At Off Record’s September 2026 gathering in Connecticut, leaders from Rebellion Group and some of the region’s most influential organizations explored the future of marketing, AI, human creativity, and the surprising power of working together.
There’s a strange ritual we’ve all come to accept at professional networking events. We gather incredibly accomplished people in a room, give them name tags and cocktails, and hope something interesting happens. We exchange business cards, make pleasant conversation, and occasionally stumble into a relationship worth remembering. It’s not necessarily a bad way to meet people, but considering the collective intelligence in the room, it’s a remarkably inefficient way to use it.
At Off Record, we wanted to try something different.
On September 24, 2026, more than 60 senior marketing executives, business leaders, and industry experts gathered at Rebellion Group in Cheshire, Connecticut, for an invitation-only event designed around an admittedly unusual proposition: What if we stopped asking accomplished people to network and gave them something worth thinking about together?
The result was an afternoon of candid discussion, collaborative problem-solving, and a reminder that the most valuable thing in a room full of intelligent people isn’t necessarily what any one person knows. It’s what becomes possible when they start working through a problem together.
The Future of Marketing Is a Human Conversation
The afternoon opened with The New Rules of Discovery, a panel moderated by James Dowd, Chief Operating Officer and Chief Creative Officer of Rebellion Group. An author, speaker, and creative executive whose work explores the intersection of behavioral psychology, creativity, leadership, and technology, Dowd guided a conversation about one of marketing’s most consequential challenges: what happens when artificial intelligence changes how people discover, evaluate, and choose brands?
Joined by marketing and technology leaders including Dagmara Scalise of Merkle, Linda Albright of Albright AI Agency, Michael Vigeant of GreatBlue Research, Kent Phillips of Covetrus, Dylan Pattenaude of Open Strategy Group, and Zac Camner of Everlast Energy, the discussion moved beyond the familiar excitement surrounding AI and into the less comfortable questions facing marketers.
For decades, businesses have built strategies around being found through traditional search. But AI-powered discovery, generative engine optimization (GEO), and answer engine optimization (AEO) are changing the relationship between brands and the people looking for them. Visibility is becoming more complicated, authority is taking on new meaning, and the familiar rules of search engine optimization (SEO) no longer tell the entire story.
For Dowd, whose career has centered on understanding how people think, feel, make decisions, and respond to communication, the conversation represented something bigger than another technological shift. Marketing has always been about influencing human behavior. AI is changing the mechanisms of discovery, but understanding people remains essential to creating meaningful connections.
That tension between technological advancement and human understanding carried into the afternoon’s second panel, The CMO Is Becoming the Growth Architect.
BJ Kito, President and Chief Strategy Officer of Rebellion Group, joined senior leaders from Cornell University, Sikorsky Credit Union, Clarios, and Masonicare to explore the expanding responsibilities of modern marketing leadership. As traditional boundaries between marketing, sales, customer experience, and organizational growth continue to shift, the role of the CMO is becoming more connected to the entire business.
Together, the panels framed an interesting challenge. Technology is transforming how organizations operate, but leadership still depends on the ability to understand people, make decisions, and bring different disciplines together around a shared purpose.
Then we decided to put that idea to work.
When Networking Becomes Collaboration
Following the panels, Off Record departed from the usual conference formula. Instead of sending everyone to another presentation or an extended cocktail hour, attendees were divided into smaller executive workshops and challenged to solve realistic business problems.
The assignments explored everything from AI modernization and the future of brand measurement to organizational alignment, trust, customer experience, and the role of human creativity in an increasingly automated world.
Grant Flannery, Rebellion Group’s Head of Strategy and an award-winning brand strategist, participated in What Humans Still Do Better, a workshop confronting a question many organizations are struggling to answer: As AI becomes faster, cheaper, and increasingly capable, where should companies continue investing in human intelligence, judgment, and creativity?
It was precisely the kind of challenge Off Record was created to encourage. Nobody needed another presentation explaining that AI was going to change everything. The more useful exercise was asking leaders from different organizations and industries to decide what they would actually do about it.
