For twenty years, partnership marketing has been built around the click. The tracking link. The last touch. The commission on sale. It's a model that has survived every shift, every algorithm change, every privacy update the industry has thrown at it. Because the fundamental logic is simple and effective - find the affiliates who drive valuable commercial results, and pay them fairly for it.
AI is about to test that logic in ways we haven't seen before.
When a consumer asks an AI assistant for a product recommendation and acts on it without clicking anything, where does the affiliate commission go? When a publisher's content is ingested by a language model and served back as a summary, who gets paid? When agentic commerce scales to the point where AI handles the entire purchase journey end to end, what does a partnership programme even look like?
Those are the questions behind our biggest launch yet. In October 2026, we're launching the AIP Summit - Europe's first event built entirely around AI and partnership marketing.
These aren't hypothetical questions. They're happening now. And the global partnerships industry doesn't yet have a dedicated space to work through them together. That's what the AIP Summit is designed to change.
Why this industry, why this moment
The partnerships industry isn't a passive victim of AI disruption. It's one of the best-placed sectors in marketing to shape what comes next.
Think about what we've actually built over the past two decades in affiliate marketing. Infrastructure for commercial relationships between brands and publishers at scale. Deep expertise in attribution and incrementality. A model that has always rewarded outcomes over exposure. Those aren't liabilities in an AI-first world. They're advantages, if we move quickly and think clearly.
The brands that figure out how to recruit partners using AI, automate programme operations, and build attribution models that work in an agentic environment won't just survive the transition. They'll pull ahead of competitors who are still waiting to see how it plays out.
The window to shape this is open now and that won't be true indefinitely.
Why generic AI events aren't enough
There's no shortage of AI conferences. What there isn't, anywhere in Europe, is an event built specifically around AI and the partnerships channel.
That distinction matters. The implications of AI for partnership marketing are different from its implications for brand advertising, or content marketing, or paid search. Our industry has specific questions that a general AI audience can't answer. How do you attribute value when the consumer journey is invisible? How do you build publisher relationships when AI is ingesting their content without compensation? How do you recruit partners at scale when the tools that made that possible are changing faster than most teams can track?
These questions need the community in the room. People who actually run partnership programmes, advise brand clients on AI strategy, build the technology the industry runs on.
What delegates will actually get
Every session at the AIP Summit is designed to produce something useful. Not inspiration, not awareness, but something a delegate can take back to their business.
That means sessions on what AI-powered partner recruitment actually looks like in practice, and which tools are delivering real results. It means an honest conversation about LLM optimisation and what the most resilient publisher strategies look like when nobody is clicking. It means working through the emerging standards around content compensation, including what the SPUR Coalition's Content Telemetry work means practically for affiliate publishers navigating the transition.
And it means space to think about agentic commerce seriously. Amazon Rufus, Google AI Mode, ChatGPT Instant Checkout. These aren't future scenarios. They're live. The affiliate model has an opportunity to be central to how agentic commerce works, but only if the industry starts building for it now.
The AIP Summit sits alongside PI LIVE Europe as part of the Festival of Partnerships in October 2026. Delegates get the depth of the summit and the breadth of the main PI LIVE stages and networking campus. Both are included in the Festival pass.
Why now
I've been an affiliate and building events in this industry for more than twenty years. The ones that matter arrive at exactly the right moment. Not too early, when the conversation is still too abstract to be useful. Not too late, when the interesting questions have already been replaced by consensus.
This is the right moment. AI is no longer something the partnerships industry can defer thinking about. The publishers are already feeling it. The affiliate programme managers are already living it. The attribution models are already being stress-tested.
What the industry needs now isn't more headlines about AI. It's a room where the right people can work out what to actually do about it.
That's the AIP Summit. I hope to see you there.
