THE HUMANS BEHIND CLASS SESSIONS
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VP of Product, Marketing, and Operations
SVP
Undersecretary of Science & Technology
AI Services Director & Host of "You & AI"
Head of Global Growth & Strategy
Founder/CEO
Chief Data & Analytics Officer
Acting Secretary
President
President
CAIO
CEO
Director of Design and Motion
Creative Director
Principal Architect, Responsible AI & Tech
Your teams are ready for AI—but is your organization ready to lead them? Drawing from TELUS's successful journey with 50,000 users, this keynote reveals how to democratize AI while maintaining ironclad security. Glimpse the future of work as we explore Agentic AI and next-gen copilots, and learn how to empower your workforce today for the collaborative human-AI workplace of tomorrow.
The AI race has frustrated many. While 98% of business leaders want to adopt AI and may have experimented with it, only less than 10% can point to specific AI benefits in their P&L. It goes beyond immature technologies, highlighting core challenges that require transforming the workplace to embrace AI.
To succeed, executives must enhance their project management capabilities, including executive sponsorship, reward incentives, training and instruction, and better workforce collaboration. Teams need to feel capable, encouraged, and empowered to work across departments, manage and train AI tools, and foster better data governance.
Key Learning Takeaways:
Presented by Fuel iX
This workshop delves into the practical implementation of Generative AI for maximizing productivity and agility in large enterprises. Drawing from a real-world case study of an organization with 50,000 users, participants will explore the concept of AI copilots and their transformative impact on workflow efficiency.
The workshop covers creating and prompting copilots, understanding the strengths and limitations of RAG and knowledge bases, and strategies for driving organization-wide adoption. Executives will gain insights into overcoming adoption barriers, identifying high-impact use cases, and fostering a culture of AI-driven innovation using Fuel iX Copilots.
Key takeaways that participants will learn...
Presented by Outright
This hands-on session offers a behind-the-scenes look at Outright's AI art project for Schmidt Sciences at the National Portrait Gallery, showcasing how AI is reshaping creative workflows. Attendees will explore the strengths and limitations of AI design platforms, ethical and legal considerations around rights and likeness, and the evolving role of AI in art. Whether you're an artist, designer, or AI enthusiast, this session provides practical insights into using AI as a creative tool while maintaining artistic intent and originality.
Key takeaways include:
Presented by Codeium
This hands-on session dives into the technical foundations of integrating AI-assisted coding tools into your IDE, focusing on real-world implementation strategies and performance considerations. Discover how to optimize your developer workflows, troubleshoot common challenges, and ensure your organization is positioned to harness the full potential of next-generation code generation platforms.
Key takeaways include:
Presented by Fuel iX
In this interactive workshop, executives will dive into the critical realm of AI safety and vulnerability detection, tailored for non-technical users.
Participants will explore key concepts in AI security, engage in red-teaming exercises, and even design their own AI attack scenarios. This practical approach equips leaders with the knowledge to identify potential vulnerabilities in AI systems and implement robust safety measures.
By the end of the session, executives will have a comprehensive understanding of AI safety principles and practical tools for safeguarding their organization's AI implementations, essential in an era of rapid Generative AI adoption.
Key areas we'll cover include:
AI interfaces are evolving from static designs to dynamic, context-aware experiences. Using LangChain, LangGraph, and modern frontend frameworks, Generative UI enables real-time interface adaptation through natural language processing, streaming component generation, and dynamic data visualization.
This hands-on workshop guides developers through building adaptive UIs with practical examples. Learn to implement streaming UI generation, intent-driven visualization, and autonomous workflow orchestration while maintaining performance and trust.
Key things you'll learn include:
Many companies experimenting with AI-powered conversation and content design find themselves stuck in incremental progress. The real breakthroughs come when teams think bigger—reimagining how AI can enhance creativity, improve accuracy, and drive engagement at scale.
This hands-on workshop will explore advanced strategies for structuring AI-driven interactions, reducing hallucinations, and equipping your generative content with powerful tools for testing, localization, and persona development. Whether you’re designing for chat, voice, or multimodal experiences, you’ll gain practical techniques to level up your AI capabilities and push past conventional limits.
