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.
In the keynote “Scaling Responsible AI: From Enthusiasm to Execution,” Noelle Russell explores the dual phases of AI innovation. The talk delves into "Day 1," characterized by the excitement and enthusiasm of AI’s possibilities, and "Day 2," where an awakening occurs, prompting the need to address ethical, safety, and scalability questions.
Noelle will guide the audience through the journey from initial hype to responsible execution, highlighting the importance of transparency, fairness, and continuous learning in navigating AI’s complexities at scale. Attendees will gain insights on building a robust framework for responsible AI, ensuring long-term benefits and trust.
In the keynote “AI is Eating the World”, Brennan Woodruff explores how the digital and physical worlds are changing as a result of the latest wave of AI innovation.
Brennan will guide the audience on a tour of AI’s impact, its ramifications for needs on both the physical and digital innovation side, and opportunities this presents. All while exploring the latest technologies, applications, and snafus of the current innovation cycle.
Description to come.
How to Build Trustworthy, Culturally Competent, and Safe Voice-Responsive Systems in the Age of Autonomous Agents
As AI systems evolve into multimodal, voice-responsive agents capable of interpreting emotion, behavior, and context, the human voice is no longer just input—it is biometric, behavioral data that drives autonomous decisions. In this session, voice futurist Mellini Monique will present a practical, implementation-ready framework for designing ethical, voice-interactive systems that are transparent, culturally competent, and safe by design.
Participants will explore the strategic role of voice in agentic AI, gain insight into emerging risks, and leave equipped with clear methods to guide product design and deployment in high-stakes environments like healthcare, enterprise services, and customer experience.
Designed For:
AI Product Leads
Innovation Executives
Voice & Conversational AI Designers
Enterprise Technology Strategists
Governance, Ethics & Compliance Teams
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:
Designed for leaders navigating the accelerating impact of AI, this intensive bootcamp offers a clear, pragmatic path to strategic integration. You'll move beyond the hype and into real-world application — gaining the insights, frameworks and decision-making tools needed to unlock competitive advantage, streamline operations and position your organization for long-term success.
Whether you're assessing your first pilot or scaling enterprise-wide adoption, you'll leave equipped with actionable use cases, practical models and expert guidance tailored to your business context.
What You’ll Learn:
How to Build a Winning AI Strategy
Align AI with your business goals to drive revenue, improve efficiency, and enhance customer experiences—without getting lost in the tech jargon.
Which AI Tools to Use (and How to Use Them)
Get hands-on with powerful, beginner-friendly tools that help automate tasks in sales, marketing, operations, and more—no coding required.
How to Automate and Streamline Workflows
Learn how to identify the best parts of your business to automate, and build systems that save time, reduce errors, and increase output.
How to Grow Responsibly and Scale with Confidence
Understand the key principles of responsible AI so you can grow your business ethically while protecting your brand, your data, and your team.
The conversation around Artificial Intelligence and Customer Experience is evolving rapidly. Beyond the buzzwords, how are leading organizations actually using AI to create more meaningful, efficient, and personalized customer interactions? What are the real-world hurdles, and what does true
success look like?
Join Susan Westwater (Co-Founder & AI Strategist) and Scot Westwater (Co-Founder & AI Implementation Expert) of Pragmatic Digital for "AI & the Future of CX: A Roundtable on Strategies, Challenges & Real-World Wins." This is not a typical presentation; it's a facilitated, interactive discussion designed for marketing leaders, CX professionals, and strategists to share insights, tackle common pain points, and collectively explore the practical application of AI in enhancing the customer journey.
This roundtable will be a dynamic exchange focused on:
After GENERATE wraps up, join our friends at AIinCHI for a post-event gathering at Kaiser Tiger (1415 W Randolph St) from 4:00 to 6:00 PM.
It’s an informal, summer hangout — great food, cold drinks, and smart conversation. Pay-as-you-go for whatever you eat or drink.
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.
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...
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:
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:
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...
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:
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:
GM & SVP 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.
CEO 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.
VP Product Fuel iX / TELUS Digital
Sho Modica is Head of Product at Fuel iX, TELUS Digital's GenAI platform. With a decade of experience at WillowTree and an extensive background in AI, computer, and system engineering, Sho combines system-level thinking with a proven track record in innovative software development. His skills span AI and generative AI, technical project management, and product ownership.
