AGS San Francisco 2026 Agenda Highlights You Should Know

Header Image - AGS SF 2026 - Whats on the Agenda

The App Growth Summit San Francisco agenda is live, with a full day of sessions unfolding across two stages. There’s plenty to explore, from fresh ideas and industry insights to conversations designed to shape what’s next in app growth.

Below, it’s grouped by what each session covers, acquisition, monetization, retention, product, and the AI thread running under it all, so you can jump straight to what matters to your team.

Main Stage and Experts Corner

Every session lands in one of two spaces. Main Stage carries the bigger conversations, panels, keynotes, the talks built for a full room.

Experts Corner runs tighter, actionable presentations back to back, the kind of session where you walk out with something you can put to use that same afternoon.

Both rooms run in parallel most of the day, so the real planning question is simply which room to be in at any given hour!

How People Are Finding Your App Now

A cluster of sessions on the day is really one conversation split into pieces: how people find your app is changing everywhere at once.

Viktor Orlov (CEO & Co-Founder, Asapty) opens with Apple Ads That Actually Scale, making the case that sustainable growth comes down to campaign architecture and disciplined execution.

Nick Janner (Senior Client Partner, FinServ, Snap) follows with a new app growth playbook built around reaching incremental audiences earlier in the journey, turning attention into action with app-native creative formats, and building the feedback loops that help campaigns scale toward real business value.

Anthony Asuncion (App Growth Consultant/Team Lead, AppTweak) covers the shift from ASO to AEO, arguing that search is expanding well beyond ranking for high-volume keywords into being cited in AI-generated answers, with actionable steps to optimize visibility there.

Eran Dunsky (Head of Product, AppsFlyer) picks up the AI thread directly. As AI chatbots become a new front door for growth, he introduces a “triangulation” method that combines attribution, incrementality, and modeling, built from running one of the first ChatGPT Ads measurement integrations.

Brenna Doyle (Product Manager, eBay) closes with a session built around a genuinely startling premise: bots now account for a larger share of internet traffic than people, and LLM-driven discovery and agentic shopping are already changing where your next user comes from.

Together, they trace a funnel that no longer starts where it used to.

Where UA Teams Are Spending Right Now

Knowing where users come from is only half the equation, the budget behind it is the other.

Drew Hampton (Head of Performance Marketing, Varo) and Dennis Mink (CMO, Bidease) sit down for a fireside chat on where growth leaders are putting budget right now, channel mix, testing, creative, and measurement, as costs rise and channels fragment.

Later, the panel Smarter, Leaner UA brings Laura Nguyen (User Acquisition Manager, Stillfront), Efe Uduigwomen (Sr UA Manager, Inkitt), Gabriel Goldwasser (SVP, Performance Marketing, Ares Interactive), and Terry Koh (Performance Marketing, Supercell) together to dig into how lean teams are using AI and automation across creative, campaign management, testing, and reporting, and where human judgment still earns its keep as more of UA gets automated.

Turning Users Into Payers

Getting someone to pay is only step one, and three sessions dig into what happens next.

The panel From Paywall to Profit brings Kjartan Fosse (CCO & Co-Founder, Knitandnote) and Jesse Paliotto (Director of Demand Generation, FastSpring) together to work through how onboarding, paywalls, pricing, packaging, trials, and web-based purchase journeys work together to drive sustainable revenue, including where conversion tactics can help or hurt long-term value.

Manuel Allende (Head of Business, Clevertap) tackles the question his session title raises, whether lifecycle marketing still has a home once discovery and loyalty start blurring together.

Andrew Davies (Chief Innovation Officer, Paddle) walks through App2Web revenue in Building Growth That Compounds, including hard lessons pulled straight from recent FTC actions and rejections, so teams stay on the right side of rules that are still taking shape.

Two Sessions Put Community at the Center of Growth

Community earns its own spotlight this year, from two very different angles.

Annie Belfield (Sales Manager, Gaming, Discord) opens with a look at one of the world’s largest mobile gaming audiences, 90 million daily active users, 78% of them on mobile, and how highly engaged communities drive new installs, re-engage lapsed users, and win back churned players alongside traditional UA and lifecycle work.

