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Agenda
April 27 - Welcome Drinks & Canapés
April 28· Day 1
27 sessionsDoors Open | Breakfast
Opening remarks from MACH Alliance's Managing Director, Holly Hall, and our, co-hosts Dana Lawson and Shawn Mandel, setting the stage for MACH X: Toronto 2026.
Speakers
CTO at Netlify
Dana Lawson is the Chief Technology Officer at Netlify, where she leads the Engineering, Product, and Design teams to innovate and deliver transformative digital experiences. With over two decades of leadership at industry-leading companies like GitHub, Heptio, and New Relic, Dana has a proven track record of scaling teams, fostering collaboration, and navigating complex technical landscapes. Throughout her career, she’s worn many hats across the product lifecycle, showcasing her versatility and expertise building impactful technology solutions. Driven by a genuine passion for people, Dana infuses her leadership with a blend of technical expertise and a spirit of fun, creating an inspiring and dynamic work environment.
MACH Ambassador at MACH Alliance
Shawn Mandel has spent his career at the intersection of business and technology, helping Canada's most recognized brands operate, grow, and compete. As a MACH Alliance Ambassador, he has led large-scale transformation for Cineplex, TELUS, and Rogers – bringing hundreds of products to market and enabling billions of dollars in revenue across telecommunications, e-commerce, retail, and media and entertainment. His expertise spans product and software development, data, and IT operations, and he has a track record of turning digital channels into top revenue generators and unlocking new monetization opportunities through data. At the center of everything he does is culture, team, and customer – building environments where collaboration thrives, teams feel empowered to experiment, and innovation follows. At MACH X Toronto, Shawn brings the kind of perspective you only get from operating at true enterprise scale.
Most enterprise AI programs promise results but struggle to prove them. Corby Fine will share how IGM Financial is taking a structured approach, targeting hundreds of use cases across all functions with hard outcome metrics attached to each. The session focuses on AI's role in removing marketing hand-offs, improving customer communications, and building agility into the Martech stack. Attendees will leave with a framework for setting measurable AI adoption targets across a multi-function enterprise.
Speaker
Vice President, Digital Marketing and Performance at IGM Financial
Most executives can build a strategy; fewer can operationalize it. He does both. For over 20 years, he has helped Canada's largest institutions – including IGM Financial, Bell, and CIBC – bridge the gap between complex business strategy and on-the-ground execution. He doesn't just "do digital"; he restructures operating models, manages P&Ls up to $350M, and transforms legacy functions into modern growth engines. His career is defined by building things that last. He served as the de facto General Manager for the launch of Simplii Financial, where he moved 2 million customers and hit 100% digital acquisition targets. At Bell, he stood up a Digital Center of Excellence to break down silos between sales and service. Today, at IGM, he is modernizing the marketing infrastructure to drive measurable asset growth. He believes leadership is a distinct skill from management. As a Certified Executive Coach, he brings a "Leader-as-Coach" philosophy to his roles. He builds high-performance teams that can execute autonomously, and he spends a significant portion of his time mentoring the next generation of C-suite leaders.
Most enterprises have an AI strategy. Fewer have made AI a genuine part of how decisions are made, how teams operate, and how the business grows. Our panelists will debate the questions that matter: who owns AI leadership, what gets approved now, and how you build timelines tied to real returns. Attendees will leave with a framework for assessing whether their own AI strategy is built to deliver or built to present.
Speakers
CTO at Netlify
Dana Lawson is the Chief Technology Officer at Netlify, where she leads the Engineering, Product, and Design teams to innovate and deliver transformative digital experiences. With over two decades of leadership at industry-leading companies like GitHub, Heptio, and New Relic, Dana has a proven track record of scaling teams, fostering collaboration, and navigating complex technical landscapes. Throughout her career, she’s worn many hats across the product lifecycle, showcasing her versatility and expertise building impactful technology solutions. Driven by a genuine passion for people, Dana infuses her leadership with a blend of technical expertise and a spirit of fun, creating an inspiring and dynamic work environment.
