CMX Summit 2026 Agenda The Summit gathers over 15,000 community professionals to advance the field of community management as a measurable, strategic business function. Sessions are organized around five strategic goals: converting community engagement into growth intelligence; integrating AI into community operations; innovating program design models; embedding community into core go-to-market infrastructure; and elevating the strategic influence of community practitioners. ^^ Submitter's Note: This StratML rendition was compiled from the source by Claude.ai and edited in the form at https://stratml.us/forms/Claude/Part1.html CMX f65bb8b7-3a2b-4ab9-a325-f51e755b8135 Summit co-host Bevy Summit co-host Communities are well managed e386f315-a4e5-43de-a53b-2a261a42f5ac To advance the field of community management as a measurable, strategic business function e8b82cae-5afc-4a7b-b4fa-3763af17be5b Evidence Impact claims must be grounded in data, not sentiment. Community programs earn credibility — and resources — by translating engagement into measurable business outcomes: pipeline influence, retention signals, account-level participation, and executive-ready metrics. Vibes are not a strategy. Strategic Primacy Community is not a support function, a program, or an experiment — it is core go-to-market infrastructure. Its value is realized when it is designed directly into GTM systems, treated as a competitive moat, and evaluated by the same standards as marketing, sales, and product investment. Human Depth Meaningful community is built through shared challenge, earned belonging, and synchronized experience — not frictionless access. Transformation happens when members move through difficulty together. Design choices that deepen human connection are preferred over those that merely reduce effort. AI Augmentation Artificial intelligence amplifies community capacity without replacing human judgment or connection. AI is deployed where it scales support, surfaces signals, or removes operational burden — and withheld where human presence, empathy, or discretion is essential. Principled boundaries on AI use are themselves a community design choice. Practitioner Agency Community professionals are strategic generalists — fluent across marketing, product, sales, and customer success — whose influence derives from internal alliance-building and executive alignment, not just program execution. Elevating community practitioners to advisor status is both an organizational imperative and a professional responsibility. Transparency Community advocacy, reach, and brand trust are earned media and should be reported as such. Honest, frank measurement — including failure, constraint, and uncertainty — builds more durable executive confidence than curated success stories. Community professionals owe their organizations clarity, not comfort. Growth Intelligence Transform community engagement from a relational asset into a quantifiable source of business intelligence — surfacing expansion opportunities, predicting retention risk, influencing pipeline, and producing executive-ready impact metrics. d5b51cf5-351c-4a54-a5e6-9ac25706fbd1 1 Signal Engine Introduce and operationalize The Community Signal Engine framework, which converts engagement into intelligence, intelligence into alignment, and alignment into measurable growth — including AI-driven methods to spot expansion and retention signals early and translate participation into account-level business impact. e96b65e7-f094-4f8f-9273-dbbf091259ec 1.1 Community Leaders Community professionals seeking to reframe community as a strategic growth engine rather than a connection or support function. Suzanne Shaw Keynote Speaker Pipeline ROI Document and replicate the playbook by which a single-person community team generated $3M in pipeline influence from $56K in event spend across 86 events and 2,000+ attendees — including AI-powered operations, VIP curation, and an executive-ready tracking framework yielding greater than $50 return per dollar. 1e3a11ec-be04-4825-b9ce-cccd0b61af4f 1.2 Community Event Managers Practitioners responsible for designing and measuring the business impact of community events programs. Ed Giansante Keynote Speaker Earned Media Reframe community advocacy as earned media and equip practitioners to report program impact in the language of reach, brand perception, and trust-building that moves budgets — rather than feel-good engagement metrics reported in Slack. 18834e0c-b327-40d3-b2f9-619c9b7dd951 1.3 Community Advocates Members and practitioners driving organic reach and brand trust through advocacy programs. Gabrielle Herrera Hot Take speaker AI Integration Equip community teams to deploy AI agents for member support at scale, optimize community content and structure for AI-era discoverability, and build AI-powered operational workflows — while maintaining clear boundaries on where AI belongs and where it does not. d78071d4-6671-4147-8100-1f066d566671 2 Scaled Support Share the Sandboxx model in which a two-person team used eight purpose-built AI teammates — branch-specific pocket guides, a letter-writing companion, and a corporate-sponsored financial agent — to welcome 175,000+ military family members, and provide a three-question framework for knowing where AI belongs in a community and where it does not. 2219c4cd-1278-4347-b2f4-0948fa67bde5 2.1 Small Community Teams Under-resourced community teams serving large or rapidly growing member populations with mission-critical support needs. Military Families Service members, family members, and supporters navigating the military lifecycle who benefit from on-demand, personalized guidance. Bethany Clark Keynote Speaker AEO Discoverability Provide actionable strategies for community content structuring and engagement tactics that ensure community impact and member voices remain discoverable and influential as AI reshapes how content is found, shared, and valued online. 91c08b22-24c5-43b0-94ac-6ae071af32a4 2.2 Community Content Strategists Practitioners responsible for content architecture, SEO, and ensuring community knowledge surfaces in AI-mediated search environments. David Kobrosky Panelist Stephanie Quan Panelist Logan Johnston Panelist Program Innovation Advance the design of community programs through evidence-based models including cohort-based structures that drive measurable transformation, scalable local meetup strategies, and intentional friction design that deepens belonging and increases sustained engagement. 