Cyril Dhenaut (Late Founder & CRO, Octopus Community) goes inside the mechanics on the Experts Corner stage, covering what makes an in-app community safe, positive, and genuinely engaged, and how to put real numbers behind its impact on retention and monetization.

Between the two, they cover community as a growth lever, from bringing people in to keeping them close.

Three Ways to Grow the Users You Already Have

Community is one lever. The rest of retention runs through partnership data, localization, and cross-channel reach, and three sessions cover it from each angle.

Kevin Hsu (Director, Growth, Lyft) and Jessica You (Head of Growth, Americas, RZR) team up for Growth in the Privacy-First Era, on how Lyft leans on strategic partnerships, financial institutions especially, for high-quality first-party data and closed-loop, outcome-based measurement built for long-term value.

Carey Flack (Senior Product Manager, Adobe Express) brings a global lens, sharing a practical framework for culturalization across product dimensions and the growth loops built to resonate and scale across markets.

Tu Tran (Mobile App Specialist, StackAdapt) covers the cross-channel side, reaching users across desktop, audio, DOOH, CTV, and mobile all at once.

What Your Users Are Telling You to Build

The next big growth idea is usually already visible in your own customers’ behavior and feedback, if you know where to look.

The panel Your Users Already Told You What to Build brings Midori Chikamatsu (Senior Staff PM – Growth, Intuit), Noa Gutterman (SVP Consumer Marketing, Mistplay), David Reichelt (CEO, Color Switch), and Colin Hodge (Founder, DOWN) together to dig into how teams turn those signals into hypotheses and test which ones move activation, conversion, engagement, and ROI.

Balakrishnan Ramdoss (Mobile Tech Lead, Amazon) takes the AI feature question head-on in Building AI Features Users Actually Love, unpacking why some AI features turn into daily habits while others get politely ignored.

How Two Established Brands Built Growth Engines

Two sessions this year come straight from brands everyone already knows.

Matt Walker (Director of Product & Design – Mobile Apps, Dick’s Sporting Goods) and David Karnstedt (CEO, Branch) break down how Dick’s built its app into the hub of the athlete experience, whether someone’s shopping from the couch, earning points for staying active, hunting a limited sneaker drop, or walking into a store, through app-exclusive offers, in-store QR codes, web-to-app banners, and an intentional omnichannel acquisition strategy.

Jonathan Knight (SVP, Head of Games, The New York Times) joins Vivian Chang (Managing Director, App Growth Summit) to unpack how a legacy publisher built a genuine games business, 11 billion puzzles solved and counting, and what app growth teams can steal from a company that turned a crossword into its biggest engagement engine.

AI Runs Through the Entire Day

AI runs as a thread through nearly every session on this list, inside AEO, the new AI ad surfaces, agentic discovery, and the automation reshaping UA teams.

It comes back one more time with Sara San Antonio (Sr Global Marketing AI Lead, Square) in From AI Assistant to AI Teammate, breaking down the four building blocks, MCPs, skills, hooks, and agents, behind systems that learn as you use them, plus real mobile-growth builds from instant AppsFlyer analysis to a human-in-the-loop creative refresh.

By the time this session wraps, AI has touched acquisition, product, community, and marketing operations from a dozen different angles.

Breakfast, Breaks, and the After-Party

Doors open at 8 AM with breakfast and all-day coffee service, and App Growth Summit founder and CEO Louis Tanguay kicks off Main Stage at 9 AM before the session lineup above gets underway.

The schedule builds in real breaks between sessions, with a morning networking break, a fully catered lunch, and an afternoon reset before the final run of Main Stage sessions.

Then it closes out with the Superfly After Party from 5 to 7 PM, open bar, appetizers, and a retro photo booth for anyone who wants proof they made it, powered by Mintegral, Yango Ads, and InMobi. It’s the kind of incredible day where the hallway conversations end up mattering as much as the sessions themselves!