Hreha from Veeam, Wil Reynolds from Seer Interactive and Katie Robbert from Trust Insights.

That mix gives MAICON room to look at AI from a few different angles. There’s the tool someone can start using today. There’s the workflow a team can build around it. And then there’s the much bigger question of what happens when AI becomes part of how a company works.

Planning to attend MAICON 2026?

If you work in marketing, business or AI and you’ll be in Cleveland this October, MAICON is worth adding to your calendar.

The conference runs from October 13–15 at the Huntington Convention Center of Cleveland, with workshops on the first day followed by two days of talks, breakout sessions and Build Sessions.

If you’re planning to attend, you can use our promo code 24CREATIVE150 when registering.

You can find the full agenda, speaker lineup and ticket details on the MAICON website.