Before we kick off the first workshop of the day, grab a snack, coffee or tea and network with your fellow attendees!
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Build your own custom AI copilot in this hands-on workshop. Led by the experts that helped TELUS roll-out AI to more than 50,000 users and address hundreds of use cases, you’ll create powerful agentic AI assistants using drag-and-drop and point-and-click tools for knowledge base creation (RAG), multi-modal inputs, model selection and enterprise data integration - no coding required.
Experience firsthand how copilots accelerate collaboration and drive measurable results across diverse use cases, gaining actionable strategies that scale from personal productivity to enterprise-wide innovation. Learn how to deploy copilots with built-in security guardrails, usage analytics and role-based access controls while maintaining data privacy.
Walk away prepared to take immediate next steps, armed with hands-on techniques to lead your team's AI transformation and create a more efficient, collaborative workplace.
Key Takeaways:
- The fundamentals of AI copilots and agentic AI, including key principles and enterprise value strategies
- Hands-on experience creating and customizing copilots using RAG, knowledge bases, and effective prompting
- Practical frameworks for identifying and implementing high-impact use cases across your organization
- Proven strategies for driving adoption at scale, based on TELUS' successful 50,000-user deployment
Mark Dennison
Product Manager, Fuel iX Copilots, TELUS Digital
Learn to detect AI vulnerabilities in this hands-on workshop led by TELUS Digital AI research leaders. Designed for both non-technical and technical audiences deploying LLM applications, you'll learn to transform traditional AI security approaches into an automated red-teaming pipeline.
Through practical exercises, you'll master AI safety fundamentals, simulate adversarial attacks and learn about automated prevention strategies. This new approach protects brand reputation, prevents costly breaches and provides CISO-friendly metrics for confidently deploying GenAI. You'll leave with the framework and tools to implement robust AI safety measures, enabling secure innovation with GenAI.
Key Takeaways:
- An overview of potential risks and vulnerabilities in AI systems, with a focus on enterprise applications
- The fundamental principles of AI safety and vulnerability detection, tailored for non-technical teams
- Core techniques and methodologies for effective AI red-teaming, including simulation of real-world adversarial attacks
- Hands-on experience in designing and executing basic AI attack scenarios, enhancing understanding of system vulnerabilities
Milton Leal
Lead Applied AI Researcher, Fuel iX, TELUS Digital
Enjoy a snack and network with your fellow attendees!
Your teams are ready for AI—but is your organization ready to lead them? Drawing from TELUS's successful AI journey with 50,000 users, this comprehensive keynote and panel session brings together the most relevant insights on the AI market, showcases high-impact use cases, and offers a thought-provoking panel discussion among business leaders who have seen both the triumphs and challenges in deploying AI in their organizations. Ideal for both business leaders and tech practitioners, you’ll walk away with actionable strategies to turn AI potential into tangible results.
This featured block program will run like this:
3-3:20 pm -- Keynote, Bret Kinsella
3:20-3:50 pm -- Real-world Gen AI Use Cases, Phill Thompson
3:50-4:30 pm -- AI Leader Panel Discussion, Steve Tannock, Steve Banick, Justin Watts, Bret Kinsella (moderator)
3:50-4:30 pm -- AI Leader Panel Discussion, Steve Tannock, Steve Banick, Justin Watts, Bret Kinsella (moderator)
Bret Kinsella
SVP TELUS Digital, GM Fuel iX
Steve Tannock
VP, Engineering, Fuel iX, TELUS Digital
Steve Banick
VP, Engineering - Enterprise IT Services & Enablement
Justin Watts
Distinguished Engineer, TELUS
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Phill Thompson
Director of Product Marketing, Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
To close the day, enjoy a beverage and network with your fellow attendees and AI leaders.
Learn From Leaders Like These At GENERATE
Tim MacGregor
VP Business Development Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
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Tim MacGregor
VP Business Development, Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
Bret Kinsella is GM and SVP at Fuel iX. He also founded Voicebot.ai, the leading source of research, data, analysis, and news about voice, AI, and synthetic media technologies. Bret has been named Voice AI commentator (2019-21) and analyst of the year (2020-21). He earned degrees from UCLA and the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School.
Sho Modica
VP Product Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
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Sho Modica
VP Product, Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
Bio to come.
Steve Tannock
VP Engineering Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
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Steve Tannock
VP Engineering, Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
Steve Tannock is the VP, Engineering for Fuel iX – an enterprise generative AI platform from TELUS Digital with more than 50,000 users. A veteran technologist, Steve was early to the web - building one of the first 10,000 websites - and has spent his career helping companies, government and non-profit organizations adopt and embrace new technologies. Since 2018, Steve has worked at TELUS - here he has led efforts to transform the software delivery process; bringing contemporary approaches to engineering excellence and security to both save millions of dollars in operational costs and significantly improve performance and reliability of corporate applications. Most recently, Steve has led the development of TELUS’ internal Generative AI approach, in close collaboration with the TELUS Data, Privacy & Security team, bringing safe, responsible AI to tens of thousands of TELUS employees and our customers.
