AI Con USA 2026 - Product Manager
Customize your AI Con USA 2026 experience with sessions covering product management.
Monday, June 8
Human in the Loop
New"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...
Become an AI Power User
Impostering a bit in the AI-verse? Overwhelmed by daily AI announcements? Unsure you're using AI most effectively? Tiny bit of FOMO? We've got you covered! In this workshop, we'll help you become an AI Power User. Become a boss at your job, whatever your role or industry! We'll show you where AI shines and where you'll want to be careful, plus toss you lots of hands-on practice. In our time together, we'll help you pinpoint YOUR niche, build a custom AI assistant, and develop a comms strategy to show off your new skills. You'll walk out with cutting-edge knowledge, a prompt library...
Tuesday, June 9
Agentic AI: From Rules to Reasoning
NewAI 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...
Vibe-Coding a Business: Using AI to Rapidly Build, Test, and Validate Real Products
NewAI has fundamentally changed how quickly new businesses can be created. With modern, high-end models, individuals and teams can now move from a raw idea to a functioning product, market narrative, sales motion, and operating loop in days rather than months. The challenge is no longer whether AI can generate assets—it’s how to use AI intentionally across the entire business lifecycle to produce outcomes that are relevant, credible, and sustainable. In this hands-on tutorial, Jason Arbon leads participants through a practical, end-to-end approach to “vibe-coding” a business using AI. The...
Wednesday, June 10
Where Are the Women in AI? Bridging the Gap for Women Technologists
Despite record investment in artificial intelligence, the gender gap in AI remains staggering. Women make up less than 22% of AI and ML professionals globally (World Economic Forum, 2024) and hold under 15% of technical leadership roles in the field. Only 3% of angel investors in regions like the Pacific Northwest are women, so the earliest capital shaping AI’s future is overwhelmingly male. This session for leaders and managers explores why this workforce imbalance matters and how it’s holding back innovation both across the tech ecosystem and within individual organizations. First, Lana...
Preparing for the Age of Physical AI: How Robot Learning Is Reshaping Manual Labor
Advances in robot learning and affordable general-purpose hardware are changing physical work faster than any past wave of automation. Industrial robot arms transformed repetitive factory tasks, but they could only operate in tightly controlled settings. Now, new learning methods and off-the-shelf mobile robots make it possible to teach machines to perform many kinds of hands-on work in warehouses and logistics facilities. This session looks at where the technology stands today, what has changed, and what the next few years will bring. Attendees will learn how to spot real opportunities...
Thursday, June 11
From Intelligence to Personalization: The New Competitive Frontier in AI
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...
Evals Are a Team Sport: Building Scalable Evaluation Pipelines for Trustworthy AI
Modern AI systems fail not only because of flawed models but because evaluation is often treated as a one-time task rather than an ongoing discipline. This session addresses the challenge of scaling evaluation across teams and pipelines to ensure model reliability, fairness, and performance. Drawing from real-world experience in large-scale financial analytics, Anusha Dwivedula will examine how product and data teams can collaborate to design a continuous evaluation framework that integrates precision, recall, and drift metrics with observability, lineage, and quality controls. She will...