Your Early Look at UNBOUND 2026: The First Sessions Are Here

The growth playbook a lot of teams have relied on for the past decade is being rewritten: AI reshuffled search, paid channels got noisier, and buyers got savvier. The "more content, more budget, more reps" model stopped delivering the way it used to.

The first wave of UNBOUND 2026 sessions (with more to come in June) reflects how leaders across marketing, sales, customer success, and growth are actually responding, with frameworks, data, and decisions they've already made and are ready to share. Here's where to start.

The Playbook Has Changed. These Sessions Prove It.

UNBOUND 2026 sessions aren't about doing more of what worked before. This year’s content lineup is about knowing when to stop optimizing a broken system and start building a better one.

Jay Schwedelson recognizes that AI has made knowledge cheap. Everyone has insights. Everyone sounds smart. So who wins? In The Next 5 Years Will Not Reward the Smartest People, his answer is a direct challenge to how most professionals think about competitive advantage right now. If you've been optimizing instead of acting, this one is for you.

Grant Lee, co-founder and CEO of Gamma, brings a founder's proof of concept to that argument. In The 0 to $100M ARR Playbook: Gamma's Growth Journey, he unpacks the unconventional choices behind Gamma's rise (investing in brand over performance marketing, turning influencers into a growth engine, building tight product feedback loops) and shares the playbook that doubled ARR growth in months. It's a growth story for people who are done with growth hacks.

Mahyar Raissi is doing something rare: sharing the full truth of what it takes to rebrand a company 90,000 businesses already know by name. OpenPhone to Quo: How to Rebrand 7 Years In covers the hard-won lessons from that transition: how to protect pipeline, maintain customer trust, align employees, and measure success beyond vanity metrics. If your brand is in motion or about to be, this one belongs on your list.

David Meerman Scott makes the case for fandom. Not followers, not customers, but genuine fans as the most durable growth engine a business can build. The Fandom Playbook: Create Passionate Fans to Grow Business is his argument that the most durable growth engine is a belief (not a channel). He'll walk you through how to earn it and you'll leave with a concrete framework for creating that kind of loyalty.

AI That Actually Works in Practice

Most teams aren't short on AI experimentation; they're short on AI that consistently delivers results. These sessions are for the people who are done piloting and ready to build.

Beth Dunn spent years building Agent.ai, and in The AI Gold Standard: How Great AI Tools Should Work, she flips the conversation entirely. Instead of asking how to adapt to AI, she asks what we should demand from it in terms of clarity, consistency, and trust. You'll leave with a framework for evaluating every AI tool your team is considering.

Ari Echt-Wilson walks through what it looks like when AI automation converts. HubSpot's email team nearly doubled baseline conversion rates with an AI-powered personalization architecture. In From AI Experiments to Automation That Converts, she shares the exact structure: how they chose data inputs, designed prompts that write emails without human review, and built a QA framework to protect brand voice. No engineering team required.

Elaine Zelby's workshop From Prompting to Building: Create Your First AI Agent is for marketers who've hit the ceiling of ChatGPT prompts and are ready for the next step. She covers agent architecture fundamentals, how to turn brand and persona docs into reusable skills, and how to connect CRM data into an end-to-end workflow. You'll leave having actually built something.

For anyone who has watched an AI agent invent a fact and quietly panicked, Nejc Skoberne's How to Stop AI Agents from Making Stuff Up covers the practical side of keeping AI agents in check. Get the source rules, fallback behaviors, and a simple review process to put into play before anything lands in front of a customer.

Search Doesn’t Work the Way it Used to. Here's What’s Replacing it.

Organic traffic is down. AI answer engines are up. And the teams still optimizing for a pre-AI search world are losing ground to competitors who figured out the new rules first.

If you want to understand what's actually changed and what to do about it, start with HubSpot’s Aja Frost. In What 1M+ Responses Reveal About Showing Up in Answer Engines, she shares what analyzing over a million AI responses across ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Gemini, and Perplexity taught HubSpot about how answer engines decide what to surface and how that translated into becoming the most visible CRM in AI search. (For a deeper read on Aja's AEO playbook ahead of September, this recap from INBOUND 2025 is worth your time.)

Dale Bertrand gets specific in Winning AI Search: Close the Gaps That Cost You Customers. He'll walk through the gaps in relevance, authority, and credibility that prevent brands from being surfaced — and what to do about each one. This one's for anyone who wants practical steps they can act on immediately.

Marcel Santilli ran AEO campaigns across dozens of high-growth startups before most teams knew what the acronym stood for. What 10,000 Hours of AEO Taught Us is the session for teams that want real data. You’ll learn what moved the needle across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Google AI Overviews, and what didn't.

The Human Stuff is Still the Hard Stuff

Not every competitive edge comes from a new tool or a faster process. Some of the highest-value sessions at UNBOUND 2026 are about something older than any algorithm: understanding people.

