OMR 2026: When the AI hype comes of age
OMR Festival 2026
70,000 attendees, six stages, 314 masterclasses, sold out earlier than ever before — the OMR Festival was once again the barometer in 2026 for everything moving the digital economy. We were there in Hamburg as visitors.
What surprised us most about the official festival figures isn’t the sheer size, but the density: around 30 percent of guests came from the C-suite or director level, three out of four DAX 100 companies were represented, and with 21 percent international guests the audience was more global than ever. Anyone who wants to know what decision-makers are really working on right now was in the right place.
And the lasting impression is less a single highlight than a shift in mood: the industry has stopped marvelling at artificial intelligence. It is now working with it. We are taking home three observations — and all three relate directly to what we work on every day at apollon.
AI has grown up
You only had to look at the main stage: the head of ChatGPT at OpenAI, plus Anthropic, DeepMind and Google — in 2026, AI was not one topic among many, but the common thread running through the entire festival. But no longer as a vision of the future. Nick Turley of OpenAI described the next stage as “agentic”: AI that does not wait for commands but initiates processes itself.
What was remarkable was how level-headed the tone remained. Alma Lipa, Chief Digital and Marketing Officer DACH at L’Oréal, summed it up: “AI needs us, so we have to steer it.” AI is moving from the playground into the engine room — and it delivers its value precisely when people feed it clean, structured data. An AI that writes product texts, translates them or generates variants for different channels is no longer a gimmick but a real productivity lever — provided the data basis is right. That is exactly where we come in with OMN.
Visibility is being redistributed
The second major thread in Hamburg: how people find products and brands at all. Classic search engine logic is losing ground, AI-powered search is gaining rapidly — several stages spoke of a multiple of referrals from AI answers compared with the previous year. SEO is becoming GEO: optimising to appear in the answers of ChatGPT, Perplexity and the like.
What many underestimate: AI systems most readily cite what they cleanly understand. Complete, unambiguously labelled and consistent product information is therefore no longer a “nice to have” of data maintenance — it helps decide whether a product appears in the AI answer or not. Visibility today begins with data quality — and thus with a central, well-maintained product data set, the kind a PIM provides.
Fewer tools, better data
The third point was perhaps the most honest. For years, marketing tech stacks have grown ever larger. In Hamburg the trend clearly pointed the other way: consolidate instead of collect, a well-thought-out foundation instead of many isolated solutions. The sober realisation behind it: no tool in the world — not even AI — repairs bad data. Anyone with unclear processes, incomplete information or an unsustainable data model gets one thing above all from AI: bad results, faster.
“Good data is suddenly worth its weight in gold” — this sentiment came up in many variations in Hamburg. For us at apollon this is no surprise but the core conviction on which OMN is built: a central, reliable place for all product information, from which every channel is served — online shop, marketplace, catalogue, AI application. It is precisely this foundation that decides whether AI becomes a lever in marketing or an expensive promise.
What we take away
OMR 2026 showed that the excitement around AI is giving way to a pragmatic question — how do you make it usable? In Hamburg, the answer lay less in a new tool than in the fundamentals: clean data, clear processes, a solid foundation. Three things that sound unspectacular and yet decide between success and failure.
For us, that is a tailwind. Product communication that works today is data-driven, cross-channel and AI-ready — and that is exactly what we work on with our customers every day. In that sense, Hamburg was for us less a glimpse of a distant future than a confirmation of the path we are already on.
By the way: OMR continues to grow — in 2027 it will be a three-day festival for the first time. But there is plenty of opportunity for exchange before then. The next one is coming up soon — more on that shortly.