Harry McIntosh
VP, Digital Products TELUS
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Harry McIntosh
VP, Digital Products, TELUS
Harry is a technology and customer experience leader at TELUS.
He believes that for teams to deliver amazing customer experiences, they must be set up for success with fulfilling career opportunities, tools and resources to make work easier, space to innovate, and a fun work environment.
In high school, Harry worked many odd jobs that taught him valuable lessons about customer service and teamwork. These experiences, along with his forever-long interest in computers and technology, set him on his path of technology and customer experience leadership at TELUS, where he started as a junior developer right out of university. Throughout his career at TELUS, Harry has maintained his lifelong curiosity and openness to new challenges by working across many different teams and projects, each providing him with unique learning and growth opportunities.
He is currently the VP, Digital Products where he supports cool customer experiences like the My TELUS app.
Andrew Taylor
Director, Corporate Services & Digital Transformation Terracon Geotechnique, Ltd.
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While my experience in the world of AI has been short, I am currently coordinating or supporting the implementation of AI into a variety of processes within Terracon. We have been working to automate workflows within our finance team, develop advanced reporting and trend analysis for our Fleet operations, develop efficiencies in referencing our Quality Management System, build efficiencies in our recruiting and interview process, streamline communications both within and across departments, and reduce the need for additional administrative support for leadership.
Andrew Taylor
Director, Corporate Services & Digital Transformation, Terracon Geotechnique, Ltd.
I started with Terracon in 2009 and have held a variety of operations support roles during the past 16 years. I graduated from Dalhousie University with a Degree in Management, in addition to an Advanced Diploma in Aviation from Confederation College. I have extensive experience in the field of entrepreneurship, business operations, operational support, asset management and organizational efficiency and have held various leadership roles within the company.
As a member of Terracon’s senior leadership team, I play a key role in Terracon’s digital transformation, strategic planning and operational support. Outside of Terracon, I love spending time with my two boys, coaching multiple minor sports, traveling with my wife and spending time in my workshop as a woodworking hobbyist. In an effort to give back to the communities that I both live and work in, I volunteer as coach for both minor hockey and lacrosse, am an active board and executive member with Calgary Corporate Challenge and have recently been elected as the U9 coordinator for Airdrie Minor Hockey.
While my experience in the world of AI has been short, I am currently coordinating or supporting the implementation of AI into a variety of processes within Terracon. We have been working to automate workflows within our finance team, develop advanced reporting and trend analysis for our Fleet operations, develop efficiencies in referencing our Quality Management System, build efficiencies in our recruiting and interview process, streamline communications both within and across departments, and reduce the need for additional administrative support for leadership.
Ryan Miller
Manager, Applied AI Research Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
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Ryan Miller
Manager, Applied AI Research, Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
Pete is the founder and CEO of Modev and the creator of a diverse series of events including GENERATE, AGENTIC, VOICE & AI, GovAI Summit, CodeForward, and the AI House and NeuroTech events at CES.
Phill Thompson
Director, Product Marketing Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
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Phill Thompson
Director, Product Marketing, Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
Phill Thompson serves as the Director of Product Marketing at Fuel iX, TELUS Digital's generative AI platform. As an AI industry pro since 2018, he brings comprehensive expertise in commercializing advanced AI solutions, including data labeling technologies, AI edge case resolution, and generative AI products.
Agenda
AI Leadership | Agentic AI | Code Generation | Prompt Engineering | Design & Content
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Welcome to GNRT! Get ready for a truly impactful day of learning at the edges of the Generative AI ecosystem and discussion. We kick off today's fun with a few opening remarks from Modev's founder and CEO, Pete Erickson.
Pete Erickson
CEO, Modev
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.
Bret Kinsella
SVP & GM, Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
AI isn’t just about algorithms and automation—it’s about the people using it, questioning it, and shaping its future. In this fireside chat, award-winning journalist Lindsey Mastis shares insights on how AI is transforming industries, how to ask the right questions for better AI outcomes, and why trust and transparency matter in the age of automation. Through real-world examples and compelling storytelling, she’ll explore the human side of AI innovation and how to cut through the hype to find the stories that truly matter.
Lindsey Mastis
Technology & AI Journalist, Blue Moves Media
Pete Erickson
CEO, Modev
AI coding tools are no longer a novelty—they’re an expectation. The question is no longer how much faster we can code, but how we can fundamentally rethink software development itself. In this keynote, Codeium explores what’s possible when AI becomes more than just a productivity tool. From redefining collaboration to reshaping engineering roles and unlocking entirely new creative possibilities, we’ll chart a course for the future of AI-powered development—one where efficiency is just the starting point.
