The reviews are in: Illuminate 2025: The Efficiency Effect delivered invaluable insights for attendees. A sophisticated audience made up of the industry’s top minds joined us in Philadelphia to absorb practical knowledge about everything from AI as your new teammate and how to build customer trust to navigating uncertain times and solving everyday challenges with change management, multishoring and organizational management.

We planned the conference with intentionality, tailoring presentations around attendees’ specific needs, delivering high-value content and guidance that presented a sea change for some. Illuminate 2025 created space for participants to have access to speakers, join in conversations with peers and share experiences beyond the formal sessions.

Here’s a recap of what our attendees gained from this all-access event.

AI as the partner at your side, not a tool in your toolbox

How do we reframe AI from a tool to a partner or collaborator? Keynote speaker Jeremy Utley shared how to shift the mindset from “using” AI to considering it as a teammate. Changing our mindset is everything. Viewing AI as a teammate is a practical step to expand innovation. Experimenting with AI outside of work life to build fluency is a useful place to start. Prompts are important, yes, but promoting two-way conversations with AI that result in actionable strategies for daily use can increase users’ comfort levels and develop better results.

Building on that perspective, we took the process deeper, shifting the focus from “using AI” to “working with AI”:

  • Begin the process of onboarding AI as a partner.
  • Synthetic creativity blends human ingenuity with AI as a creative asset.
  • AI as a collaborative partner for idea generation and problem-solving.

Utley considers the single-greatest determinant of quality of your ideas to be the quantity of your ideas. Instead of simply looking for good ideas, we were encouraged to generate bad ideas to be able to find the “delightful” ones.

Taking these ideas a step further, Salesforce Creative Services Manager, Amy Elias, guided attendees in a hands-on session, showing them how to create an AI onboarding framework. By defining roles and skills, establishing boundaries and expectations, practicing prompting, and exploring governance for overall accountability, table groups implemented these ideas and resources in real time.

Customer trust and continuous improvement

What else was on our minds? The critical component of data privacy and trust in AI. Cella’s Director of Digital Marketing, Mary Baum, reminded the attendees of the phrase “trust is currency.” There is a real paradox that marketers face between the expectation of personalization and distrust of data gathering. True innovation requires mastering the delicate dance between hyper-personalization and ironclad privacy. Companies must build trust with transparency, giving users granular control over their data.

Maintaining trust is a long-term investment, and it’s vital for healthy, lasting customer relationships. How can marketers do it? Not ignoring vital continuous improvement strategies. By constructing frameworks for steering through resource constraints and promoting a culture of small, incremental enhancements, making significant gains is entirely realistic.

Human in the loop and elevated human role

A central theme of the conference, AI accelerates, humans elevate, highlighted the concept of “human in the loop.” It all comes back to this: AI serves to accelerate processes. Humans provide the elevation, reasoning and guardrails. When we get beyond fear-based thinking, we can foster an optimistic and open environment to help digital, marketing and creative teams understand how AI integrates into work and makes room for new ways of thinking and creating.

Illuminate: The event that’s created with you in mind

Illuminate isn’t just another conference where you’re one among the masses, lost in a sea of competing ideas in a vast convention hall. Cella is committed to making space for the industry leaders to be immersed in a highly interactive environment that fosters a sense of community. This intimate event is consistently filled with leading digital, marketing and creative experts who generously share their learned experiences to benefit others.

Illuminate stands out as a unique event in the industry. Unlike large conferences where conversations often remain surface-level, its intimate format creates space for genuine dialogue between speakers and participants. Illuminate offers an exceptional return on time invested—providing insights, strategies, practical frameworks that can be put into practice right away, and connections that continue to create value long after the event ends.

Is it time to redefine your organization’s relationship with AI? Our experts have expertise ready to share and help you reach your goals. Contact us today.