MSI Forum: When AI Disrupts — Rethinking Data, Insights, and Modeling
February 11 – February 12 @ 8:00 am – 5:00 pm PST • Los Angeles | In-Person (Feb. 12 will be from 8:00am – 12:00pm)
Vassilis Bakopoulos – SVP, Head of Insights & Research, MMA Global
Vas is the SVP Head of Research for the MMA Global. In his role he is tasked with formulating a learning agenda for the Marketing Industry, and designing new experiments to address some of the biggest challenges in marketing, from AI and data, to attribution, targeting , the role of brand and creative. Vas comes from the advertising world where he led Strategic Planning At Digitas and previously at Kantar in Europe and the US. His sits at the Board of Trustees of the Advertising Research Foundation and the board of Content of I-COM.
Dante Donati – Assistant Professor of Business, Columbia Business School
Dante Donati is an Assistant Professor in the Marketing Division at Columbia Business School. He studies the economics of digital platforms and their implications for firm decisions, consumer behavior, and well-being, using empirical methods. His research covers generative AI, digital advertising, online reviews, and digital well-being, and has been published in leading journals including PNAS, Marketing Science, and the Journal of Health Economics. He is the co-founder of Virtual Lab, an open-source tool for social media survey recruitment and the evaluation of advertising campaigns. Before joining Columbia, he earned a Ph.D. in Economics from Pompeu Fabra University and was a visiting researcher at Stanford University. He also collaborates with the World Bank on policy-oriented research and is a research fellow at CESifo.
Megan Franklin – Vice President – Creative Excellence / Ipsos
In her six years at Ipsos, Megan has partnered with leading financial, B2B, and tech brands—and their agencies—guiding them through the creative development process from early-stage research to in-market assessment. She leverages storytelling and strategic, actionable guidance to shape, test, and optimize creative. An AI champion across Ipsos and its Creative Excellence (CRE) practice, she drives quality and efficiency gains, helps develop AI-centered products, and partners with clients who integrate AI into creative testing. She champions HI—humans and AI working together—to deliver more insightful, accurate results and faster learning, driving stronger creative effectiveness.
Ron Friedman – Vice President, Mattel Future Lab
Ron Friedman leads Mattel Future Lab, a visionary division he founded in 2022 to redefine play by merging Mattel’s iconic brand portfolio with cutting-edge technology. Under Ron’s leadership, Mattel Future Lab explores what’s next in play, expanding beyond traditional toys into interactive, tech-enabled realms.
Before launching Future Lab, Ron spearheaded Amazon Key, overseeing Product Management, Marketing, and Business for Amazon Key, Amazon’s secure delivery innovations. Prior to that, he spent seven years with Mattel, driving global product marketing, innovation, and technology partnerships that continue to shape the Hot Wheels brand today.
Ron’s knack for unlocking innovation is backed by an MBA from UCLA Anderson (Class of 2011) and certifications in in Software Product Management, Agile SAFe POPM, and Human-Centered Design from IDEO. Originally from Mexico City, Ron now calls Los Angeles home, where he lives with his wife, daughter, and son.
Runshan Fu – Assistant Professor of Marketing, NYU Stern School of Business
Runshan Fu is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at New York University’s Stern School of Business. Her research focuses on studying the economic and business implications of machine learning algorithms, particularly examining their unintended disparate impacts across demographic groups. She employs machine learning techniques, analytical modeling, and structural modeling methods to investigate how algorithms influence decisions and behaviors in various contexts, and their potential role in exacerbating or alleviating social inequalities.
David Gilbert – Global Director, Analytics & Insights for Marketing Excellence at Mars, Incorporated
David Gilbert is Global Director, Analytics & Insights for Marketing Excellence at Mars, Incorporated, where he leads the Communications Lab, Growth Lab, and Foresight Lab. He has more than 20 years of experience in marketing analytics and consumer insights, with expertise in marketing mix modeling, digital analytics, and measurement frameworks. In his current role, he focuses on strengthening the connection between marketing investment and business performance while partnering closely with senior marketing leaders.
David holds degrees from the University of Notre Dame and Vanderbilt University.
Kartik Hosanagar – John C. Hower Professor of Technology and Digital Business, The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania
Kartik Hosanagar is the John C. Hower Professor of Technology and Digital Business and a faculty director of Wharton Human-AI Research (WHAIR) initiative. Kartik’s current research focuses on AI-mediated commerce, design of human-AI collaboration, and AI-led business transformation. Kartik is a thirteen-time recipient of MBA or Undergraduate teaching excellence awards at the Wharton School. Kartik cofounded and developed the core IP for Yodle Inc, a venture-backed firm that was listed among America’s fastest growing private companies prior to being acquired by Web.com. He was a cofounder of Jumpcut Media, an AI workflow platform for media & entertainment industry acquired by Cinelytic. He recently founded Bodhium Labs, a research lad focused on AI and agentic commerce. Kartik is the author of A Human’s Guide to Machine Intelligence, an award-winning book that originally proposed an AI Bill of Rights in 2019 and influenced the Whitehouse AI Bill of Rights.
