Value Driven 2026: what value leaders told us in New York
We took a camera to GeniusDrive's Value Driven 2026 in New York and asked four enterprise value leaders how they quantify, defend, and prove business value.
Value Driven 2026 put the people who actually run business value programs into one room in New York. GeniusDrive hosted it, in a Manhattan showroom rather than a conference hall. We went with a camera.
Twelve minutes, and it is the day as we experienced it: arriving in the city, the room filling up, the conversations that happen between sessions, and the four interviews we sat down for.
Who we talked to
Value engineering is a small field, and most of what practitioners know they learn from each other rather than from a playbook. So we asked four people who run these programs at enterprise software companies to sit down on camera for a few minutes.
- Mike Samuels, Global Head of Business Value at Datadog
- Howard Bienstock, Director Business Value at LaunchDarkly
- Gaurav Sharma, Strategic Value Advisory at ServiceNow
- Stephan Zoder, Director Value Center of Excellence at Palo Alto Networks
Every conversation is published in full as Conversations on Value.
What kept coming up
Four separate conversations, and the same few themes surfaced in all of them.
AI moved the ceiling on coverage
Business-case attach rates have long sat in the 20 to 25 percent range. Howard's argument is that AI turns that into a realistic 70 to 80 percent, because the binding constraint was never willingness, it was how many cases a small team could physically build. He also makes the case that value leaders should be sharing their models rather than guarding them.
Nobody is buying productivity
Mike's point is that the productivity story has stopped landing. When pricing is tied to outcomes rather than seats, the value narrative has to survive past the signature, which changes what sellers and CSMs each need to be able to prove. His take on outcome-based pricing is the shortest conversation of the four and the most pointed.
The value team's job is changing
Gaurav described using AI to take business-case review off his consultants' plates so they could spend their time on strategic deals instead. The interesting part is what he tells people starting a value program from zero, which is not what most teams expect to hear.
The handoff nobody owns
Stephan went straight at the gap between the business case built to win the deal and the value actually realized afterwards. Most companies fumble that handoff because no single team owns both ends of it. He walks through where he thinks AI takes that connective tissue next.
Why we filmed it
Most of what gets written about value selling is written by vendors, and we are a vendor. Putting a camera in front of practitioners who work somewhere else, and then publishing what they said rather than a summary of it, is a more honest way to find out what is actually working.
We will keep doing this. If you run a value program and would sit down for one of these, we would like to hear from you.
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