AVP AI Activation at Canadian Tire Corporation
Scott Adel is AVP, AI Activation at Canadian Tire Corporation, responsible for turning AI strategy into real business impact across retail operations. With more than 20 years of experience in retail technology and digital transformation, he has held senior leadership roles across large‑scale enterprise and consumer brands, including Canadian Tire, Tulip, McKesson, and the Canadian lifestyle retailer Frank and Oak. A regular speaker with the Retail Council of Canada and at global retail conferences, Scott is known for his practical, execution‑focused perspective on AI and the future of retail.
Break
TELUS set itself a demanding benchmark: the ability to ship in a day. Steve Tannock shares what several years of generative AI investment has produced, from reducing SaaS dependence to building a degree of AI sovereignty. He'll be direct about where TELUS stands today and what mature AI looks like in practice. Attendees will leave with a concrete picture of what a sustained, multi-year generative AI commitment delivers, and what it demands.
The real story around AI? Remarkable team adoption and measurable outputs. In the workshop that follows, participants will apply those same principles to their own organizations – building on strong data foundations, adopting a product mindset, and navigating the messy middle without losing momentum. They'll leave with a clear, structured approach to sequencing AI initiatives and the insights to accelerate adoption across their teams.
Key updates from MACH Alliance leadership on the evolving Agent Ecosystem, including new initiatives, progress, and what’s next for the community.
Speaker
President at MACH Alliance
Jason Cottrell is the the President of the MACH Alliance and Founder & CEO of Orium, the leading composable and adaptive commerce consultancy in the Americas. He works closely with enterprise clients and strategic partners to prepare businesses for hybrid human–agent experiences. Under his leadership, Orium helps organizations modernize their technology foundations and unlock new levels of speed, scale, and intelligence in how they serve customers across channels.
Lunch
01:30 PM - Concurrent Sessions
When the business demands a return on AI investment and experimentation for its own sake is losing favor, the question becomes where to concentrate. Matthieu Houle shares how ALDO Group approached that decision, making supply chain the centerpiece of their AI strategy and consciously stepping back from other areas in favor of vendor partners. A peer panel drawn from the room then debates how the same trade-offs apply across their own organizations. Attendees will leave with a clearer basis for deciding where to focus AI investment, and where to rely on partners instead.
Speakers
CIO at ALDO Group
Matthieu Houle is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) of the ALDO Group, responsible for the company's IT strategy, digital technologies, data platform, cybersecurity, and digital transformation. Since joining ALDO in 2018, he has led a major modernization of the company's technology landscape, transforming IT into a strategic enabler of business growth. Under his leadership, ALDO has leveraged data, AI, and omnichannel technologies to enhance operational efficiency and customer experience. Matthieu has also played a key role in driving innovation, establishing new revenue opportunities through AI-powered initiatives. With a background in entrepreneurship, he brings a startup mindset to corporate innovation, fostering agility and strategic partnerships. Beyond ALDO, he is actively involved in the Montreal startup ecosystem, advising emerging businesses on technology and digital strategy.
Most teams are still building single-agent experiences. The architectural decisions that enable a move to multi-agent environments are made earlier than most teams realize, and some are hard to reverse. Matthew Quarisa from AGNTCY, alongside technical leaders Rakesh Krishna from Harry Rosen and Krishna Gangu from Catalyst Brands, the parent company of Aéropostale, Brooks Brothers, Lucky Brand, Nautica, and JCPenney, lead a workshop on the foundations multi-agent environments require: interoperability, identity, communication and observability. Attendees will leave knowing which decisions to prioritise now, which are hardest to undo, and how to evaluate their current stack's readiness for multi-agent adoption.
Speakers
Partner AI Advisor & Engineer at Cisco
Matt Quarisa, P.Eng., is a Partner AI Advisor & Engineer within Cisco’s Cross-Architecture Group. In this role, he represents Cisco’s AI investments to the partner ecosystem and guides organizations in building and scaling services underpinned by Cisco’s AI technology and frameworks. Prior to this, Matt worked as a Solutions Engineer, collaborating with customers and partners on topics ranging from IT automation to wireless design and industrial transformation. He holds undergraduate and graduate degrees in Electrical Engineering from Queen’s University, where his research focused on wireless communication and decentralized decision-making in distributed networks, and is currently pursuing his MBA at the University of Toronto.