Zach Diamond
Lead Customer Strategist, Codeium
The coming together of AI & human creativity pushes the boundaries of art and design. The creative team at Outright has been working at the leading edge of AI design and will share what they have learned about the capabilities, limitations and evolution of current AI technologies, and what can be unlocked by artists' deep in the AI landscape and artform.
Kate Gazzillo
Creative Director, Outright
Antoine Dickens-Rouse
Director of Design & Motion, Outright
Before we kick off the first classes of the day, grab a snack, coffee, tea...whatever suits your palette. Network with your fellow attendees and visit with our fantastic sponsors!
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...
- Foundations & Concepts: Core principles of AI copilots and Agentic AI, plus strategies to maximize enterprise value.
- Strategic Implementation: Identifying and deploying high-impact use cases with simple, scalable tools, backed by real enterprise examples.
- Technical Mastery: Practical skills for customizing copilots, crafting effective prompts, and implementing RAG and knowledge bases.
- Change Management: Strategies for driving adoption at scale, modeled on TELUS Digital’s rollout to 50,000 users.
Sho Modica
VP Product, Fuel iX/TELUS Digital
Mark Dennison
Product Manger, Fuel iX/TELUS Digital
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:
- How to extract, preprocess, and chunk text from PDFs efficiently
- Building a vector search index using FAISS for fast and accurate retrieval
- Leveraging Google Gemini (Vertex AI) to generate precise answers with source citations
- Practical insights into embedding generation, query processing, and RAG implementation for production-ready applications
Roya Kandalan
Google Developer Expert
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:
- The evolution of the artform and the strengths and weaknesses of various AI design platforms
- Opportunities and limitations of designing with AI technology
- Questions of rights, ethics and likeness in the world of AI design
- What can be unlocked by artists' deep in the AI landscape and artform
Kate Gazzillo
Creative Director, Outright
Antoine Dickens-Rouse
Director of Design & Motion, Outright
Jared Schwartz
VP of Brand Strategy & CEO
In October 2022, we published the Internet's First Guide on Prompt Engineering—two months before ChatGPT was released in November 2022. Since then, our Prompt Engineering courses have been taken by over 3 million people, including 1 in 15 OpenAI employees, and we've delivered Prompt Engineering workshops to teams at OpenAI, Microsoft, Stanford, Dropbox, and to the U.S. Congressional staff. We also later collaborated with OpenAI to develop a ChatGPT course—one of only two companies to do so.
The field of Prompt Engineering has evolved rapidly since then. This workshop will cover essential Prompt Engineering techniques, demonstrating how to apply them to enhance your ChatGPT results. We'll begin with the fundamentals and gradually move toward real-world applications, incorporating hands-on training along the way. Upon completion, you'll qualify for our Introduction to Prompt Engineering Certificate of Completion.
In Part One of this 2-hour workshop, key things you'll learn include:
- Overview of generative AI and the role of prompts in guiding model outputs
- Breakdown of prompt components: directive, context, role, and formatting
- Introduction to key prompting techniques (few-shot, chain-of-thought, least-to-most, self-ask, self-consistency)
- Practical examples demonstrating the impact of well-crafted prompts
Michael Ilie
Head of Research, Learn Prompting
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:
- Core requirements and best practices for integrating AI coding tools into your IDE
- Strategies for measuring effectiveness and maintaining quality in AI-driven development workflows
- How to troubleshoot common integration challenges and align AI capabilities with team goals
- Insights and tactics to future-proof your development environment for rapid AI advancement
Vanessa Salas
Strategic Engineer, Codeium
After a full morning of ideas, inspiration, and learning, we break for lunch. Enjoy some awesome food and use the time to network, chat with our sponsors, or just reset before the afternoon classes begin.
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:
- Executive sponsorship as the lynchpin in sponsoring and encouraging widespread adoption.
- Proven programs to overcome employee resistance to AI adoption.
- Effective incentive mechanisms to ensure continued focus on integrating AI.
- The right kind of training to ensure long-term success.
Geoff Livingston
Chief Strategy Officer, CognitivePath
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...
- Foundations & Concepts: Core principles of AI copilots and Agentic AI, plus strategies to maximize enterprise value.
- Strategic Implementation: Identifying and deploying high-impact use cases with simple, scalable tools, backed by real enterprise examples.
- Technical Mastery: Practical skills for customizing copilots, crafting effective prompts, and implementing RAG and knowledge bases.
- Change Management: Strategies for driving adoption at scale, modeled on TELUS Digital’s rollout to 50,000 users.