Key Learning Takeaways:
Beyond the Basics – Techniques to enhance AI-driven conversations and content generation
Smarter, More Reliable AI – Strategies to improve accuracy and reduce hallucinations
Interactive Challenges – Apply new tools and approaches to create high-impact AI experiences
Overview of prompt hacking threats: injection, leaking, and jailbreaking
Identification of vulnerabilities arising from untrusted inputs
Real-world case studies and red teaming in AI security
Strategies and best practices to mitigate prompt-based security risks
AI-driven development tools are advancing rapidly—from code-completing copilots to fully agentic IDEs capable of building applications with minimal human input. These tools are not just assisting developers; they are evolving into AI-driven junior engineers capable of executing complex development tasks.
In this interactive workshop, we’ll survey the latest AI tools revolutionizing software development, from copilots embedded in IDEs to AI agents that autonomously generate and refine code. A live demo will showcase an AI-driven IDE building an application from scratch—without a single line of human-written code. We’ll also explore how these advancements are transforming developer workflows, what it takes to integrate AI effectively, and the skills developers need to stay ahead. AI won’t replace developers, but those who embrace it will outperform those who don’t.
Key Learning Takeaways:
Integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) into business operations requires more than just access—it demands a clear understanding of how different models perform under real-world conditions. This interactive workshop introduces a structured evaluation approach, allowing participants to compare multiple LLMs side by side and analyze their strengths in factual accuracy, reasoning, creativity, coherence, and bias.
Through hands-on exercises, attendees will explore key performance metrics like response latency, token usage, and perplexity to assess model efficiency and reliability. By the end of the session, participants will be equipped with the insights needed to make more strategic, data-driven decisions about AI model selection and deployment, ensuring their AI initiatives are both effective and scalable.
Key Learning Takeaways:
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is transforming how we extract insights from large documents by combining retrieval-based search with generative AI for more precise, context-aware answers.
This hands-on tutorial walks you through building a PDF Question-Answering System powered by Google Gemini (via Vertex AI) and FAISS for vector-based search. Whether you're working with research papers, legal contracts, or technical manuals, this guide provides a step-by-step framework to implement real-world RAG applications from scratch.
Key Learning Takeaways:
Vice President, Artificial Intelligence Northwestern Mutual
Anju Gupta is vice president of artificial intelligence at Northwestern Mutual. In this role, she is accountable for providing technical leadership, guiding the company’s AI roadmap and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver business-driven AI solutions. Anju joined the company in October 2020 and has been instrumental in helping to shape Northwestern Mutual’s AI initiatives, including building an ethical framework for implementing AI products. She is also a member of the Northwestern Mutual Data Science Institute executive steering team, which is a partnership that contributes to the formation of a technology ecosystem and advances southeastern Wisconsin as a national hub for technology. Anju also serves on the AI advisory board for LIMRA/LOMA, the Milky Way Tech Hub Coalition and a few AI startups. She has been recognized as the 2023 Women of Influence by Marquis and has also been awarded the 2024 Top 100 AI professionals in the U.S.
VP & Lead Software Engineer JPMorgan Chase
With over ten years of work experience in software engineering and architecture, I am a passionate and skilled developer who strives to deliver high-quality solutions for complex business problems. I currently work as a Software Engineer at JPMorgan Chase, where I leverage my AWS, and Apigee certifications to design, develop, and deploy scalable and secure APIs for various financial applications. Previously, I was an Architecture Lead Analyst at Citi, where I led a team of developers and analysts to implement a API gateway framework. I also have experience as a Senior Software Engineer at Fannie Mae, where I worked on several web development projects using Hugo, a static site generator and service mesh for micro service integration. My core competencies include API management, service mesh, web development, cloud computing, and agile methodologies. I am always eager to learn new technologies and best practices, and to collaborate with diverse and talented teams. My mission is to use my expertise in software engineering and architecture to create innovative and impactful solutions that improve the lives of millions of people.