Without a large technology function, Team Select Home Care built CareSight AI, a system that analyses proprietary clinical data to detect early signs of respiratory decline before a crisis occurs. Meghan Willson will walk the audience through this journey - the goal and ambition as well as the process selecting and refining this use case. Following the keynote, Ryan McKenna from RVO Health will join Meghan to discuss this endeavor with the audience. Attendees will leave with a set of questions to stress-test their own organization's approach to AI "use-case" selection in high-stakes environments.
Speakers
VP of Technology and Business Enablement at Team Select Home Care
Meghan Willson is a VP of Technology with a unique background that bridges clinical care and innovation. She began her career as a physical therapist, working directly in healthcare environments and gaining deep insight into how data, decisions, and outcomes intersect at the point of care. That experience later informed her leadership of CareSightAI, where success started with a deliberate focus on building a strong data foundation to deliver real, measurable value in healthcare.
Principal Engineer at RVO Health
Ryan McKenna is a Principal Software Engineer at RVO Health. In his role he helps drive AI adoption and architects developer workflows for healthcare products that serve millions. He brings an engineering perspective on what embracing AI in an engineering organization with an emphasis on responsible implementation looks like. With a background in driving organizational change as an IC, he’s passionate about building products that help people live better lives.
Most enterprise commerce stacks were built for human buyers clicking through pages. Apurva Parikh walks through how Tapestry is architecting an Agentic Commerce Plane, a strategic layer that connects legacy platforms to emerging protocols like Universal Commerce Protocol, without a full replatform. The Q&A opens the conversation to what this means for your own architecture and where to invest next. Attendees will leave with a working model for what agentic-ready commerce infrastructure looks like, and where to start building toward it.
Speakers
Co-Founder & Principal Analyst at StrategyēM
Brian is founder & Principal Analyst at StrategyēM – a boutique strategic advisory firm focused on enterprise technology GTM. He is also known for Cocktails & Commerce, a leading commerce tech newsletter and podcast focused on the state of the digital commerce and marketing tech market – with some cocktails splashing around. Brian has held many senior leadership roles within the industry, including CSO & CMO of Bloomreach, SAP CX, hybris, and leading the global commerce offering at Accenture for a time. He is also known for his time leading commerce tech at Forrester Research many years ago.
VP Digital Technology at Tapestry
Apurva Parikh is VP, Digital Technology at Tapestry, where he leads the global eCommerce and digital platform strategy for iconic brands including Coach and Kate Spade. He is responsible for building a scalable global commerce architecture that supports approximately 50 markets across both brands, balancing global consistency with local market needs. Apurva’s scope spans enterprise platform modernization, digital experience, and MarTech, with a growing focus on AI‑driven discovery, including AEO/GEO and agentic commerce, as he explores how intelligent agents and evolving search paradigms are reshaping how consumers discover, engage with, and purchase from global brands.
02:20 PM - Concurrent Sessions
Conversational front ends sound straightforward until your engineering team hits the reality: legacy systems with limited visibility, protocols that shift mid-build, and design patterns that didn't exist six months ago. Grubhub and Loblaw are both deep in this work, building new engineering capabilities to deliver front-end experiences that go well past scripted bots. Mike Jahn and Gayatri Sikka will share where their teams are, what has changed in how they staff and ship, and where protocol-level changes have forced architectural rethinks. The workshop portion opens this up to the room. Attendees will leave with a concrete picture of the engineering competencies required, practical approaches to increasing delivery velocity, and a clearer sense of when a conversational front end is worth the architectural cost.
Speakers
Most enterprise AI programs stall at the proof-of-concept stage because no one agreed on what "value" meant before the build started. Loblaw took a different path, defining value against its own operations first, measuring outcomes progressively over two years, then extending into an agentic program built around consumer value. Chrissy Munroe will unpack both programs and open a working conversation in the room: how do you measure AI value that holds up over time, and how do you sequence a roadmap that delivers for the business and the customer? Attendees will leave with a practical framework for staging AI investment from internal efficiency through to customer-facing agents, along with Loblaw's criteria for deciding when a program has earned the right to scale.
Holt Renfrew's AI strategy is live, and it started with a deliberate rule: no project proceeds without criteria tied to improving customer experience or process, with data quality, security and governance built in from the start. Alicia Samuel shares the challenges of building whole-company buy-in and the outcomes that have made the case. A peer panel follows to broaden the conversation. Attendees will leave with a framework for setting AI project criteria that hold up under real scrutiny.
