Three days. One city. Hundreds of revenue, finance, and comp leaders gathered in Austin with the same question: what does it take to build a revenue engine that can move as fast as the world around it? 

Captivate 2026 answered that question over the course of mainstage sessions, table talk conversations, fireside chats, and one unforgettable karaoke night. Whether you were in the room or following from afar, here are ten moments that defined the week.

1. CaptivateIQ Agents: A New Era, Announced Live on Stage

The biggest news of the conference happened during the product keynote, when we announced the launch of CaptivateIQ Agents: a portfolio of purpose-built AI agents designed for every stage of the compensation and sales planning lifecycle. 

The suite of CaptivateIQ Agents includes: 

• Builder Agent, which designs and configures comp plans 
• Comp Admin Agent, which handles routine operations and exception management
• Rev Ops Agent, which connects planning data to compensation execution
• MCP Server, which extends CaptivateIQ's intelligence layer across the rest of a team's GTM stack

As Nahi Ojeil, SVP of Engineering, Product, and Design, explained on stage, three things set CaptivateIQ Agents apart. They're grounded in your business. They operate on live data, so every output reflects where things stand right now. And governance is built in: every action is visible, every output is explainable, and nothing ships without a human review. Because these agents work with payroll, that responsibility is treated accordingly.

This is the biggest product step we’ve ever taken, and there was no better place to share it than the Captivate stage. CaptivateIQ Agents are available now in limited beta, with broader access rolling out throughout the year.

Read the full press release →

2. Carl Eschenbach on Leadership, Speed, and Not Waiting for Permission to Embrace AI

Carl Eschenbach has a résumé that earns attention in any room: Sequoia partner, former Workday CEO, the operator who helped scale VMware from zero to $7 billion. During Wednesday's Opening Keynote, he sat down with Mark Schopmeyer, CaptivateIQ’s co-founder and co-CEO, for a conversation that was direct, candid, and generous. 

"It's not if but when and how fast AI will impact your company," Carl said. "If you want to be a part of the future, you need to lean into AI quickly." 

Carl also named his two conviction plays for competitive advantage in any market: speed and simplicity. "Be faster than your competitors, and don't get bogged down. To scale quickly, you need to simplify." The through-line: AI enables both, but only if you actually adopt it. "AI lets you move quicker and simplify, but it won't do that for you on its own."

For an audience of comp and revenue ops leaders managing hundreds of plans, thousands of payees, and increasingly complex GTM structures, Carl’s message made an impact. Simplicity isn't the absence of ambition; it's how ambition scales.

3. The SOIC Data: A Reality Check the Industry Needed

The 2026 State of Incentive Compensation report produced one of Captivate's most talked-about moments. Mark, along with Conway Teng, CaptivateIQ’s co-founder and co-CEO, and Agata Dec, SVP of Customer Experience, walked the audience through three statistics that provided the event's backbone: 

• 82% of revenue orgs have ICM software. Only 33% are end-to-end automated. The tooling is there. The wiring isn't.
• 81% are using AI in some form. Only 28% are using it meaningfully. The gap between 'we use AI' and 'AI is changing how we work' is where most orgs are living right now.
• 91% say they trust their comp plan. 64% had a payout error this year. Trust is high, until it isn't.

Conway put a name to what separates the companies pulling ahead: they're not adding more dashboards on top of broken systems. They're rewiring. "You can't patch your way to resilience," he said. That idea echoed throughout the rest of the event. 

4. Voices from the Community: The Speakers Who Showed Their Work

At Captivate, some of the most credible voices in the room weren't from within the company. They came from our community, in the form of users, operators, and leaders who live and breathe revenue every day.

This year's speaker slate delivered exactly that. Gretchen Freihofer (Buyers Edge Platform) turned the Trust Is the Multiplier panel into a masterclass on why rep trust starts with sales leadership, not the comp team. Nick Kim (Reddit) brought a high-velocity ad sales lens to the question of earnings visibility and what reps do when they can see their comp in real time. Nic Gochis (Braze) gave the most honest account of an AI pilot actually moving to production that many attendees had ever heard — the governance pressures, the audit trail requirements, what it took to get from "we tested this" to "this is running our comp." 

