The GetWhy team spent months planning and preparing for the Summit. Selecting the venue, building the agenda, coordinating with vendors, developing presentations, emails and marketing materials. The kind of work that happens in the background long before anyone walks through the door.

So when I finally stood in the room at Villa Copenhagen, it was amazing to see more than 300 people from over 20 countries fill the room. Months of planning had come to life and the energy in the room was buzzing from the first minute. Villa Copenhagen was a beautiful choice for the venue, the interior created a very intimate setting before a single speaker even took the stage. Breakfast and coffee were laid out as people arrived; both delicious. And attendees were greeted with gift bags at their seats.

Our host, Colleen Funkey, did a great job walking us through the day, introducing each speaker and keeping the energy in the room up from one session to the next. The day’s agenda had a variety of formats from keynotes, a product demo, a panel, breakout sessions and more which I think kept people engaged. Throughout the day, I noticed people were locked in, taking notes, leaning forward and asking questions that added to the conversation. Every speaker brought a different angle and you could feel the room treating each one as valuable.

What I loved the most was how different every speaker’s perspective was, but how much they still complimented each other. Each speaker contributed a valuable perspective to the day, but there were a few moments that stood out to me. Casper Henningsen, GetWhy CEO & Founder, opened the Summit with a line I keep coming back to: “The businesses that win are the ones that get closest to a real person at the moment it counts.”

Another moment that stood out to me was during Tony Costella’s keynote. He gave the room an image to think about. “Stop treating consumers like rocks, fixed points you can measure and file away, and start treating them like clouds, always moving, always changing shape.”

Vincent F. Hendricks opened his keynote with an important question: when intelligence becomes abundant, what becomes valuable? His answer was attention and trust. “The more powerful AI becomes, the more trust matters,” he said. “Trust shifts from can the machine generate to can we rely on this system to do consequential decisions.”

The panel, Turning Empathy into an Advantage, was one of my favorite sessions from the day. Edwin Taborda called empathy a hard business capability, not a soft skill. Mireille Patoine brought the B2B lens, reminding everyone that there are humans behind every logo. James Wycherley pushed the room to think of themselves as insight activists, not just producers. And Joanna Dumont closed with a prediction: the businesses that win five years from now will be the ones that are customer centric. I appreciate how this echoed Casper’s line from earlier in the day.

After all the sessions, we moved into happy hour which I think was a nice closing to the day. It was an opportunity to connect with people in the industry, share ideas, ask questions, and deconstruct everything we had just heard.

My takeaway is that this year’s GetWhy Summit felt like more than just an event. It was a platform for ideas, influence, and impact during a crucial time in the industry. The conversations happening between sessions, at lunch, and in the hallways were just as valuable as the sessions on stage which is something you can only hope for. Thank you to our host, Colleen, to every speaker who gave us so much to think about, and to everyone who traveled to be in that room with us. See you next year!