Head of Data & AI Banking Bank of America
Awais Sher Bajwa is a leader in Data and AI banking, as well as a tech entrepreneur and angel investor. With a career spanning over 15 years, Awais has led over 60 strategic deals, including IPOs, M&A, and capital raises, with a total value exceeding $60 billion. Awais founded Bank of America’s global AI banking practice in Palo Alto. His unique insights into AI adoption within financial institutions as well as the broader AI landscape position him as a distinguished strategic advisor on AI. Prior to his current role, Awais established the software investment banking practice at Bank of America and the digital infrastructure banking practice at Barclays in London.
Awais holds a Master’s degree in Engineering from the University of Oxford.
Associate Director, Data Science Merck
Data science leader with years of hands-on and leadership experience in Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, & Natural Language Processing (NLP). Proven track of successes with developing and implementing impactful AI solutions in both large tech and start-up settings. Currently leading Merck’s flag-ship Gen-AI product in human health. Ex-Meta research data scientist tech lead in AI Infra. Ex-start-up founder in the space of NLP.
Chief Product Officer Gannett Media
Renn Turiano is Chief Product Officer for Gannett Media. He is an established product leader with 30+ years delivering successful customer experiences. He has deep operational experience and expertise in organizational leadership and end-to-end product development. Previously, Renn served as VP of Product and Design at NBCUniversal where he helped incubate and launch the Peacock streaming service. Prior to Peacock, Renn was at Amazon where he built and led multiple teams, driving the creation of numerous successful products and features. Additionally, he has held product and design roles at RAPP, HTC, McKinsey, Goldman Sachs, among others.
Head of Applied Innovation Lab Thomson Reuters
Yulia Pavlova, PhD, is the Head of Applied Innovation Lab at Reuters. At Reuters she is leveraging AI technology to revolutionize the news and media landscape, focusing on enhancing accessibility and discoverability of multimedia news content. Yulia Pavlova is a strategic leader with 15+ years of experience in ML and cloud-based AI technology advancement, driving innovation through strategic research, cross-disciplinary collaboration, and product development. Her team brings value through translating complex scientific concepts into commercially viable AI products, enhancing customer experience, and driving market growth. She has PhD is Scientific Computing, and Applied Mathematics and Cybernetics.
Vice President, Product - Responsible AI & Tech Salesforce
Rob Katz is Vice President of Product Management in Salesforce's Office of Ethical and Humane Use of Technology. Rob leads the Responsible AI & Tech team, which ensures that Salesforce's products, software, and services are designed, developed, and delivered responsibly. Prior to Salesforce, Rob worked for Amazon Alexa, Acumen Fund, and the World Resources Institute. He holds a BA from Georgetown and MBA from Stanford.
Head of Conversational AI Verizon
Bala Maddali is a strategist, influencer, innovator, story-teller, insights-driven product leader who is passionate about the convergence of people, products, experience, and technology.We live in an algorithmic digital world that craves for humanness. He strongly believes human-centered Ai is the secret sauce that blends the digital and the human behavior to humanize the experiences. He leads the Conversational Ai Channels, Product & Customer Experience for the Verizon Consumer group. He has a proven track record in leading and driving strategy, transformation and, commercialization of next-generation Digital experiences, Conceptualizing and enabling industry best and first products to delight customers and enable sustainable growth and value. He is a curious speaker at multiple industry leading customer experience & Ai forums.He has 12 patents in the area of mobile and TV second screen convergence experience, social TV and voice & gesture-based app interactions.
Founder AI Leadership Institute
Noelle Russell is a multi-award-winning technologist with an entrepreneurial spirit who specializes in helping companies with emerging technology, Generative AI, and LLMs. She has led teams at NPR, Microsoft, IBM, AWS and Amazon Alexa, and is a consistent champion for Data and AI literacy.
Senior Practice Manager AWS
She is a Senior Practice Manager that started and led customer engagement globally on Responsible AI. Diya leads discussions organizations in various industries on taking intentional action to build trust in AI by uncovering potential unintended impacts, and mitigating risks related to its development, deployment and use. She also meets with legislators and policy makers globally to provide perspective to influence imminent regulation and policy on AI. For the first 15 years of her career, she worked in early-stage companies in consulting and in roles focused on scaling their products for acquisition. She is an international speaker; has been awarded and recognized in the industry for her work in Responsible AI; serves on non-profit boards; mentors through multiple organizations; and guest lectures on responsible and inclusive technology.