Speakers
Senior Vice President Information Technology at Holt Renfrew
Alicia has spent 26 years working at the intersection of technology and business, leading transformations at some of Canada's most recognized and trusted organizations – including IBM Canada, Microsoft Canada, Canadian Tire, and Longo's. She currently serves as Senior Vice President of Technology at Holt Renfrew. Alicia holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Toronto and a Post-Graduate Diploma from the University of Liverpool. Beyond her executive role, she serves as Member Chair for Inspire Toronto (Toronto CIO Group) and sits on the CAMH Foundation Board of Directors. A passionate advocate for women in technology and leadership, she regularly speaks at events championing the next generation of female leaders in the industry.
CTO at Harry Rosen
Steve Warriner is the Senior Vice President and Chief Information Officer at Harry Rosen Inc. With over 20 years of experience in the retail industry, Steve has a proven track record of driving technological innovation and enhancing customer engagement. Steve holds a Computer Science degree from the University of Western Ontario. He began his career as a developer in the financial industry, where he was part of the original development team that created E-mail Money Transfers in Canada (Interact). He later joined Harry Rosen as an Oracle DBA & Developer, where he created the company's first internal software development team. In February 2019, Steve was promoted to Director of IT, and in February 2022, he became the Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. In August 2024, he took over the role of Chief Information Officer following the retirement of the previous CIO. As CIO, Steve is responsible for technology strategy, infrastructure, security, application development, e-commerce, digital technology, and vendor management. His day-to-day responsibilities include ensuring that business leaders within Harry Rosen deliver on their growth objectives through tech investments.
Vice President & Owner at Harman Heavy Vehicle Specialists
Ian Johnston is the Vice President of Harman Heavy Vehicle Specialists, an 88-year-old, family-owned business specializing in heavy truck and transportation parts solutions. Ian is a focused business professional with over 25 years of experience as a leader in the heavy-duty industry, having held the roles of President of Heavy-Duty Aftermarket Canada (HDAC) and GenNext, and currently serves as Chairman of the Board of the Commercial Vehicle Solutions Network (CVSN). He has been awarded the GenNext 4 Under 40 Award and has spoken at major industry events such as Heavy-Duty Aftermarket Week (HDAW) and the CVSN Summit. Ian holds an Honours Degree in Commerce and outside of work has a passion for photography and open wheel racing, driving a Formula F2000.
Ramzi Rahbani built AI-guided selling across 1.5 million SKUs and has the hard lessons to prove it. He'll share what AEO and GEO discovery strategies actually require to work at scale, including the ongoing experimentation that most case studies leave out. The workshop brings in Edward Wong and others to work through the same questions with the room, applying the thinking to your own discovery and engagement stack. Attendees will leave with a practical set of tests to run against their current commerce experience.
Speakers
Chief Product Officer at FortNine Group
Ramzi is Chief Product Officer at FortNine and Defender Marine – Novacap portfolio companies – where he leads the evolution of large-scale, enthusiast-driven commerce platforms spanning over 1.5 million SKUs. His work centers on rethinking digital commerce through agentic and conversational interfaces, leveraging AI to transform how customers discover, evaluate, and purchase complex products. With a background spanning corporate innovation, digital strategy, and product development across retail, e-commerce, telecom, banking, and insurance, he has built and scaled high-performing teams across product, engineering, data science, AI, and growth. He also oversees the digital ecosystem of FortNine's dealership network, contributing to a unified vision of the end-to-end ownership experience across online and offline channels. At MACH X Toronto, Ramzi shares real-world lessons from deploying AI-driven guided selling at scale – exploring what it actually takes for conversational commerce to deliver ROI in complex, high-SKU environments. A self-described product geek, he is passionate about exchanging ideas with peers pushing the boundaries of modern commerce.
Senior Product Manager at IPSY
Alexia Borchgrevink is a Senior Product Manager focused on ecommerce growth, discovery, and platform transformation. She leads large-scale experimentation and personalization initiatives across high-traffic digital commerce experiences, with a track record of delivering measurable impact in conversion, engagement, and revenue. Alexia has led the transformation of legacy commerce systems into modern composable architectures, integrating AI-driven search, recommendations, and merchandising capabilities to improve product discovery at scale. Her work sits at the intersection of product strategy, experimentation, and customer experience, helping organizations turn complex technology investments into tangible business outcomes.
