Chris Grothkopp
Chris Grothkopp
VP of Forward Deploy Product Management
Chris leads forward deploy product management at Gradial, embedding with enterprise marketing teams to turn agentic workflows into production reality. Over nearly 25 years across digital agencies, global brands, and product organizations — including leadership roles at Revel, HTC, Accenture, and Razorfish — he's worked at the seam between what marketers actually need and what the technology can deliver. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing from Gonzaga University.
Tuesday, September 29, 2026
10 Hours to 30 Minutes: Closing the Execution Gap
12:35 PM - 12:50 PM

Marketing teams have never been short on AI. They're short on execution. The work between an approved brief and a live campaign crosses a CMS, a DAM, an engagement platform, and a review process, and at every handoff someone carries it to the next tool, or files a ticket and waits. That's the execution gap, and it's why your segments outnumber the experiences you can actually build. This session makes the case for a governed execution layer that runs across the whole stack and ships the full variant set including how AWS cut page creation from ten hours to thirty minutes.

Monday, September 28, 2026
Building an AI Native Marketing Organization
12:35 PM - 12:50 PM

Most marketing orgs have AI access but few have an operating model for it. This talk lays out what an AI-native marketing organization actually looks like: where CMOs are embedding agents, which work stays human, and how to build a team whose capacity isn't rationed by who happened to get a license. It also covers the failure mode nobody advertises: tokenmaxxing, where pilots burn spend without shipping real work, and what separates orgs building brands from orgs still working backlogs.