The 2024 Fall Executive Summit will be held at the Archer Hotel:
1230 First Street Napa, CA 94559

Archer's boutique hotel is set in the heart of flourishing downtown Napa, surrounded by the distinctive shops and dining of First Street Napa and just steps from the Napa Riverfront and Oxbow Public Market. 

Any event hosted in Napa Valley elevates expectations. Fresh, local fare. The chance to discover a new favorite wine. Inspired settings. And, of course, impeccable service. All reasons to look to wine country's favorite host for a nouveau Napa experience.

Hotel Room Reservations:

Once your event reservation is confirmed, an email will be sent with hotel room reservation details for you to book your room.

A group rate of $399 (plus taxes and fees) per night has been arranged for Tuesday, September 3 – Friday, September 6, 2024 based upon availability. We encourage you to book your room as soon as your event registration is confirmed.

Sopan Shah, SVP, Global Procurement Officer – IHG Hotels & Resorts

Sopan Shah is the SVP, Global Chief Procurement Officer of IHG Hotels & Resorts. IHG^® is one of the world’s leading hotel companies, home to some of the world’s most well-loved hotel brands. IHG’s footprint spans nearly 6000 hotels and approximately 885,000 guest rooms in more than 100 countries, with over 1,800 hotels in its development pipeline.

Sopan leads the global IHG Procurement team that conducts strategic sourcing and manages billions of dollars of goods and services worldwide. He is a passionate alchemist of high-performing procurement teams that focus on strong collaboration, sourcing expertise, and strategic insights to drive company performance and innovation – all while keeping the growth and development of people at the core. He has spent 20 years in supply management, working for leading multinational companies such as Nestlé, NBC Universal, General Mills, and Intel. He was born in India and raised in the United States, where he earned a business degree in Supply Chain Management from the W.P. Carey School of Business at Arizona State University. Sopan has traveled extensively worldwide and is married with one child in Atlanta, Georgia, USA.

Sanford J. Hodes, SVP, Chief Procurement & Corporate Development Officer - Ryder System Inc.

Sanford (Sandy) Hodes is senior vice president and chief procurement (CPO) and corporate development officer (CDO) for Ryder System, Inc., a leading commercial fleet management, dedicated transportation, and supply chain solutions company. In the CPO role, Mr. Hodes leads Ryder’s global strategic sourcing organization across all three of its business units: Fleet Management Solutions (FMS), Dedicated Transportation Solutions (DTS), and Supply Chain Solutions (SCS). In his CDO role, he leads a team focused on corporate merger and acquisition transactions.

As a 20-year veteran of Ryder, since joining Ryder’s legal department in 2002 to manage commercial litigation, Mr. Hodes’ role evolved to support other areas of the company and since 2007, having responsibility for the day-to-day legal operations for the company. As deputy general counsel, Mr. Hodes’ legal responsibilities included handling commercial and environmental litigation, corporate transactions, and customer and supplier agreements. In addition, from 2005 to late 2022, Mr. Hodes led Ryder’s Safety, Health & Security organization and was instrumental in establishing and maintaining Ryder’s unmatched reputation for safety in its operations. Additionally, Mr. Hodes was tapped by Ryder’s leadership to lead a zero-based- budgeting project across the entire organization that led to significant contributions to the organization from 2017 to 2019.

Prior to joining Ryder, Mr. Hodes practiced law for several large law firms in New York City and northern New Jersey as a trial lawyer handling complex commercial litigation. While in private practice, he counseled national and international clients in diverse and complex commercial matters, representing them in litigation before state and federal courts and administrative agencies. He also served as the senior vice president and general counsel for a technology company involved in spatial data management.

For the past 16 years, Mr. Hodes has been a board member of The Children's Fund for Glycogen Storage Disease Research, a not-for-profit foundation established in 2002 to make a difference in the lives of children and their families affected by GSD1, a metabolic disorder.

Mr. Hodes earned his Juris Doctorate from George Washington University Law School and graduated from Lehigh University with an undergraduate degree in Economics.