86d11a57-248a-493a-8d77-57f71166cd0c 3 Cohort Models Demonstrate how cohort-based programs — characterized by defined start and end dates, shared goals, and synchronized member journeys — outperform always-on communities in driving behavior change, deepening relationships, and producing measurable outcomes, and provide a practical framework for integrating cohort tactics into existing community programs. 46f3234a-ea18-4b14-9a2f-bbcb0b950716 3.1 Program Designers Community leaders architecting learning, onboarding, or activation programs who seek measurable transformation rather than passive access. Paz Pisarski Hot Take speaker Local Meetups Develop a modern local meetup event strategy through hands-on frameworks covering scalable program design, member enlistment for event facilitation, compelling value propositions, and ROI measurement — enabling practitioners to deliver sustainable local events programs as part of broader community strategy. 1d857613-f26d-4140-8f87-88d98019f989 3.2 Local Community Organizers Community professionals building or scaling in-person chapter or meetup programs tied to broader organizational goals. Brian Oblinger Workshop Leader Friction Design Challenge the default assumption that frictionless community experiences are superior, and demonstrate through research and a real-world case study how intentional friction — such as selective entry, shared challenge, or earned status — can increase engagement by orders of magnitude and transform inactive communities into thriving ones. ac256e57-4e9b-4885-b038-24dc7568d980 3.3 Community Designers Practitioners responsible for onboarding flows, membership criteria, and experience architecture who seek to optimize for belonging over convenience. Santiago Espinosa Hot Take speaker Strategic Infrastructure Move community from a parallel program or support function into core go-to-market infrastructure — designed into GTM systems, built for competitive defensibility, and structured to produce business impact that leadership would feel if removed. 4f50711c-330a-44db-903e-f02f275206aa 4 GTM Integration Diagnose why community-led growth raised business expectations without changing how most organizations actually operate, identify where impact measurement approaches break down, and articulate what changes when community is built directly into core GTM systems for adoption, retention, and revenue rather than running alongside them. 2142bb32-f96b-4af4-a123-0848cb7d970d 4.1 GTM Leaders Marketing, sales, and customer success executives evaluating how to integrate community into revenue-generating workflows. Community Executives Senior community professionals seeking to redesign their programs as indispensable GTM infrastructure rather than discretionary investment. Josh Zerkel Keynote Competitive Defense Reframe community as the primary non-replicable competitive differentiator in markets where products can be copied, explore why most community programs fail to create genuine competitive advantage, and provide principles for building ecosystems that convert members into true partners competitors cannot replicate. 2a7cfb9f-f096-4ab0-8448-d2447e19e04d 4.2 Product Leaders Product and strategy leaders seeking non-product moats through community ecosystem design. Monica Rodriguez Hot Take speaker Enterprise Evolution Debate the merits and limitations of the traditional enterprise community model, surface emerging strategies that address its gaps, and establish how community programs must evolve to drive real business impact and member value in 2026 and beyond. 9ded82d3-7a5f-4cd7-977d-de6916ac42a4 4.3 Enterprise Community Leaders Community professionals operating large-scale programs within enterprise organizations subject to traditional community management models. Richard Millington Debater Nisha Baxi Debater Jacob Gross Debater GTM Infrastructure Make the case that community is not an experiment or discretionary program but a foundational element of go-to-market infrastructure, and provide a practical blueprint for shifting from executor to strategic advisor by creating healthy tension with leadership and aligning community metrics to executive priorities. 2d2f4170-30e0-41bd-ad1f-4a48eb5682c1 4.4 Community Practitioners Community managers and directors seeking to reposition their role from program executor to strategic GTM advisor. Demario Bell Hot Take speaker Practitioner Influence Elevate community professionals from tactical operators to strategic influencers by developing cross-functional business fluency, building internal alliances, and positioning community management as a Renaissance discipline connecting marketing, product, sales, and customer success. d2101caf-dcda-4fd9-a55c-be8d5a7d8f75 5 Renaissance Fluency Demonstrate through real-world examples from large startups, acquired companies, and growth-stage firms how the best community managers operate as generalists who connect functions across the business — and how fluency in multiple business languages (marketing, sales, product, customer success) combined with internal alliances elevates community to a strategic partnership function. 9951325a-a35c-481e-a541-f7d57f12b4de 5.1 Community Managers Individual community professionals seeking to grow their strategic influence and cross-functional business credibility within their organizations. Avital Knoller Hot Take speaker Peer Exchange Create space for participant-driven agenda-setting, peer discussion groups, and shared synthesis of the Summit's key themes through an unconference format — enabling community leaders to surface emerging challenges, co-develop strategies, and build the collegial relationships that extend Summit learning into ongoing practice. 8cdd2b40-95c3-495e-ad04-deea7efe9703 5.2 Summit Attendees All 2026 CMX Summit participants contributing questions, insights, and challenges to the collective intelligence of the community professional field. 2026-04-30 2026-05-01 2026-04-24 https://www.cmxhub.com/summit-agenda Owen Ambur Owen.Ambur@verizon.net