Zainab Jamal – Director of Data Sciences & Analytics, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Dr. Zainab Jamal is recognized for delivering transformative technology solutions and unlocking business value through advanced analytics, artificial intelligence, and strategic change management. Currently, as the Director of Data Sciences & Analytics at Hewlett Packard Enterprise, she manages cross-functional teams in HPE’s Global Marketing organization, driving business transformation by leveraging people, data, processes, and technology to deliver real business value.
She has led strategic collaborations and partnerships within HPE and with external partners, building innovative solutions that generate business impact. Her expertise includes developing and implementing AI-powered tools for sales and marketing intelligence, business outcome-focused strategies, and orchestrating change management initiatives that enhance operational efficiency. Her leadership has significantly improved customer engagement, team productivity, process efficiency, and measurable ROI.
Dr. Jamal holds a Ph.D. in Management (Marketing) from UCLA Anderson School of Management, an MBA from the Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad, an MA in Economics from Delhi School of Economics, and a BA in Economics from Hindu College, Delhi University. Her professional skills encompass business and technology transformation, project and people management, data operations, analytics, software development, and domain expertise in marketing, sales, customer strategy, predictive modeling, and AI/ML applications.
Tai Lam – Assistant Professor of Marketing, UCLA Anderson School of Management
H. Tai Lam is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at UCLA Anderson School of Management. His research lies at the intersection of quantitative marketing and industrial organization, with a focus on platforms, advertising, consumer search, and antitrust. His work shows that platform design choices—such as how products are arranged and surfaced in marketplace search—can reshape consumer search intensity and firm pricing, leading to counterintuitive conclusions about market power and the welfare effects of proposed antitrust remedies. He also studies how generative AI changes equilibrium outcomes in digital markets, including evidence on creative goods marketplaces and how LLM adoption shifts online search and downstream website traffic. Lam earned his Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University. He teaches MBAs to combine real-world data with statistics and machine learning to make better business decisions.
Zipei Lu – PhD Candidate, University of Maryland
Zipei is a PhD candidate at the University of Maryland and will be joining the City University of New York, Baruch College this fall. Her research lies at the intersection of artificial intelligence and customer relationship management (CRM). Her recent paper, “AI for Customer Journeys: A Transformer Approach,” published in the Journal of Marketing Research, applies generative AI to customer journey prediction and multi-touch attribution. She is currently working on integrating marketing mix modeling (MMM) with customer journey–based AI to support firms’ budget allocation decisions.
Samantha Moore – Director of Market Research, Microsoft
Samantha Moore is a Director of Market Research at Microsoft, where she leads brand and campaign insights across the company’s global portfolio. Over the past decade, she has helped shape Microsoft’s brand strategy and translate audience understanding into highimpact creative and media decisions. Her current work focuses on how generative AI is transforming consumer behavior, expectations, and trust—and how brands can evolve in response. She is also pioneering new AIdriven measurement approaches that close the gap between business questions and customerpowered answers, enabling faster, more predictive, and more actionable insight for marketers and product teams.
Oded Netzer – Vice Dean of Research and the Arthur J. Samberg Professor of Business at Columbia Business School
Professor Netzer is the Vice Dean of Research and the Arthur J. Samberg Professor of Business at Columbia Business School, an affiliate of the Columbia Data Science Institute, and the author of the book Decisions over Decimals. Professor Netzer is a world-renowned expert in data-driven decision-making and extracting meaningful insights from data. He wrote dozens of papers published in the top-tier academic journals. His award-winning research is broadly read and highly cited. He is an award-winning teacher at Columbia Business School’s MBA, Executive MBA, and Executive Education programs. Professor Netzer is also an Amazon Scholar at Amazon’s Advertising Sales AI team. Additionally, he frequently consults to Fortune 500 companies and entrepreneurial organizations on strategy, data-driven decision making, marketing research and extracting useful information from rich and thin data.
Richard Qiao – Director of Marketing Science, State Farm
Richard Qiao is currently Director of Marketing Science at State Farm. He leads teams that focus on marketing channel optimizations, experimentation, and AI adoption. Richard introduced the attribution framework into the organization, launched State Farm’s first Gen AI application for marketing, and designed the AI adoption roadmap to empower the marketing organization via AI. He is passionate about making data and AI practical, responsible and useful for long-term business growth.
Prior to State Farm, Richard held executive roles at IPG, CVS Health and Wayfair, where he helped build AI-driven analytics, experimentation, and personalization capabilities that improved customer experience and business performance.
