Exploring:
How one enterprise media and archival team approached AI adoption while facing increasing workloads, growing asset collections, and limited staff growth.

Offering:
Perspectives from both manager and senior leadership on building responsible, scalable AI adoption strategies that balance innovation, operational efficiency, and team trust.

The challenge:

Content operations are evolving faster than most organizations can adapt. 

Response:

How AI-powered content supply chains, content provenance, trust, and governance are reshaping the industry and why the organizations that succeed will be those that build the capability to adapt continuously.

What it really takes to lead change, accelerate adoption, and prepare organizations for what’s next.

The Great DAM Bake Off is a forum to provide attendees with succinct, comparative presentations on the latest DAM solutions.

DAM vendors will present a series of short, focused demos showing how their systems address specific business use cases and attendees will help crown the "DAM NY 2026 Tastiest DAM Demo".

Expert judges will offer commentary, both attendees and the judges can ask tough questions, but YOU vote for the winner. Which system soufflé will rise to the top?

Context:

For years, DAM success has been measured by operational metrics - downloads, logins, storage usage, and search activity. But do these numbers really demonstrate business value?

Today's DAM leaders are under increasing pressure to prove measurable impact.

An interactive panel:

Leading industry experts discuss how organizations are moving beyond activity metrics to outcomes that matter, including:

Challenge:

Brands and marketing organizations must determine what metadata fields and relationships are appropriate for AI integration with digital assets. AI can help automate tasks, including:

• Tagging
• Categorising
• Describing

AI is used to support DAM duties such as metadata clean-up, governance documentation and reporting. Applications that optimize asset ingestion, saving time and money.

However, there are important questions that must be answered:

Digital asset management has traditionally focused on organizing, governing, and distributing approved content. But what happens after those assets leave your DAM?

As counterfeit goods, unauthorized sellers, and intellectual property infringement continue to expand across ecommerce marketplaces, social media, and digital channels, organizations are discovering that their DAM can play a much larger role in brand protection.

How Helen of Troy Built an Agentic DAM Across Multiple Brands

Reality

Retail teams know the pain: 

• Fragmented workflows across brands.
• Seasonal campaigns that barely ship on time.
• Creative assets that are impossible to find.
• The promise of AI that doesn't quite deliver. 

Helen of Troy lived this reality across OXO, Hydro Flask, Osprey, Drybar, Braun, Hot Tools, PUR, and more. 

The response

Most DAM conversations focus on strategy, governance, metadata, AI, and transformation. Far fewer focus on what actually breaks in day-to-day operations.

This panel brings together practitioners from across the DAM ecosystem to discuss the operational realities that often remain hidden behind process diagrams and transformation roadmaps.

Panelists share candid perspectives on where workflows fail, why workarounds emerge, and what prevents organizations from achieving the outcomes they expected from their DAM investments.