Xactly Upside 2026 is shaping up to be less about one-off feature reveals and more about a broader shift in how Xactly wants customers to think about revenue operations.
This year’s event runs May 11–13, 2026 at the Anaheim Marriott in Anaheim, California, and Xactly is positioning it around a clear theme: “Agents of Change.” The published agenda points to three major audience tracks, a keynote from Xactly CEO Arnab Mishra, a featured keynote from former OpenAI go-to-market leader Zack Kass, live product demonstrations, Xactly University training, and a closing product roadmap session.
For Xactly customers, that matters because the company’s recent messaging suggests Upside 2026 will center on a more connected story than last year: AI, yes, but also the data model, workflows, reporting, and planning foundation needed to make AI useful in the real world. Xactly has been steadily tying together Xactly Intelligence, Design, Reporting, Extend, CRM-native experiences, planning, and forecasting under its broader Intelligent Revenue Platform strategy.
If you use Xactly today, here are the five areas worth paying closest attention to at Upside 2026.
In 2024, AI drew attention because it felt new inside the Xactly ecosystem. In 2026, the conversation will be more mature. Xactly is no longer talking only about a conversational assistant experience. It is talking about Xactly Intelligence as a framework that combines predictive AI with generative AI and lays groundwork for more agentic, workflow-oriented capabilities across the revenue lifecycle.
That shift is important. Xactly’s public materials now describe AI in terms of practical outcomes: helping practitioners analyze data faster, create applications with natural language, forecast team performance, surface trends in reporting, and support better decision-making across planning, compensation, and forecasting.
So at Upside 2026, the smartest question goes beyond “What new AI feature did Xactly announce?” It now encompasses the bigger picture, focusing more on where AI is actually being embedded in ways that reduce admin work, improve decisions, or remove bias from revenue operations.
2. Reporting is likely to be one of the most practical product areas to watch
If there is one category that looks especially relevant going into Upside 2026, it is reporting.
In April 2025, Xactly announced Xactly Reporting as a modern reporting and dashboard-building experience designed to connect data across the revenue lifecycle. Xactly says the product is meant to help both business and technical users create dashboards and reports without the same level of IT dependency, while also using Xactly Intelligence to surface trends and challenges faster.
For customers, this may end up being one of the most valuable areas to monitor because reporting is where platform vision either becomes usable or stays abstract. If Xactly can truly unify planning, performance, incentive, CRM, and forecasting data into a more self-service reporting layer, that has day-to-day impact for compensation teams, RevOps, finance, and admins.
Extend is emerging as a key way to automate adjacent processes like approvals, roster management, objectives, and crediting structures, while also supporting bespoke applications that span Xactly products and external data sources. Xactly’s 2025 launch of Extend Builder went further, explicitly positioning it as a platform capability for customers and partners to design and deploy specialized workflows and custom workspaces.
Extend is no longer just a “nice add-on” for edge cases. It’s now a part of how customers operationalize the messy, cross-functional work that lives between official modules: approvals, disputes, sales incentive portals, payroll processes, and other workflow gaps that often end up outside the core system.
If you are a current Xactly customer, Upside 2026 may be a good place to evaluate whether Extend is becoming mature enough to replace some of the spreadsheets, side workflows, or custom bolt-ons your team still relies on.
One of the more concrete product threads leading into Upside 2026 is Xactly for CRM.
Xactly is preconfigured for leading CRMs, eliminating manual data uploads, supporting SPIF tracking, and keeping compensation and performance activity closer to the system where sales teams already work.
That makes this more than a convenience feature. For many organizations, one of the biggest barriers to good compensation administration is not just plan complexity. It is fragmented workflows. Whenever reps, managers, Sales Ops, and comp admins are bouncing between systems, trust drops and manual work increases. Xactly’s CRM-native features are about reducing friction at the point of use.
If Upside 2026 includes deeper product demos here, this could be especially relevant for companies already standardized on Salesforce and looking for a more embedded way to manage incentive-related experiences.