Lead Applied AI Researcher Fuel iX/TELUS Digital
Milton Leal is Lead Applied AI Researcher at Fuel iX, TELUS Digital’s GenAI platform. Deeply involved with LLMs since 2022, he drives red-teaming and safety for LLM applications, combining expertise in Applied and Computational Mathematics with 15 years of investigative journalism to expose model blind spots and secure chatbot deployments.
Founder Vocal Culture Garden
Mellini Monique is a Voice Futurist and the founder of Vocal Culture Garden, a consultancy at the intersection of ethical AI, vocal expression, and voice design— for Humans and AI. With over 30 years of experience spanning public speaking, drama therapy, and AI voice strategy, Mellini guides enterprise leaders and developers to build emotionally intelligent, culturally fluent, and ethically grounded voice technologies.
Her work blends performance expertise with emerging technologies to shape how AI hears, speaks, and responds to the world. From high-net-worth executive voice coaching to ethical infrastructure for agentic AI, Mellini is redefining what it means to design with voice at the center.
She is a featured speaker at global tech and wellness conferences, and leads workshops on ethical voice systems, emotional resonance, and AI-human collaboration. Her mission: to ensure that the future of voice is not only intelligent, but trustworthy, inclusive, and human-aligned.
Director of Strategic Partnerships mHUB
Brennan Woodruff is the Director of Strategic Partnerships at mHUB, focusing on driving partnerships with Corporations to accelerate humanity impacting technologies towards commercialization.
Brennan is uniquely passionate for innovation, especially in the Midwest. Prior to returning to Chicago, Brennan worked at AI powerhouses like Uber, SoftBank's Vision Fund, and even started his own Generative AI startup (GoCharlie). At SoftBank’s Vision Funds he oversaw the deployment of $50B in capital across 100+ growth stage AI companies. Brennan was part of Uber’s product finance team playing a role in launching Bikes, Scooters, Self Driving, Self Flying and Uber as a Platform Products. He was part of the team that drafted Uber’s Initial Public Offering, resulting in $8.1 Billion in funds raised from public markets. He has seen first hand how innovation drives opportunity, and moved back from San Francisco to Chicago to bring learnings from his career to the mHub ecosystem of partners, ventures and startups.
Co-Founder Pragmatic Digital
Susan Westwater is the co-founder of Pragmatic Digital, where she helps marketing leaders move beyond AI buzzwords and turn technology into real business advantage. With over 20 years of agency leadership at Leo Burnett, Frankel/Arc Worldwide, and Grey Direct, she brings deep experience in building customer engagement strategies that drive measurable growth.
A two-time author, Susan’s latest book, Voice Marketing, was recognized as a finalist for the American Marketing Association Foundation’s Berry Award for outstanding industry impact. She combines the strategic rigor of enterprise marketing with the agility of a boutique consultancy, helping businesses make AI practical, scalable, and focused on outcomes.
At Pragmatic Digital, Susan and her team specialize in practical AI solutions that empower companies to lead with innovation and deliver lasting customer value. When she’s not advising brands on AI strategy, Susan speaks at major conferences about how smart marketers are redefining growth with emerging technologies.
Co-Founder Pragmatic Digital
Scot Westwater is the co-founder of Pragmatic Digital, where he helps growth-driven companies move beyond AI buzzwords and deliver real-world revenue, efficiency, and market leadership. Since 2017, he has partnered with CEOs, CMOs, Sales, and Customer Experience leaders to design AI strategies that drive measurable business outcomes — not endless pilots or PowerPoint decks.
A two-time author, Scot’s latest book, Voice Marketing, was recognized as a finalist for the American Marketing Association Foundation’s Berry Award for outstanding impact on the industry. He brings the strategic discipline of Big 4 consulting and the execution speed of a boutique partner, helping businesses turn AI into a true growth engine. At Pragmatic Digital, Scot and his team focus on practical AI solutions that create competitive advantage fast. When he's not building roadmaps that scale, Scot speaks at major conferences about the realities of AI adoption and how smart businesses are winning with it.
Founder & CEO Rezonance AI