Sheena Collier built Boston While Black into a 100,000+ member community and multi-six-figure sponsorship revenue without paid acquisition. In The Belonging Economy: Marketing's New Competitive Advantage, she shares the community-led growth framework behind it and how to audit your relational capital, design high-trust spaces, and turn belonging into recurring revenue.

Dr. Carmen Simon is a cognitive neuroscientist, and in What Neuroscience Reveals About Sales Succes she'll tackle a big question in modern sales: when does human connection matter most, and where can AI actually add value? She'll examine how buyers respond differently to human sellers versus AI agents and how to design sales experiences that combine the strengths of both to improve buyer experience and performance.

Nancy Harhut brings behavioral science to the messaging decisions marketers make every day. In 3 Costly Mistakes Marketers Make with Today's Humans, she makes the case that AI-assisted, highly educated buyers don't actually respond the way most marketers assume and she’ll show exactly what messaging approaches prompt action instead. Built around real brand examples, with science to back it up, it’s a can’t-miss for marketers.

Dax Miller's Feeling Known Beats Being Targeted is a sharp reframe of personalization. Moving away from tokens and templates, toward memory, timing, and emotional context, the session will change how you'll think about what customers actually want from you.

Growth Without the Old Guardrails

UNBOUND 2026 isn't just for marketers. These sessions are for the sales leaders, RevOps practitioners, founders, and C-suite accountable for growth across the whole organization.

Xilian Sansoucy shares that 61% of successful founders acquire customers through word-of-mouth and referrals, not paid ads. In Community Over Ads: Growing Without a Marketing Budget she’ll cover how to build referral engines that compound over time, use free channels to punch above your weight, and stay top of mind without ad spend. If you're a founder who'd rather invest in relationships than ad budgets, start here.

Carole Mahoney and a sales coaching team from Harvard Business School tackle one of the most expensive problems in business: the wrong sales hire. With 75% of sales hires failing, The Hidden Cost of Cognitive Bias in Sales Hiring gives founders and sales leaders a framework for reducing the bias that leads to poor-fit hires. Learn how to meaningfully improve the odds of landing someone who'll actually perform.

Karen McFarlane has spent 14 years as a fractional CMO watching marketing leaders struggle not because they lacked strategy, but because they misread the situation they were in. Her workshop Diagnose Team Tension Before It Derails Results teaches leaders to identify which of four leadership tensions they're actually facing and apply the right response. Come ready to be honest about where you're stuck.

Sumedha Rai brings the data to a question sales teams argue about endlessly. After analyzing behavioral data from 150+ field sales reps, she found that reps who consistently executed a structured, repeatable process generated 73% higher quarterly revenue than those who relied on instinct. The advantage was process. The Death of the Natural Closer in Sales is built for anyone hiring, coaching, or leading a sales team right now.

Not Sure Where to Start?

If you're a marketing leader, the AEO sessions with Aja Frost and Dale Bertrand should be high priority content, alongside David Meerman Scott on fandom and Nancy Harhut on behavioral science.

If you're in sales or leading a revenue team, start with Carole Mahoney, Sumedha Rai, and Jay Schwedelson’s sessions.

If you're a founder or early-stage operator, Grant Lee and Xilian Sansoucy’s sessions built for where you are. If you're in RevOps, insights from Karen McFarlane and Ari Echt-Wilson will give you the most to take back to your team.

The Full UNBOUND Agenda is Still Coming

This is the first wave. More sessions drop in June with the full agenda release. Browse the UNBOUND 2026 session catalog now to start planning which content you can’t miss.

Browse the session catalog and register for UNBOUND 2026.

Frequently Asked Questions About UNBOUND 2026 Sessions

What sessions are at UNBOUND 2026? The first wave of UNBOUND 2026 sessions spans marketing strategy, AI implementation, answer engine optimization (AEO), sales performance, RevOps, leadership, and go-to-market growth. More sessions will continue to be added with the full agenda coming in June 2026.

When and where is UNBOUND 2026? UNBOUND 2026 takes place September 16–18, 2026 at the Massachusetts Convention and Exhibition Center (MCEC) in Boston.

What is AEO and why are there so many sessions about it at UNBOUND 2026? AEO (answer engine optimization) is the practice of structuring content so brands appear in AI-generated responses in tools like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, and Perplexity. It's one of the most urgent changes in how buyers discover and evaluate brands right now, which is why UNBOUND 2026 has dedicated multiple sessions to it across different angles to cover strategy, data, and execution.

How is UNBOUND different from INBOUND? UNBOUND is the evolution of INBOUND. A new name and expanded focus that reflects where business growth actually happens today: across marketing, sales, service, and operations together. The content, community, and experience have been redesigned for that broader mindset.