Meanwhile, James Dowd moved from moderating the discovery panel to facilitating one of the executive workshops, bringing his experience in leadership, behavioral psychology, creative collaboration, and group dynamics into an environment designed to turn conversation into action.
Dowd later admitted in his personal reflection on the experience that he’d entered the workshop with a healthy degree of skepticism. After all, these were accomplished executives attending a networking event, not employees showing up for another strategic planning session. Would they really want to spend their afternoon doing more work?
Apparently, yes.
Working alongside leaders including Brenda Jahnke of Cornell, Ann Collette Krantz of Masonicare, Whitney Cadett of Sikorsky Credit Union, Giovana Monaco of Connex Credit Union, and Tanya Palmer-Labeck and Megan Arias of Mattatuck Museum, Dowd watched the group embrace the challenge with an enthusiasm that surprised even him.
Rather than competing to dominate the conversation, participants listened, questioned, challenged, and built upon one another’s thinking. Different experiences brought different perspectives, and those perspectives gradually became a shared solution. The participants weren’t simply exchanging information. They were creating something together that none of them had arrived with.
Even the prospect of taking a break proved less appealing than continuing the work.
There’s something wonderfully revealing about offering a room of executives permission to stop thinking and discovering they’d rather keep going.
The Psychology Behind a Better Kind of Connection
What happened in those workshops points toward something fundamental about human motivation.
Psychologists have long studied the conditions that encourage people to engage deeply with difficult tasks. Self-Determination Theory, for example, identifies autonomy, competence, and relatedness as important psychological needs. People are motivated when they have ownership over their choices, opportunities to exercise their abilities, and meaningful connections with others.
The Off Record workshops weren’t designed as a psychology experiment, but they created an environment where those needs could be met. Participants had the freedom to approach problems in their own ways, the opportunity to contribute valuable expertise, and a shared challenge that gave their interactions an immediate purpose.
Dowd’s approach to executive facilitation reflected that understanding. Rather than controlling the conversation or supplying the answers, his role was to create the conditions for participants to think, challenge one another, and collaborate productively. The aim wasn’t to be the smartest person in the room. It was to make the room smarter.
It’s an important idea for anyone responsible for leadership, organizational culture, or creative collaboration. We spend enormous amounts of time trying to make work easier, smoother, and more efficient, but sometimes the right kind of challenge is precisely what brings out the best in people.
And perhaps that’s what professional networking has been missing.
Traditional networking is built around the exchange of information. Collaboration is built around the creation of something new. One allows people to learn about each other, while the other gives them the opportunity to discover how they think, what they value, and what they can accomplish together.
The distinction becomes particularly interesting when those people come from different industries, professional backgrounds, and organizations. The experiences that make them different also make their contributions more valuable.
A Different Kind of Executive Experience
Off Record was created around a simple belief: The most valuable professional conversations rarely happen when everyone is listening to someone on stage. They happen when people feel comfortable enough to question conventional thinking, challenge assumptions, and explore ideas they haven’t entirely figured out yet.
That belief shaped an event that brought together senior leaders from marketing, technology, higher education, financial services, healthcare, and other industries, with Rebellion Group executives James Dowd, BJ Kito, and Grant Flannery contributing expertise in creative leadership, marketing strategy, behavioral understanding, and collaborative problem-solving.
The afternoon explored some of the biggest questions facing modern marketing, from AI-powered search and evolving CMO responsibilities to the future of human creativity. But perhaps its most interesting outcome had little to do with technology.
It was watching what happened when talented people were given permission to think together without the usual organizational boundaries, professional hierarchies, or expectations of a traditional conference.
They didn’t need another lecture. They needed an interesting problem, different perspectives, and the opportunity to create something worth caring about.
As businesses continue searching for the next technological advantage, experiences like Off Record offer a reminder that there’s still extraordinary value in something remarkably simple: bringing thoughtful people together and giving them a reason to think.
After all, the future of business won’t be shaped by what we already know. It’ll be shaped by what we’re willing to figure out together.
