Plan your day with keynotes, breakout sessions, networking, and lightning talks — all designed to connect, educate, and inspire.
Check in, grab breakfast and coffee, meet attendees, and get settled before the day begins.
Get energized with some fun trivia before the keynote.
Translating Skills: Turning What You Know Into What’s Next
A practical and empowering keynote that helps career changers and experienced professionals identify,
articulate, and leverage their transferable
skills to confidently move into new roles and industries.
Bette Smith.
Choose from two concurrent session tracks:
As artificial intelligence evolves from simple assistants into autonomous, decision-making agents, organizations face a new class of governance challenges that extend beyond traditional IT controls. This talk explores how to establish guardrails that ensure ethical behavior, accountability, and transparency—without stifling innovation or speed. We examine practical frameworks for aligning AI systems with business objectives while mitigating risk across security, compliance, and operational domains. Attendees will learn how to operationalize governance through policy, architecture, and observability to maintain trust at scale. Ultimately, this session demonstrates how responsible AI governance becomes not a constraint, but a catalyst for sustainable profitability and competitive advantage.
Nathan Hiscock
Auditorium
The Ethics of Generative AI & Audience Red Teaming: A gamified "hackathon" style session where the audience tries to break or "jailbreak" a model deployed. Talk about Prompt Injection, data leakage, Black Box problem, etc. Discuss how RAG can use to mitigate hallucinations but introduces its own security vectors. Show a vulnerable internal-knowledge bot. Demonstrate how a malicious prompt can extract sensitive system instructions or private data. Can involve some live participation by challenging them to get the bot to reveal a secret code or violate a safety guideline.
Recharge, network, and connect with speakers and attendees.
Panel Session
Health challenges — visible or invisible — affect millions of workers, yet the conversation is rarely had openly. This panel creates space to discuss how our definition of career progression has changed through our journey, what sacrifices were made along the way and how people with mental and physical health conditions can advocate for themselves, access the right support, and continue to grow professionally in the fast-paced, high-pressure world of tech. From managing the demands of always-on culture and screen-heavy workdays to navigating remote work and burnout, panelists will share how they've built sustainable careers in tech without compromising their health — and how the industry can do better for all of us.
Quick talks with a "meditation moment" in between to reflect on the day's learnings.
Takeaways from the day and final raffles.
Christine Stiles 
Riyaz Usman 
Alex Smedley (Moderator) 
Sonya Chapin 
Fatemeh Hajizadeh 
Jeni McIntosh-Elkins