Sho Modica
VP Product, Fuel iX/TELUS Digital
Mark Dennison
Product Manger, Fuel iX/TELUS Digital
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
Ben-Allen Kingsland
Conversation Designer, Synergis
In October 2022, we published the Internet's First Guide on Prompt Engineering—two months before ChatGPT was released in November 2022. Since then, our Prompt Engineering courses have been taken by over 3 million people, including 1 in 15 OpenAI employees, and we've delivered Prompt Engineering workshops to teams at OpenAI, Microsoft, Stanford, Dropbox, and to the U.S. Congressional staff. We also later collaborated with OpenAI to develop a ChatGPT course—one of only two companies to do so.
The field of Prompt Engineering has evolved rapidly since then. This workshop will cover essential Prompt Engineering techniques, demonstrating how to apply them to enhance your ChatGPT results. We'll begin with the fundamentals and gradually move toward real-world applications, incorporating hands-on training along the way. Upon completion, you'll qualify for our Introduction to Prompt Engineering Certificate of Completion.
In Part Two of this 2-hour workshop, key things you'll learn include:
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Overview of prompt hacking threats: injection, leaking, and jailbreaking
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Identification of vulnerabilities arising from untrusted inputs
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Real-world case studies and red teaming in AI security
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Strategies and best practices to mitigate prompt-based security risks
Michael Ilie
Head of Research, Learn Prompting
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:
- Understand the AI tools available for developers
- Review the capabilities of state-of-the-art agentic IDEs
- Discuss how developer workflows must evolve in an AI-assisted world
- Share lessons learned from driving AI tool adoption among 10,000+ developers
Sanjeev Sharma
SVP, Development and Engineering Platforms, Dell Technologies
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:
- Comparing LLMs in Action – Evaluate AI models based on accuracy, coherence, and decision-making abilities
- Measuring Performance – Understand essential metrics for AI efficiency and reliability
- Strategic AI Selection – Identify the best-fit model for different use cases and implementation scenarios
- Optimizing AI Integration – Learn best practices for deploying LLMs in complex workflows
Dr. Atif Farid Mohammad
Chief AI Officer/CISO, Healable
Sarthak Bhatt
Chief Software Architect, Healable
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:
- How to build event-driven systems for streaming UI generation
- Best practices for process user intent for dynamic interface adaptation using LangChain/LangGraph
- Tactucs for connecting modern frameworks with LLM backends
- Managing dynamic updates while maintaining application stability
Noble Ackerson
Co-Founder, Byte an Atom Research
The rapid expansion of generative AI, led by GPTs and other comprehensive language models, has garnered significant interest from global consumers, business entities, and the executive suite. OpenAI's GPT-4, GPT 4.5, o1, and DeepSeek's R1, among others, operate based on prompts. While these models boast immense potential, their outputs are highly sensitive to the input prompts, rendering prompt formulation a crucial competency to hone.
In this hands-on session, Microsoft AI MVP and Microsoft Certified Trainer Prashant G Bhoyar will delve deeply into several pivotal topics:
In this hands-on session, Microsoft AI MVP and Microsoft Certified Trainer Prashant G Bhoyar will delve deeply into several pivotal topics:
- Advanced Prompting Techniques
- Few-shot prompting (examples for better responses)
- Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting (step-by-step reasoning)
- Instruction fine-tuning (forcing the model to follow specific constraints)
- Persona-based prompting (role-based responses)
- Multi-step prompting (iterative refinement)
- Debugging & Refining AI Responses
- How to fine-tune prompts for specific AI tools (GPT, Claude, Bard)?
- Prompt automation using APIs & workflows
- How do we work with reasoning models like o1?
Prashant Bhoyar
AI Architect, Office of CTO, AIS
Explore how to effectively manage and maintain codebases that incorporate AI-generated components. This session delves into version control strategies, debugging processes, and ensuring long-term scalability and reliability of AI-enhanced development projects.
Creativity is not what you make, that’s just the receipt. It’s not how well you understand perspective in drawing or color in a painting. To be creative you simply have to have the desire to create. It is this desire that makes us ask questions, try different ideas, and take risks.
We need creative thinking to solve problems everyday - regardless of our job - and creativity is becoming increasingly important as tasks that do not require creativity are taken over by robots and artificial intelligence. Practicing creative thinking is critical for jobs in the 21st century.
In this session, Jason talks about the difference between human intelligence and “artificial” intelligence to show that there is plenty of room for human creativity using AI as a tool. Key takeaways we'll discuss include:
- What is creativity and how it is a unique biological ability?
- How to develop your creative ability at work.
- How to develop mindful creativity at work.
- How to grow creativity at work.
- The secret of being creative.
Jason CranfordTeague
Creative Technologist, CranfordTeague
In Partnership With
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