AI Con USA 2026 - General Management

"We love AI and use it for everything we do!" "We hate AI and will NEVER use it for anything ever, I swear to god!" Which camp are you in? This will be a question that will come up over and over in 2026 and beyond. If you use AI for EVERYTHING and think you can be mistaken for AI…has AI not already taken your job? We all need to get INTENTIONAL about our stance in the AI-verse. Have you thought deeply about what is a good activity for AI to lead on and what should be uniquely human? We are already seeing a premium price tag on in-person, uniquely human-to-human experiences, and this will...

Tired of staring at the chat box of an AI assistant wishing it could actually do a task for you rather than just telling you what to do? Model Context Protocol (MCP) is the glue between an AI agent and your data and tools. With MCP, AI assistants can read your documents, conversations, and other context and take action for you by sending emails, submitting tickets and more. But what really is MCP and how do you use MCP servers safely in practice as part of your day-to-day workflow? This half-day course introduces MCP and dives into practical use cases. Laurel will walk you through how to...

Tired of sifting through endless news sources and missing the topics you care about? This hands-on workshop empowers you to build a personalized AI news assistant using Redis and LangGraph.js. You’ll learn to ingest articles from RSS feeds, summarize and analyze them, extract structured data, and generate embeddings—all stored in Redis for powerful hybrid (vector + structured) search. Your agent will provide a web interface for browsing and semantic search, and even chat with you about current events, retrieving relevant articles and metadata using RAG techniques. LangGraph.js orchestrates...

The world of software development is rapidly evolving, and AI-powered tools are leading the charge. Generative AI tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor, and Continue are revolutionizing how we code by offering intelligent code suggestions, complete function generation, and other advanced features that streamline the development process, improve code quality, and significantly boost developer productivity. In this hands-on workshop, Jeffery Payne will guide you through leveraging these powerful tools to accelerate your coding, reduce errors, and unlock new levels of creativity. Learn how to...

AI agents have existed for decades, but generative AI has fundamentally changed what agents can do and how they are designed and built. Come and explore the evolution of AI agents across two major waves. First, learn the foundations of Agentic AI through agents built using rules, heuristics, and traditional machine learning, examining where these approaches excel and why they struggle with complexity, ambiguity, and scale. Then dive into the second wave of agents powered by generative AI and multimodal large language models. These modern agents can reason, plan, use tools, and interact...

The era of single-turn AI prompting is over, giving way to the sophisticated "digital assembly line." This session guides technical leaders, CTOs, and AI product managers through the critical leap from isolated AI tools to coordinated, multi-agent constellations capable of autonomously executing complex enterprise workflows. Marshall will dissect the four levels of agentic evolution, focusing on today's epicenter of innovation: cross-system orchestration. Because the risk of cumulative failure multiplies with every automated handoff, he will unpack the architectural strategies required to...

Building effective agents requires fundamental changes to how engineers think about their work. LLMs that sit at the heart of agentic systems are stochastic by nature and operate in a world that requires optimal context to produce optimal results. While models offer bigger and bigger context windows, the cost and performance during inference is tied to the consistency of context delivery and the stability of that context over time. As tool calling and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem play a larger role in agentic development, engineers need to invest in not only delivering the...

Are you ready to transform your productivity from incremental gains to exponential growth? Whether you're an individual contributor or engineering leader, this session introduces the AI Maturity Model, a proven framework that guides technical teams through five distinct levels of AI adoption—from 33% productivity boosts to an extraordinary 1000% increase. Discover how to navigate each stage: Level 1 (Foundation, 33%) builds essential AI awareness; Level 2 (Literacy, 75%) develops practical AI skills; Level 3 (Fluency, 300%) masters AI-assisted workflows; Level 4 (Agents, 500%) implements...

We are entering a defining chapter for bioscience—one where AI is no longer an accessory, but a core engine of discovery. At the Allen Institute, AI is being woven throughout the scientific process empowering research teams to analyze complex biological systems at scale. Their teams are collaborating to develop frontier AI applications like advanced computer vision to interpret high-resolution imaging data, multimodal models that integrate complex molecular, cellular, and physiological signals, as well as intelligent systems to assist researchers as they navigate and synthesize vast...

AI strategy has focused on intelligence—better models, stronger reasoning, and higher benchmark performance. That advantage is rapidly commoditizing. As AI becomes embedded across products and operations, the next source of durable value is personalization; systems that adapt to individual customers, employees, and contexts over time. Generic AI delivers diminishing returns; relevance, trust, and perceived quality increasingly determine adoption and impact. This talk explains why personalization is emerging as the decisive competitive frontier in AI, how it reshapes product strategy and...

Borrowing from tabletop games, this session transforms AI leadership into a live-action adventure. Each team faces challenges drawn from real-world case studies: biased data, budget cuts, regulatory chaos, and “move-fast” culture. Every choice (and dice roll) reveals how easily good intentions can drift into poor outcomes. You’ll leave understanding why alignment isn’t a compliance checkbox, it’s a continuous act of human judgment. Key takeaways include: experience on how small trade-offs create large ethical ripple effects, applying alignment frameworks that balance business speed with...

Engineering leaders are under constant pressure to deliver faster, improve quality, and reduce costs despite fixed resources. At Nelnet, this challenge was compounded by ongoing acquisitions, a complex application landscape, and competing team priorities. Brittany Wilson will discuss how they evaluated the impact of Generative AI (GenAI) on the software development lifecycle without disrupting critical delivery work and how Nelnet adopted a measured pilot approach. Over 12 weeks, a side-by-side experiment compared a GenAI-enabled team with a business-as-usual team working on similar...

Successful AI adoption is 10% technology and 90% organizational change—and most organizations are failing at the 90%. In this dynamic, experience-driven session, we will cut through the hype and get honest about what it actually takes to move AI from promising pilot to measurable business impact. Drawing on nearly three decades of technology leadership and his background as a U.S. Army Ranger, Shawn brings a battle-tested perspective to the modern boardroom: the same principles that forge elite units into high-performing teams are exactly what today's organizations need to win the AI...