Captivate also made room for a different kind of conversation. The Women in Incentives breakfast — moderated by CaptivateIQ’s Kristen Wisdorf and featuring Nicole Redfern (EvoVie Consulting) and Aya Kawashima (Senior Director of Global Sales Compensation at Confluent) — stepped back from the technical and into the personal: career growth, building influence, and how to lead in a fast-moving, complex field. 

We're incredibly grateful to every speaker who showed up and shared their experiences. That generosity is what makes this community so special.

5. Table Talks: The Field Chimes In

Six table talk sessions ran across Captivate 2026. These intimate, round table discussions covered everything from planning performance and flexibility, to comp ROI, to AI's role in compensation strategy. 

When it came to AI, the conversations were especially illuminating. While attendees were excited about the potential of AI, hallucination risk and the need for deterministic paycheck calculations were keeping most of them from going all-in. 

One exchange captured the mood of the room perfectly. When asked how they measure ROI on their comp plans, one attendee smiled and said: "Hope." Everyone at the table laughed, and then they shared strategies for moving to metrics a bit more measurable.

6. The IQ Bar: Where the Real Conversations Happened

Ask anyone who attended what they're taking home from Captivate, and a solid portion of the answers won't reference a keynote. They'll reference a conversation they had at the IQ Bar.

The IQ Bar was Captivate 2026's dedicated space for live demos, candid Q&As with CaptivateIQ's product and customer teams, one-on-one problem-solving, and the kind of casual rapport-building that turns a vendor relationship into a real partnership. Attendees could drop by between sessions, catch a product demo of something they'd just seen announced on stage, or sit down with a CIQ team member and work through a specific challenge in their own program.

If you missed it this year, put it on your list for 2027.

7. Chris Degnan on What Resilient Revenue Actually Looks Like

There are speakers who talk about resilience theoretically. And then there's the operator who ran comp at Snowflake through a pandemic, a rate cycle, and a consumption-model shift — and lived to tell the tale. 

Chris Degnan, former Snowflake CRO, brought exactly that credibility to Wednesday afternoon's fireside. His read on the "fragile move" most companies make when growth slows was one of the day's sharpest reality checks: when things get hard, the instinct is to add — more spiffs, more dashboards, more overlapping motions. Instead, the companies that held together simplified. They made comp a system that moves with the business, not a static plan that requires a fire drill to update.

It was a session that felt less like a keynote guest and more like a peer who'd been through the hard quarters and came back with real answers.

8. Calcy Makes an Entrance 

Not every moment from a conference needs a thesis. Some just need a mascot.

Calcy — CaptivateIQ's beloved numbers nerd and official mascot — made several appearances across Captivate 2026, including at least a few that could best be described as a full dance performance. If you were in the room when Calcy materialized during the reception, you know. If you weren't: the energy was exactly what the middle of a two-day conference about incentive compensation management and sales planning needed.

9. Karaoke Backed by a Live Band

Wednesday's evening reception had everything you'd want from a conference social: a live band, great energy, and a room full of people happy to be there. It’s no wonder it turned into a full-on karaoke sing-along, complete with a spontaneous Wobble on the dance floor. 

We spend a lot of time at CaptivateIQ talking about serious things. Comp plans, data integrity, change management. Moments like Wednesday night are a good reminder that the people doing this work are also just really fun to be around.

10. Strangers on Tuesday. A Community by Thursday.

More than 200 revenue, finance, and comp leaders arrived in Austin on Tuesday not knowing each other. By the time Agata Dec gave her closing remarks Thursday afternoon, she could see something different in the room.

"Way back on Tuesday morning, most of you had never met each other," she told the audience. "But over the last three days, you stopped being an audience. You became a room."

What built that? Coffee conversations between sessions where someone from a Series B and someone from a 20,000-payee enterprise realized they were fighting the same battle. A-ha moments at the IQ Bar where a demo suddenly unlocked a solution a customer had been stuck on for months. Karaoke duets between CSMs and customers. 

Three days earlier, most of these people had never met. By Thursday, there were new relationships, shared ideas, and a real industry community. That’s what happens when you put the right people in a room and give them time, space, and opportunities to make connections (a karaoke stage doesn't hurt, either). We’re proud that we could build that space, and grateful to every single person who was a part of it.

Want to go deeper on what the CaptivateIQ community shared this week? The 2026 State of Incentive Compensation report is available now.