Rising productivity pressure and tighter ROI scrutiny is reshaping how companies pay, motivate, and invest in sales talent. Consequently, Xactly is focused on quota management, continuous territory and quota planning, AI-driven forecasting, and revenue risk analysis.
Upside 2026 agenda is split across three tracks: one for leaders driving GTM strategy and enterprise value, one for leaders focused on sales planning and forecasting, and one for power users maximizing the platform.
In other words, Xactly seems to be telling a bigger story now:
Not just “How do you administer incentives?” But “How do you connect planning, forecasting, compensation, workflows, and analytics well enough to run a more predictable revenue organization?”
This is one of the most important things to watch at Upside 2026. The event may still feature product news, but the larger signal is that Xactly wants to be seen less as a point compensation tool and more as a connected revenue operations platform.
If you are attending Upside 2026, the value you get will depend less on which sessions you sit in and more on how intentionally you approach them. This is not just a product showcase. It is one of the few opportunities to pressure-test how Xactly’s direction aligns with your real operational challenges.
Start by prioritizing sessions and demos that go beyond surface-level storytelling. When AI is discussed, push for specifics. Ask to see where it is embedded in actual workflows, not just how it generates insights or summaries. The difference between a compelling demo and a usable capability is whether it reduces manual work, improves decision-making, or removes friction from your current process.
Spend time with reporting and analytics sessions, even if that is not your primary focus area. Reporting is where most organizations feel the gap between platform promise and day-to-day usability. Look for examples of business users building reports without heavy IT involvement and ask how data is unified across planning, incentives, and CRM systems. This is often where long-term value is either unlocked or limited.
Make a point to explore Xactly Extend in a practical way. Instead of asking what it can do, map it to one or two workflows your team struggles with today, such as dispute management, approvals, or crediting adjustments. Use those scenarios to understand whether Extend simplifies your environment or introduces additional administrative overhead.
If your organization runs on Salesforce, prioritize CRM-related sessions and demos. Focus on how compensation workflows show up inside the CRM experience for reps and managers. The goal is not just tighter integration, but reducing system switching and improving adoption in the field.
Finally, use the event to step back and evaluate the bigger picture. Attend at least one session focused on planning, forecasting, or revenue strategy, even if your role is more operational. Xactly is clearly positioning itself around a more connected revenue lifecycle, and this is your opportunity to assess whether that vision translates into more predictable and manageable outcomes for your organization.
Approached this way, Upside 2026 becomes less about collecting product updates and more about validating whether Xactly’s direction can realistically solve the problems your team deals with every month.
Upside moves fast, so the goal is not to attend everything. It is to focus your time so you leave with clear answers and next steps.
Attend the keynote and one or two strategy sessions to understand where Xactly is heading. Then explore product overviews and demos to map what is new vs. relevant to your challenges. End the day with networking to hear real customer experiences.
Focus entirely on your top 2–3 priorities (AI, reporting, Extend, CRM, etc.). Attend deep-dive sessions and ask product teams specific, real-world questions tied to your environment. This is also the best day for hands-on sessions and 1:1 conversations.
Use the final day to confirm what you learned. Attend roadmap sessions, revisit key areas, and clarify open questions. Before leaving, define what is actionable now vs. what needs further evaluation.
Walk away with a clear view of where Xactly is going, what is usable today, and how it applies to your organization, not just a list of features.
Events like Upside are great for seeing what’s possible. The harder part is figuring out what actually works in your environment. That is where Canidium comes in.
We help organizations translate what they see at events like Upside into practical, executable improvements across compensation, planning, and revenue operations. That means pressure-testing what you’ve learned against your current architecture, identifying where complexity will create friction, and prioritizing the changes that will actually move the needle.
If you are evaluating new capabilities, dealing with reporting gaps, struggling with plan complexity, or trying to connect Xactly more effectively to Salesforce or your broader ecosystem, a short conversation can save months of trial and error.
If you are attending Upside 2026, connect with the Canidium team onsite. If not, we are always happy to talk through what you are seeing and help you make sense of it in the context of your organization.