Break
03:35 PM - Concurrent Sessions
Every major business function, finance, data, sales, faced the same issue: top talent stuck on mechanical work instead of strategy. Each solved it by building an engineering layer. Marketing hadn't - until now. Through a live demo, Josh shows how AI agents make Marketing Engineering possible, covering how to design systems that automate routine work, how teams need to restructure, and what skills to hire or develop. Attendees will leave with a clear model for where to start building their own marketing engineering layer.
Every large organization is working to define its agentic strategy, but with competing definitions in play the process can quickly lose direction. Dave Stevens holds exactly this brief at Groupe Dynamite. He'll share his working definition, the approach his team is taking, and the change program underway, including where they're still figuring it out. The Q&A brings the room's own experience into the conversation. Attendees will leave with a sharper framework for scoping their own agentic brief and the questions to answer before committing to a direction.
Speaker
CTO at Groupe Dynamite
With over 25 years of experience driving digital transformation, Dave Stevens serves as the Chief Technology Officer at Groupe Dynamite, where he leads the technological evolution for iconic brands Garage and Dynamite. A forward-thinking retail leader, Dave oversees a comprehensive mandate including technology strategy, data analytics, AI engineering, and cybersecurity. He is currently spearheading the integration of agentic AI and advanced data unification to refine customer insights and create seamless, unified commerce experiences across more than 300 physical stores and global digital platforms. Prior to joining Groupe Dynamite, Dave held senior executive roles at Spin Master and Munich Re Canada, consistently focusing on leveraging innovation to enhance operational efficiency and drive business growth in highly competitive landscapes.
The idea of a 'future-proof' tech stack is losing its meaning. Engineers who keep learning and adapting are pushing code velocity to levels that can risk destabilizing the entire stack. Isaac shares Klue's experience moving from startup to scaleup: the AI decisions enabled them to truly accelerate, the ones that didn't, and how sustained pressure to move faster is reshaping how they build and scale. Attendees will leave with a grounded view of what engineering speed demands from a technical organisation today, and a few honest lessons from someone still in it.
Speaker
GTM AI Ops Engineer at Klue
Isaac leads Klue's team of Builders, the people who turn AI ambition into working systems. When business teams hit a wall, his crew builds the door. As the person who created Klue's first dedicated AI role, he's built it from the ground up alongside the company itself, from scrappy startup to scaling company, with all the hard lessons that come with it. Off the clock, you'll find him causing havoc on the rugby pitch or tinkering with his Harley.
Composable commerce got you to AI readiness. Readiness doesn't pay the bills. For most commerce teams, incentives are still static, rarely tested and disconnected from live market signals, driving margin erosion without clear attribution. Yann Boisclair-Roy and Marianne Boucher will share how Altitude Sports is combining composable commerce, market intelligence and AI to move beyond static loyalty programs toward continuous incentive optimization. Attendees will leave with a framework for identifying where AI can drive measurable ROI in incentive decisioning, and what guardrails to put in place before acting.
Speakers
Solutions Architect at Altitude Sports
Yann is a Solutions Architect and Software Engineer with deep expertise in Composable Commerce, MACH architecture, and event-driven systems. At Altitude-Sports, he has led the design and implementation of scalable, high-performance e-commerce platforms built on modern composable stacks. With hands-on experience integrating a wide range of best-of-breed SaaS platforms and leveraging cloud-native infrastructure, he champions a modular approach to building flexible and future-proof commerce experiences. A strong advocate of MACH principles, he helps businesses accelerate digital transformation through composable architectures. Beyond architecture, Yann is actively driving AI adoption at Altitude-Sports, applying it across operations, development workflows, and customer-facing experiences to streamline decision-making and unlock new efficiencies. He brings a pragmatic, hands-on perspective on the intersection of composable commerce and AI.
