The industry is grappling with the same three challenges wherever you look — scaling product data, getting governance right, and figuring out where AI actually helps rather than just adds noise. An event like offers exactly the right platform to exchange ideas, learn from peers, and hear firsthand how teams are approaching the next generation of product experience management.
GSPANN attended as a certified Syndigo partner with 40+ PXM implementations behind us, across Fortune 500 product organizations and some of the UK and Europe's most complex retail and CPG environments.
Three Pressure Points the Industry is Currently Dealing With
The agenda mapped directly onto three challenges that kept surfacing in product data conversations across the UK and Europe leading up to the event. They were not new questions — but the pressure behind them had shifted.
1. Scaling content without losing quality
This one sounded like a content problem. It wasn't. It was a governance problem.
Generating descriptions was never the slow part. Deciding whether what got generated was accurate, compliant, and right for each channel — that was where the effort sat. GenAI made drafting faster, but it didn't make reviewing any easier. If anything, it added volume to the review layer at exactly the moment most organisations' governance frameworks weren't built to handle it.
2. Where AI helped, and where it didn't
AI genuinely took effort off the table at drafting. The new complexity showed up the moment unverified content hit the syndication layer and landed on every channel at once.
Across PXM programs with Fortune 500 product organizations, what GSPANN consistently observed was this: the tooling rarely failed. The governance sitting underneath it did. AI amplified whatever quality standard existed in the data before it reached the model. It accelerated the upstream problems instead of fixing it.
3. What good MDM governance looked like in a multi-channel world
Good Master Data Governance (MDM) in a multi-channel world was not a checkpoint at the end of the process. It was the layer everything passed through first. It’s where claims got validated, standards were held, and an audit trail was maintained. The content moving fastest through a system was also the content carrying the most regulatory risk.
With General Product Safety Regulation (GPSR) already in force and the Digital Product Passport coming under Ecodesign for Sustainable Products Regulation (ESPR), the bar for accurate, traceable product data kept climbing.
Then where did governance really live?
Based on GSPANN's experience working through this with enterprises across sectors, the answer was consistent: governance had to move upstream, into PXM (Product Experience Manager) and MDM, before anything reached a channel. That was where claims got validated, standards were enforced, and audit trails were built to survive regulatory scrutiny.
Across 40+ PXM programs on Syndigo, Salsify, Stibo STEP, inRiver, Akeneo, and Pimcore, GSPANN had seen enough to know where implementations gained ground and where they lost it. The governance was a real differentiator.
GSPANN-Sponsored Roundtable: Leading the Room
The roundtable drew a full room of senior practitioners. The discussion centered on a challenge that every organization in the room recognized: as product catalogues grow in volume and complexity, and as AI-generated content enters the mix at scale, the stakes around governance and compliance have never been higher.
Key themes that emerged from the conversation:
- Governance frameworks must be designed for scale from day one. Retrofitting governance onto an existing, ungoverned data estate is significantly harder — and more expensive — than building it in from the start.
- AI amplifies both quality and problems. Organizations using generative AI for product content creation are discovering that AI doesn't distinguish between good and bad input data — it accelerates whatever is already there. Clean, governed data upstream is non-negotiable.
- Compliance is now a competitive differentiator. As regulatory expectations around product data accuracy, sustainability claims, and content traceability tighten — particularly in the EU — organizations with robust governance frameworks are better positioned to respond quickly and avoid costly remediation.
- Operating models matter as much as technology. PIM, MDM, and syndication platforms are only as effective as the people and processes around them. The roundtable surfaced strong interest in GSPANN's approach to building scalable operating models alongside the technology.
Five Themes That Defined the Day
How GSPANN Can Help
GSPANN brings deep, hands-on PXM expertise across the full product data lifecycle — from implementation and data modeling to AI-powered content generation and managed operations.
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GSPANN is a global technology services company and certified Syndigo partner specializing in Product Experience Management (PXM), Digital Commerce, and AI-powered content solutions.
If we sparked a discussion around governance, PXM implementation, AI content or digital shelf strategy at the event, we’d love to continue the conversation.
Get in touch with us: marketing.team@gspann.com
Our Representative
Ashish Ranjan
VP & Head, EMEA