Jiwoong Shin – Professor of Marketing, Yale School of Management: Senior Editor, Marketing Science
Jiwoong Shin is a Professor of Marketing at the Yale School of Management and a Senior Editor at Marketing Science. He holds a Ph.D. in Management Science from MIT and an MS and BS in Business Administration from Seoul National University. An applied economic theorist, Professor Shin uses analytical modeling and game theory to study marketing strategy, digital innovation, and firm decision-making, with research spanning advertising, targeting, pricing, and customer relationship management.
His work has received wide recognition, including the John D. C. Little Best Paper Award twice consecutively (2010, 2011) for the best marketing paper published in Marketing Science and Management Science, and finalist recognition for the 2020 ISMS Long-Term Impact Award. He was named an MSI Young Scholar in 2011 and an MSI Scholar in 2018. His teaching has been recognized with the Inspiring Yale Award and the Yale School of Management’s Teaching Excellence Award in 2025.
Professor Shin has served in editorial roles at leading journals including Marketing Science, Journal of Marketing Research, Management Science, and Quantitative Marketing and Economics, and previously served as Vice President of Education for the INFORMS Society for Marketing Science.
Taylor Schreiner – Senior Director and Head of Adobe Digital Insights
Taylor Schreiner is Senior Director and Head of Adobe Digital Insights (ADI), where he leads the team behind Adobe’s flagship insights on the digital economy and customer experience, including the Adobe Digital Economy Index and Adobe Digital Price Index. ADI provides timely, data-driven perspectives not only on ecommerce and inflation, but also on creativity trends, document productivity, and all aspects of the digital commercial and creative world. Adobe Digital Insights research regularly appears in top outlets such as The Wall Street Journal, CNBC, and the BBC, and was recently cited by Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell as a source of inflation data for the Fed. Taylor holds an MBA from UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business and a BA from Amherst College.
K. Sudhir – James Frank Professor of Marketing, Private Enterprise and Management at the Yale School of Management
Sudhir is James Frank Professor of Marketing, Private Enterprise and Management at the Yale School of Management. He is a past MSI academic fellow and currently on the MSI Leadership Council. Sudhir was previously Editor-in-Chief of Marketing Science and President-Elect of INFORMS Society for Marketing Science (ISMS). As a pioneer in the development of structural econometric models in marketing, Sudhir published many foundational and award-winning models in marketing channels, sales force management, organizational buying and the marketing of customer data. He is currently pursuing an active research and teaching agenda on the use of AI, machine learning and Large Language Models in marketing.
Artem Timoshenko – Associate Professor of Marketing, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management
Artem Timoshenko is an Associate Professor at Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management. He studies how emerging technologies are reshaping innovation, building new methods for product development and data-driven personalization. Artem holds a PhD in Marketing from MIT Sloan, as well as advanced degrees in Computer Science and Economics.
Stephanie Tully – Associate Professor of Marketing, USC Marshall School of Business
Stephanie Tully is an Associate Professor of Marketing at USC’s Marshall School of Business and a Visiting Scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. Professor Tully studies the impact of resources—money, time, and technology—on consumers. Her research examines how people navigate their finances and factors that influence their spending decisions. More recently, she has studied how people respond to AI in their lives. Her work has been published in top academic journals including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the Journal of Consumer Research, and featured in major outlets such as The Wall Street Journal and Forbes. She serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Consumer Research, and is on the editorial board of multiple other journals. An MSI Young Scholar and recipient of the Behavioral Science and Policy Association Best Paper Award, she was most recently honored by Poets&Quants as one of the “50 Best Undergraduate Professors of 2024.”
Grant West – Senior Director, Marketing Science
Dr. West is a marketing science leader specializing in advanced measurement and customer analytics. At in4mation insights (i4i), he leads consulting engagements for major advertising brands, helping clients transform data into actionable insights that drive growth.
Beyond consulting, Dr. West is currently commercializing transformer-based customer journey intelligence technology developed in collaboration with Dr. P.K. Kannan and Zipei Lu at the University of Maryland.
Dr. West received his Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas. He lives in the Boston area with his wife and teenage daughter. If he’s not working on DIY home renovations, you can find him at the local muni golf course down the street.
Helen Wolf, Ph.D. – Senior Director, Global Consumer Experience Insights, Colgate-Palmolive
Helen is an experienced client-side insights professional with passions for people-centricity, disruptive innovation, and insights agility. As Senior Global Director, Consumer Experience Insights at Colgate-Palmolive, she enjoys the challenge of understanding consumer connections holistically, to provoke people-first thinking and inspire transformational growth. She is always looking for analytical ways to integrate behavior and attitudes, and loves to experiment with new technology-enabled techniques to gain a fuller picture of people at both depth and scale.