Brand-Side Researchers Can Attend IIEX.AI 2026 for Free: Here's What You'll Gain
If you lead an insights function right now, you're probably not short on AI ideas. Vendors are pitching synthetic samples, an agency partner is testing an AI moderator, and someone on your team has likely already run a report through a large language model just to see what happens.
What's harder to come by is judgment. Which applications actually hold up under scrutiny? What needs a governance conversation before it touches a deliverable? Where does AI genuinely save time versus just relocating the work? And how are other insights organizations turning early experiments into workflows they can defend to legal, security, and leadership?
Those are the questions IIEX.AI 2026 is built around. Hosted by Greenbook on September 23-24, the virtual event brings together more than 2,000 insights leaders from 500-plus brand-side teams and 200-plus research agencies to talk through exactly this stage of AI adoption, and qualified brand-side researchers can attend the live event at no cost.
Hear How Other Brand Teams Are Actually Using AI
Rather than theorize about what AI could eventually do, IIEX.AI's agenda leans on people describing what they actually built.
Marks & Spencer is presenting its pilot of humanoid avatars in research ("Facing Tomorrow: M&S's Journey with Humanoid Avatars"), a session that gets into the operational and ethical questions behind a technology most insights teams have only encountered in vendor demos.
Ancestry is walking through how it rebuilt customer understanding at scale, relevant to any team whose customer data has outgrown its existing analysis methods.
Alliance Pharmaceuticals is discussing how it's using AI to fuel its next wave of innovation work, and Miro's session frames AI adoption as a team sport, a useful lens for insights leaders figuring out how research, product, and design can share AI-assisted work without duplicating effort or losing rigor.
DIRECTV's "No Code? No Problem! Vibe Coding for Non-Coders" speaks directly to researchers who've started building their own tools without a technical background. Google, Amazon, and Stanford University also appear on the agenda, alongside teams from No7 Beauty Company, Salesforce, Mondelēz International, AARP, DISH, and Organon. The value here isn't the roster; it's the chance to hear practitioners describe what worked, what didn't, and what they'd change.
Compare Your AI Strategy Against What Other Teams Are Testing
Most insights leaders don't need convincing that AI is worth testing. What's harder to gauge on your own is whether your organization is ahead, behind, or roughly in line with peers facing the same decisions. IIEX.AI gives you an opportunity to benchmark your approach against what other teams are testing.
Sessions across the program touch on adoption patterns, workflow redesign, governance frameworks, validation methods, and how much human oversight organizations are keeping in place as AI takes on more of the research process.
If your team has already built a validation protocol for AI-assisted findings, you'll find out whether it resembles what other brand-side teams are doing, or whether you're missing a step they've already identified as necessary. If you haven't built one yet, you'll hear how teams further along handled it, including where they got it wrong the first time. For anyone still deciding how much autonomy to give AI agents inside a research workflow, or how to document AI use for compliance review, that kind of comparison is worth more than another vendor pitch.
See the Tools, and Understand the Decisions Behind Them
IIEX.AI includes a substantial lineup of AI research tools and live demonstrations, but the more durable takeaway isn't a list of vendor names, it's the reasoning attendees can apply afterward. Each demo is a chance to see what specific problem a tool solves, where it sits in a research workflow, and how the people evaluating it are testing for accuracy and bias before trusting its output.
Watching those conversations in real time gives brand-side researchers a sharper set of questions for their own vendor evaluations: What's the validation methodology? What happens when the tool is wrong? Where does a person still need to review the output before it reaches a stakeholder? Those questions matter more than any single feature comparison, and they're easier to develop by watching experienced buyers interrogate a tool than by reading a product page.
Bring Practical Ideas Back to Your Team
The measure of a good conference isn't what you hear, it's what you can bring back to your team and put to use.
A brand-side researcher attending IIEX.AI can reasonably expect to leave with a short list of AI applications worth piloting internally, sharper questions to ask AI research vendors before signing a contract, at least one governance idea worth raising with legal or IT, and concrete examples to share with leadership about how comparable organizations are approaching the same decisions.
Just as useful is what the event clarifies about your existing workflow. Sessions on research reporting, knowledge management, and human-AI collaboration tend to surface where AI can reasonably absorb repetitive work and where a researcher's judgment remains the differentiator. That distinction is often more valuable to bring back than any single tool recommendation.
Free Live Access Removes One More Barrier
Because IIEX.AI is fully virtual, attending doesn't require travel, a hotel, or two days out of office for anyone on your team. That matters beyond convenience; it changes who can realistically attend. Instead of sending one person to report back afterward, an insights team can have several people in different sessions at once: one following the governance and validation track, another watching tool demonstrations, another sitting in on the qualitative or synthetic data sessions most relevant to their category.
Qualified brand-side researchers can register for complimentary live access to the full two-day event. That's not the reason to attend; the content is, but it does mean the cost of involving your team in the conversation isn't what stands in the way.
It's also worth reviewing the agenda before the event rather than during it. With sessions running across governance, tools, and case studies simultaneously, deciding in advance which tracks map to what your team is actually deciding right now and who should be in which session is easier with a few weeks of lead time than it is the morning of.
What to Do Next
If you're responsible for deciding where AI belongs in your insights function, IIEX.AI gives you two days to see what peers are actually testing, what’s holding up under real use, and which questions your own team should be asking next.
Qualified brand-side researchers can attend IIEX.AI 2026 live for free. Explore the agenda and register for September 23–24.
View the Agenda & Register Free
Speakers, participating companies, sessions, and event details were confirmed at the time of publication. All speakers, sessions, schedules, and program details are subject to change due to circumstances beyond our control.