Product Manager at Altitude Sports
Marianne is a Product Manager at Altitude Sports, where she leads the customer redemption experience across the full purchase journey, from cart to post-purchase. She is responsible for building, designing, and optimizing how customers apply promotions, loyalty rewards, and incentives, ensuring a seamless and high-impact experience at every touchpoint. She plays a key role in evolving Altitude Sports' approach to loyalty and incentive strategy, helping the organization move toward more dynamic, AI-driven customer engagement.
04:15 PM - Concurrent Sessions
Running five brands on one operations team sounds like a resourcing problem. This enterprise is treating it as an architecture one. With a composable platform as the foundation, they're using AI and agentic workflows to multiply capacity without multiplying headcount — live use cases include AI-driven catalog enrichment across image analysis, attribution, and copy generation, with search, CMS, and PIM being rebuilt on a multi-tenant, AI-first architecture. You'll leave with a clear view of how to make the headcount, licensing, and vendor decisions that let you scale brands without losing control of your own IP.
How do you prepare your data infrastructure so that AI can accelerate your customer centricity strategy? Leverage payments data to help you learn about your customers and your space, to build a winning business strategy.
Speakers
Grocery and hospitality leaders face tough calls: chase agentic AI as a fast follower or risk leading too soon? In this session, brands debate planning agentic applications amid shifting protocols.
They’ll tackle business imperatives like leader vs follower strategies, roadmaps that pivot without stalling, and tactics to keep customers trusting these agents. Attendees leave with a decision framework for timing agentic shipments to live and aligning roadmaps with emerging rules.
Learning Outcomes:
- Framework to balance fast-follower vs leader risks in agentic builds.
- Tactics for roadmap pivots: when to adjust, when to ship.
- Methods to build customer buy-in for agentic experiences
Speakers
Director of Software Engineering at Wegmans
Craig Oley is Director of Software Engineering – Digital at Wegmans Food Markets. He leads engineering across Wegmans.com, the Wegmans app, Meals2Go, and the customer and loyalty platforms that power personalized experiences at scale. With deep experience in composable commerce and digital transformation, Craig is passionate about building high-performing teams and scalable, flexible systems. His organization is actively leveraging AI to accelerate engineering and enable faster innovation, helping deliver differentiated customer experiences at scale. Craig also serves as a MACH Alliance Ambassador.
Associate Director, Product Management at Grubhub
Justin Kilian is a product leader at Grubhub, one of the largest food delivery platforms in the US, where he has led product across the core consumer UX, mid and bottom funnel conversion, traffic generation, cross-sell, and is now driving Grubhub's AI and agentic commerce strategy. Justin has been at the center of Grubhub's most forward-looking AI bets, including the launch of Grubhub's ChatGPT integration, one of the first agentic food ordering experiences built on MCP, and ongoing work to explore how LLM-native interfaces and autonomous agents can transform how people discover and order food.
Most enterprise conversations about agentic AI are still hypothetical. This session isn't. Two brands built real agent ecosystems through the MACH Alliance AI Exchange, and they're presenting the results live. Ipsy is turning a monthly subscription into a daily personalization engine. Wegmans is using agent-to-agent communication to solve omnichannel pricing consistency across every marketplace it sells through. You'll leave with a concrete picture of what agent architectures look like in production, and a realistic sense of where your organization could start.
Speakers
Senior Product Manager at IPSY
Alexia Borchgrevink is a Senior Product Manager focused on ecommerce growth, discovery, and platform transformation. She leads large-scale experimentation and personalization initiatives across high-traffic digital commerce experiences, with a track record of delivering measurable impact in conversion, engagement, and revenue. Alexia has led the transformation of legacy commerce systems into modern composable architectures, integrating AI-driven search, recommendations, and merchandising capabilities to improve product discovery at scale. Her work sits at the intersection of product strategy, experimentation, and customer experience, helping organizations turn complex technology investments into tangible business outcomes.
Director of Software Engineering at Wegmans
Craig Oley is Director of Software Engineering – Digital at Wegmans Food Markets. He leads engineering across Wegmans.com, the Wegmans app, Meals2Go, and the customer and loyalty platforms that power personalized experiences at scale. With deep experience in composable commerce and digital transformation, Craig is passionate about building high-performing teams and scalable, flexible systems. His organization is actively leveraging AI to accelerate engineering and enable faster innovation, helping deliver differentiated customer experiences at scale. Craig also serves as a MACH Alliance Ambassador.