This time, I didn't have the courage/ambition to do a written live on LinkedIn 😉 But I still took a few small notes from the event, especially from two of the morning conferences on Ibexa's mindset and on the details concerning the agency AI future of the suite of tools.
Overall, we (I'm including Marion, with whom I debriefed) are quite pleasantly surprised by the event ! This new edition establishes the transition from Activation Day to the’Orchestration Day. The main change being that in the meantime, all of QNTM group's marketing brands have moved under the umbrella Ibexa (even if each tool keeps its identity).
Before getting into the substance, on the form, we had an introduction with a performance by Gilles Babinet, whose central message I have a bit of trouble remembering. It was about AI, obviously, but I had a bit of trouble grasping what he wanted to explain to us. Anyway, the rest was much better.
Otherwise, what I mainly remember is teams that are asking themselves the right questions overall !
this was felt in the’Bertrand Maugain, CEO of Ibexa, speaks the will to build a A comprehensive martech stack and 100 % in Europe is fully aligned with the global restructuring in progress. A certain realism about what AI has actually produced for marketers in the last two years is also noteworthy. No angelic speeches: globally, So far, most marketers don't Neither saved time nor saw performance boosts with generative AI. We are replacing fundamentals that are even more important in a world where AI wants to impose itself everywhere: the role of (human) decision-making, collaboration, business specifics, and knowledge.
The other interesting session was about the Ibexa AI projects (which will be integrated with the same philosophy across all group tools). Even if these announcements may seem late, the concepts developed have me particularly impressed Maybe it was worth the wait.
From the Modularity, a freedom to Choices in LLMs and the proposed models, some libraries already available from MCP (internal AND external tools), agent libraries, the construction of’Custom agents by clients. And a functional live demo!
Orchestrating Performance in the Age of Agentic Marketing — Bertrand Maugain, CEO of Ibexa
Bertrand Maugain opened the day's session with a market analysis framework. Starting point: the famous MarTech Map, and its staggering finding of over 15,000 SaaS publishers on the market, with a continuous stream of new AI players. The result is that marketers are drowning in execution. More and more campaigns, tasks, and tools, with an average of 40 MarTech tools to manage.
Ibexa's thesis is that this market will consolidate, and that «best of breed» has mostly led to fragmentation (ironic, considering Actito defended this positioning tooth and nail a few years ago). Hence, the stated willingness to build a coherent European martech ecosystem, structured around complementary and integrated bricks (APIs, shared UX, UI):
- Qualifio Data collection
- Raptor customer experience personalization
- Actito customer engagement platform
- Cohesive the CMS
- Quable : PIM, to centralize product data
The point that I found most refreshing was the’honesty of AI diagnosis. Market consolidation began before AI, and we are observing a stagnation in the number of players today. Above all: no real efficiency gains with GenAI. AI is everywhere, but the ROI isn't there.. Worse, for now, AI even tends to worsen the fragmentation of the martech stack.
The message: Magic doesn't exist. The context of a company is complex (decision-making, collaboration, business specificities) and Governance is becoming a central issue, because the speed enabled by AI directly affects control and confidence. For Bertrand Maugain, the first phase of AI marketing (that of GenAI) is over: we are moving on to agentic marketing. And in this new world, The marketer of tomorrow will primarily become the guardian of the brand and its values..
All of this is carried by what Ibexa calls the «Ibexa way»: an ecosystem approach and an unapologetic «European way,» with an open attitude towards American players.
Leveraging AI and Agents to Improve Marketing Performance — Gregory Becue, Chief Product Officer
Gregory Becue extended and solidified the product side of the proposition. His starting point aligns with that of the CEO: Despite all the investments in tools, marketers still lack time. For three years, AI has been added here and there. It works... but it's not a revolution: time isn't divided, and productivity isn't multiplied.
The assessment is clear: generative AI produces text, a lot of it, quickly, but that's not what a marketer's job is about. The goal is not to produce ever more content, but to create quality and value. Hence Ibexa's conviction: the future is not GenAI, but agents. Teams are working tirelessly on agentics, with an early adopter program announced for September.
The common thread: AI must understand the company's business. And that's precisely the advantage Ibexa highlights: its tools already have access to a large portion of their clients' business data and information.
And that's where it gets interesting. The announced approach is LLM-agnostic it is the client who chooses which LLM(s) to connect and which models to use. On the MCP side, Ibexa will offer a catalog from which to pick connectors from the market, with access to the list of their functionalities. On the agent side, a One-click activatable agents library, the possibility of create custom agents, and even a system agent capable of preconfiguring and generating new agents.
The underlying promise: never depend on a single model. Tomorrow, everyone will have access to the same models, which will become a commodity. What will make the difference, therefore, will not be the model, but: your brand, your content, your products, your customers, your campaigns, and your industry knowledge.
My personal opinion: it's clearly a vision that contrasts with what was chosen by companies that launched earlier on the subject of agentic AI. Not a black box AI, but open solutions, multi-LLM, with access to agent editing and orchestration. Will this vision still be relevant in 6 months? Only time will tell..
To close
The afternoon was dedicated to workshops and smaller conferences! We even had the opportunity to offer a intervention on the compliance with consent pixel tracking, in collaboration with Gilles Louviaux Who presented the philosophy of implementing consent for tracking in the Actito tool.
Both other afternoon sessions were very concrete and operational, directly presented by Ibexa clients, which is always refreshing. Seeing people do real, concrete things in tools, with best practices and figures: That's cool, we want more of that.. As an anecdote, zero AI in these afternoon conferences (the ones I attended, at least 😉).
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