Ed Oldham, Senior Vice President of Supply Chain and Chief Supply Chain Officer - PetSmart

Ed Oldham, Senior Vice President of Supply Chain and Chief Supply Chain Officer, joined PetSmart in May 2022. Prior to PetSmart, he served as Senior Vice President of Inventory and Planning at Petco. Ed has more than 25 years of experience in retail, CPG and consulting. Serving in many different leadership roles at companies including Walmart, Ernst & Young and Walgreens, Ed’s experience spans store operations, transportation, merchandising, replenishment, planning, strategy and program management.

Ed graduated from The University of Memphis with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology, later earning his MBA from University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He is a native of the Nashville area. Ed and his wife April have three children and four British Shorthair cats.

Kristin Bahnsen, Partner -DGA Group

Kristin Bahnsen is Partner at DGA Group and is based in Denver. As a senior member of the Intelligence offering, she draws on deep experience in the public and private sectors, specializing in contextualizing intelligence to inform and drive desired legal and business outcomes.

Ms. Bahnsen brings more than two decades’ experience in strategic intelligence, global operations and risk advisory, having worked across industry and government. Most recently, she served as Vice President with Gartner, Inc., supporting C-suite supply chain and operations leaders on their operational and digital transformations, ESG strategies and the future of work.

Ms. Bahnsen’s previous experience encompasses a range of special projects with a focus on strategic intelligence, advisory and risk management services. She began her career in the public sector working for the federal government in the United States and abroad.

Ms. Bahnsen earned her M.A. in Governmental Administration from the University of Pennsylvania’s Fels Institute of Government and a B.A. in International Politics from Penn State University. She is a board member with the Duet Design Group Foundation, a nonprofit that seeks to improve the lives of children and their families by creating healing and soothing environments.

John Hughes, Partner – DGA Group

John Hughes is Partner at DGA Group and is based in Washington, DC. As a senior member of the Intelligence offering, he has an extensive track record working on issues at the intersection of geopolitics, geoeconomics, risk analysis, public policy and strategy across roles in government, the private sector and consulting.​

Most recently, Mr. Hughes served as the Head of Geopolitical Engagement at X (previously known as Twitter), where he drove the company’s strategies on priority global issues.​ Previously, he was a Senior Vice President at Albright Stonebridge Group, which became part of DGA Group in 2021, where he advised clients on market entry and expansion, government affairs, and managing regulatory issues. Mr. Hughes also served as the Acting Director in the Office of Sanctions Policy and Implementation in the State Department’s Bureau of Economic and Business Affairs. In this role, he helped set policy priorities for sanctions and export control regimes around the globe, and served as a key liaison to the private sector.

Before his time in public service, Mr. Hughes served as Director of two educational language centers in San Francisco, overseeing operations to ensure a successful experience for over 250 language clients from more than 30 countries.

Mr. Hughes has discussed business implications of sanctions and geopolitical issues in interviews with Bloomberg, POLITICO, and The Washington Post, among others. He has also been interviewed by several television and radio programs including CBS News, CNBC, and CNN.

He earned his M.A. in International Affairs from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, and a B.A. in English, magna cum laude, from Colby College.

Patrick Marlow, Staff Engineer, Vertex Applied AI Incubator - Google

Patrick is a Staff Engineer on the Vertex Applied AI Incubator team, where he focuses on building tooling and reusable assets to extend Google’s cutting-edge LLM technologies. He specializes in the Conversational AI ecosystem, working with products such as Vertex Agents, Vertex Search and Conversation, and Dialogflow CX. Previously, he was an AI Engineer in Google’s Professional Services Organization. Prior to Google, he was the Principal Data Architect at Levelset, a construction technology company, specializing in NLP Data Pipelines and OCR tooling. Patrick also worked as the Director of Engineering and Data Science for Amelia.ai, a Conversational AI company, delivering chat and voice bots to Fortune 500 clients across the Banking, Hospitality, Entertainment, and Retail verticals.

Patrick studied Electrical Engineering at the University of Texas at Austin.

He is the author and maintainer of several Open Source works including CXLint, an automatic linter for Dialogflow CX, and the Dialogflow CX Scripting API (SCRAPI) which is utilized by developers worldwide to supercharge bot building and analysis in Dialogflow CX.