The AI Leadership Summit

07:30 AM - 08:30 AM ET

Registration and Networking Breakfast

08:30 AM - 08:40 AM ET

Opening Remarks

08:40 AM - 09:10 AM ET

AI Leadership Fireside Chat: Separating the Hype from The Growth Opportunity

A frank, unvarnished assessment of where enterprise AI actually stands — not the headline version, but the practitioner version.

09:10 AM - 09:40 AM ET

Reconciling AI: CFOs and ROI

The period of open-ended AI experimentation is giving way to a tougher phase of accountability. Boards, investors, and CFOs want clearer evidence that AI spending is improving productivity, lowering costs, strengthening decisions, or creating new growth. That means leaders need better ways to judge which projects deserve more funding, which should be redesigned, and which should be stopped. In this session, a look at what a credible AI return story looks like, how companies are managing AI budgets, and how leaders can avoid overpaying for tools, vendors, and compute that do not deliver business value.

Mark Patterson, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer, Cisco

09:40 AM - 10:10 AM ET

The Execution Gap: Redesigning the Organization Around AI

As AI transforms specific workflows, it triggers a ripple effect across the organization. Most CEOs now expect AI to reshape how work gets done — but few executives believe their organization is truly ready to combine human labor with AI systems effectively, and fewer still can point to AI initiatives tied to clearly defined business outcomes. This panel explores how to turn that gap into a practical framework for transforming work: the boardroom decisions required to flatten management layers, how to prepare leaders for hybrid humanagent teams, how to capture critical institutional knowledge before it's lost, and how to link AI investment to measurable, defined business value rather than efficiency in the abstract.

Mike Weideman, Head of Enterprise Transformation, Dow

Seth Fox, Chief Information Officer, S&P Global

10:10 AM - 10:40 AM ET

AI’s New Threat Landscape

Bad actors are using the same AI tools that drive productivity to create new vectors for data exposure and social engineering attacks, compressing the time between a breach and a company's ability to respond. What used to take days or months now takes hours or even minutes. In this session, learn how businesses are staying ahead of attackers by rethinking security perimeters, strengthening defenses, closing governance gaps, and responding faster as AI changes the speed and methods of cyberattack.

Kristin Lovejoy, Global Head of Strategy, Kyndryl

Sundari Parekh, Global Deputy CISO, TrendAI

10:45 AM - 11:15 AM ET

Meet & Connect

11:15 AM - 11:35 AM ET

AI's Trust Problem

AI has an image problem — and companies can no longer afford to ignore it. Inside organizations, employees are navigating real anxieties about job displacement, how AI factors into performance evaluations, and the boundaries of workplace surveillance. Beyond company walls, rapid AI advancement has generated more unease than confidence among the broader public. Together these pressures are creating a reputational and trust deficit that demands a deliberate leadership response. This session examines how senior leaders can address AI's trust problem on both fronts — building internal communication strategies that keep employees informed without amplifying anxiety and developing external narratives credible enough to withstand public scrutiny.

Artem Fishman, Chief Technology Officer, Dow Jones

11:35 AM - 12:00 PM ET

Bringing AI Agents Into the Workplace

AI agents are rapidly moving from the pilot phase into embedded business operations. They can now carry out multi-step tasks across finance, operations, customer service, and other functions. Using them well requires more than flipping a switch. It is crucial that companies have strong data, clear decision rights, security controls, and a shared view of which work should be automated, assisted, or left to people. In this session, gain a greater understanding on how to choose the right use cases, decide what to build or buy, and put the oversight in place to make agentic AI useful across the business.

Justin W. Bundick, Vice President, Artificial Intelligence & Intelligence Platforms, Southwest Airlines

12:00 PM - 12:30 PM ET

Scaling AI Across the Enterprise

Moving AI from isolated experiments to enterprise-wide deployment is one of the hardest problems organizations face right now. Legacy infrastructure, employee buy-in, governance bottlenecks, and regulatory requirements all create friction, and most organizations are working through these issues while the business keeps moving. This session brings together executives to share specific examples of how they are removing the obstacles that stall deployment, building accountability into workflows, and maintaining momentum without creating risks that undermine progress.

Richard Donaldson, Chief Information Officer and SVP Enterprise Technology & Innovation, Duke Energy

12:30 PM - 01:50 PM ET

General Networking Lunch

02:00 PM - 02:30 PM ET

A1 | Beyond the black box: Why high-stakes decisions need explainable AI

Most generative AI predicts, but it can't defend its reasoning in a way that holds up to scrutiny. For an insurer justifying a denied claim to a regulator, or a bank explaining a lending decision in court, that gap is what determines whether the decision survives regulatory review or a legal appeal. This session looks at neuro-symbolic AI, an approach that combines pattern recognition with clear rules and logic, and how regulated industries can integrate the technology into their day-to-day decision-making.

David Mocklow, Head of Insurance, Growth Protocol

02:00 PM - 02:30 PM ET

A2 | AI Governance: From Policy to Proof

Many organizations have established formal AI policies, but few have verified their effectiveness in daily operations. Chief Artificial Intelligence Implementation Officer at Mayo Clinic provides a practical roadmap to evaluate a company's AI governance frameworks. In this session, participants will learn how to close the dangerous execution gap between compliance guidelines and actual, frontline technological execution.

Micky Tripathi, Chief Artificial Intelligence Implementation Officer, Mayo Clinic

02:35 PM - 03:05 PM ET

B1 | Why Data Quality Determines Enterprise AI Success or Failure

In the AI arms race, the most sophisticated models do not always come out on top. Companies making real progress often start by building strong data foundations before they need them, and before scaling AI exposes long-standing problems in data quality, architecture, ownership, and trust. This session looks at how to treat data as a long-term business asset, decide who owns it, and build the systems that allow AI investments to improve over time rather than stall after early pilots.

02:35 PM - 03:05 PM ET

B2 | Workshop: Upskilling Your Workforce For AI

Most organizations know they need to upskill their workforce on AI — few have built the infrastructure to do it at scale. In this interactive workshop, Verizon's Brent Vader walks attendees through AI Unlocked, the company’s upskilling platform, sharing the design decisions, partnerships, and implementation lessons that turned a workforce readiness initiative into an enterprise-wide capability. Attendees leave with a practical framework they can adapt to their own organizations.

Brent Vader, Vice President, Learning & Development, Verizon

03:10 PM - 03:30 PM ET

Meet & Connect

03:35 PM - 04:00 PM ET

From AI Policy To AI Accountability

U.S. AI policy is actively being reshaped under the current administration, and the EU AI Act — which applies to any organization operating in European markets — is already in force. As regulation expands and AI systems become more central to business, the challenge is not just writing internal policies but demonstrating accountability to external parties when AI affects customers, employees, finances, or risk. This session explores how companies can map where AI is being used, define who can approve or stop high-risk use cases, build oversight into workflows, and create the evidence regulators and auditors will eventually expect.

04:05 PM - 04:50 PM ET

Ask The Experts

Bring your toughest questions to a panel of seasoned AI leaders. Whether its evolving stakeholder demands, or regulatory uncertainty, no topic is off limits. A running list of questions gathered throughout the conference will shape the discussion, offering practical insights on how to navigate disruption from every angle.

04:50 PM - 05:00 PM ET

Day One Recap and Day Two Preview

05:00 PM - 06:00 PM ET

Networking Reception