At our inaugural CPG Data Summit on May 13th, 2026, we welcomed sales operations, trade marketing, analytics, and data professionals from across the country to our NYC office. Building on the momentum of our Deduction and RGM Summits, this event turned the lens on data itself — the crucial layer underlying everything from trade planning to RGM.
Across a full day of sessions and roundtables, practitioners and experts tackled the real-world challenges of data quality, integration, governance, and the emerging role of AI in CPG commercial operations.
Here are the top takeaways from the conversations, case studies, and debates that took place over the course of the event.
1. The data foundation problem is structural — and it starts with master data
2. RGM needs to go from gross price to EBIT — not just net revenue
3. Data freshness — not just data volume — determines promo performance visibility
4. The Excel fallback is symptomatic of deeper integration gaps
5. AI creates value only when it’s built on operational discipline
Thierry Soudee — UpClear, Founder & CEO
Thierry opened the day with a data-driven look at how the CDO role has evolved in CPG — from systems management to governance, data product thinking, and AI oversight. He contextualized the scale of the data explosion facing mid-market brands, highlighted the emergence of RGM as a must-have function, and set the stage for the day’s discussions around data quality, trust, and speed of decision-making.
Don Baker — The Partnering Group
Don brought years of RGM consulting experience and a practitioner’s candor to his two sessions. In the first, he walked through the master data readiness areas of Pricing, Product, and Customer — with case studies, do’s and don’ts, and a persistent challenge to the room: get the business driver language right before the finance language, or your trade system will never serve its purpose.
Marine Bibal — EasyPicky, Co-Founder
Marine introduced the concept of the ‘freshness gap’ in promo execution data — the lag between when a promotion runs and when brands receive visibility into how it actually executed at the shelf. She shared real-world examples of promotion plans that looked perfect on paper but failed in the store, and outlined a framework for embedding qualitative execution data into the promo planning process.
Andrew Dentinger — UpClear, Product Director
Andrew provided a grounded overview of what data readiness actually means — walking through anomaly detection, tokenization, product mapping challenges, and the role of synthetic data. He also offered a frank perspective on AI: in CPG, the value is less in advanced generative models than in using AI to cleanse, label, and prepare data for modeling — a step most organizations still do manually.
Don Baker — The Partnering Group
In his second session, Don connected data strategy to organizational design, governance structures, and the practical mechanics of getting started — even for small teams. He shared his own master data governance org from Sara Lee, walked through intake form-based governance as a starting point, and closed with guidance on pricing strategy in the context of current tariff and fuel cost uncertainty.
