Bjarn Brunenberg

Bjarn BrunenbergJun 9, 2026

Ciao, buongiorno Milano 🇮🇹 Just landed in Milan for ConversATion, Italy's leading event on Conversion Rate Optimization organized by JAKALA. But this time I’m not on the speaker list… I’m hosting the whole thing in Milan! ConversATion 2024 was one of my first international speaking gigs. Big room. Serious crowd. An experience I still look back on with energy and pride. Coming back in 2026 as the MC feels… wild! I’m genuinely grateful for the trust from the Jakala team. Special thanks to Simone Iuculano and Sara Baltieri And I will be honest with you. Preparing a keynote and preparing to host are two completely different things. When you give a talk, you carry 20 minutes. When you host, you carry the whole day. Being the person with the mic is the smallest part of hosting. The hard part is connecting six brilliant speakers and six different topics into ONE story. It's It feels like being an "experience architect": building a storyline across the talks, keeping it all running smoothly and on time, and keeping the energy high. I am really looking forward to the event tomorrow - sharing the stage with a big stars like: Katie Dove (Irrational Labs), Nils Stotz (Zalando), Rinaldo Ugrina (Baymard Institute), Ilie George Avram (AB Tasty), Melina Hess (DRIP Agency), and Karl Gilis (AGConsult). A big thanks to JAKALA for having me, and to the main sponsors AB Tasty and Contentsquare for making it happen. Let’s make ConversATion 2026 one people actually remember. 🚀 P.S. If you will be in Milan, come say hi!

Bjarn BrunenbergJun 17, 2026

I thought giving a keynote was the hard part. Then they asked me to MC the whole event for 200+ CRO and experimentation practitioners in one room in Milan 🇮🇹 ConversATion 2026 last week was amazing, and the day more than delivered. The weird thing is: as MC you’re always on, but you are never the main character. Your job is to make the audience feel safe, make the speakers look great, and keep the energy moving. No slide deck does that for you. If I had to summarise the day in one line: “Everything is changing. And nothing has really changed.” A quick show of hands made it clear. Everyone feels the industry moving faster than ever. AI is everywhere. New tooling. New workflows. New “agentic” promises. But… the things that actually makes experiments win: trust, clarity, psychology and knowing why people buy.. those haven’t moved in years. Tools get shinier. Humans don't. It was great to see 6 speakers, delivering six angles on exactly that. What I learned from hosting (and you can steal for your talk / MC gig): → I scripted the whole thing: opening, intros, closing, all of it. But when i was about 2min in, I barely looked at it. My learning: script your first 2 minutes. The start is were nerves spike. After that, it's feel. You go with the room. → Treat energy like it’s a metric. I kept a mental score from 1-10. If the room is at a 5, you walk in at a 7. (After Karl talk the room was at an 11. Following that is a sport of its own 😆). → Before the doors opened, I was mingling: asking people why they came, what they were after. Those tiny conversations were really helpful because I could relate back to that during the conference: building engagement. → Open with a personal story. People repeated mine back to me during breaks. That made networking frictionless and made conversations so much easier. → The MC role isn't about you. It's about the audience, the speakers, the company. AI can prep my bullet points. But it can't build the bridge between a speaker and 200 strangers. That part stays human. → And the one that mattered most: have fun. The second you actually enjoy it, the room relaxes with you. And fun we had! (as you can see from the picture). Honestly, the best part did not happen on stage. It was the aperitivo conversations, dinner with speakers at a tiny Italian restaurant, and being the last ones to leave 😄. Thank you Nils, Melina, Katie,Ilie, Rinaldo, and Karl for making moderating easy and being an amazing crew! Huge thank you to JAKALA, and special thanks to Amedeo Guffanti, Simone Iuculano and Sara Baltieri for making this happen! Grazie, Milano!

Bjarn BrunenbergAug 21, 2026

I stopped writing experiment reports. When talking AI in experimentation, most start with automating their test reporting (n=12 people i talked to in the field). Makes sense. It is one of the most time-consuming task and yet critical final output of your work. But even with your AI chat open, you easily spend an hour per test. You pull context. Grab raw data. Check stats and SRM. Fix the tone. Let it build the slide deck. And because it's never the output you want 1st time around, you tweak the slide deck... and Voila! you just burned an hour on pure admin friction. I got tired of that. So I built an architecture that automates the entire loop in Claude Code. I call it the xOS Report Run. Now I just prompt: "build the experiment report for EXP-21" Here is the (simplified) breakdown: → It pulls the record from the repo and locks the date window → It reconciles every row and refuses to build if numbers mismatch → It runs the math while a second code path verifies total accuracy → It writes the report, gets my human approval, and builds a branded Google Slide Now I have a complete test report ready in 2min 😎 I can run this workflow a 100x times with perfect consistency. The process is locked in files and the quality is secured by hitl. This is why you need to start building your own operating systems. You unlock so much potential! Increase velocity, guarantee quality across the board and save time to think about strategy instead of wrestling with spreadsheets. All with 0 extra headcount. If you run (in-house) program and want to try building this yourself, send me a DM. I will share how it works.