Tech Leadership in the Time of AI

Wednesday, 9:00 AM EST

The typical path to senior tech leadership involves learning the
tools, tips, tricks, and artistry of using technology to further an
organization's business goals while satisfying the needs of its
customers. The collective experience of a leadership team benefits the
entire organization by providing them the vision and capacity to make
decisions in the face of technical and business change.

AI has emerged like a rocketship of disruption across our industry and
around the world. It has undermined the foundations on which this
collective wisdom has been forged with both promises of inconceivable
productivity and the fears of wide-scale obsolescence. The problem is
exacerbated by the wholesale failure of tech journalism to hold AI
companies and their advocates accountable for the wild claims they
have put out into the world.

This day-long workshop will help technology leaders evolve their thinking
to absorb these new realities into their collective wisdom. With a grounded
position on the realities of both the promises and pitfalls, I believe I can help
shape this discussion by facilitating discussion around the following topics.

• AI Reality Check
• The 21st Century Corporation
• How Your Vision of AI Shapes the Role It Will Take
• Making the Case for Adoption via Business Alignment
• Tech Trends Influenced By and Influencing AI
• The Role of Chief AI Officer
• The Path from Automation to Autonomy
• Augmenting Employees vs Replacing Them
• Extracting the Value of Institutional Memory
• Adopting Agents with Agency
• The Future of Work and Education
• The Security of AI Systems
• AI Legal Risks and Protections
• Ethics of Adoption
• Proactive AI Governance
• Measuring Success
• The Impact on Decision Making
• Preparing for What Is Next

Come have a deep, rich, and valuable discussion about AI that isn’t couched in greed
and fear. We will give you the tools to evaluate and select AI strategies that are reasonable,
profitable, lower risk, and based in reality.

Tech Trends for Tech Leaders

Thursday, 9:30 AM EST

There are certain tech trends people at least know about such as Moore's Law even if they don't really understand them. But there are other forces at play in and around our industry that are unknown or ignored by the ever diminishing tech journalism profession. They help explain and predict the pressures and influences we are seeing now or soon will.

In this talk, I will identify a variety of trends that are happening at various paces in intertwined ways at the technological, scientific, cultural, biological, and geopolitical levels and why Tech Leaders should know about them. Being aware of the visible and invisible forces that surround you can help you work with them, rather than against them. You will also be more likely to make good choices and thrive rather than being buffeted uncontrollably.

Designed In

Thursday, 11:00 AM EST

Do your software developers feel responsibility for the security of the systems they build? If so, are they designing security in? One of the reasons this is difficult is that they are incentivized to demonstrate that the system does what it is supposed to do.

How often do we make sure it doesn't do what it is not supposed to do?

By the way, what is security? Can you and they even define it? How will you know it when you see it? How will you know you have done enough?

How do we instill deep, meaningful, incremental improvements to an organization's security posture? How do we convince our executives to spend enough on security? By the way, what's enough?

In this talk I will help give you a tangible set of steps to do just this.

Empowering Generalists

Thursday, 4:00 PM EST

Since the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, there has been more to know every day. No individual can know it all and we have seen the entrenchment of the specialist for the past hundred or so years. When all of this tacit knowledge was locked in our heads, the specialist was rewarded for knowing details.

In our industry we have seen professionals gravitate to specific languages, specific tiers in the architecture (e.g. front-end vs backend), and specific libraries or frameworks. Sometimes they will even go so far as to list specific versions of specific technologies on their resume.

All of this specialization can be beneficial when you need resources that are deep within narrow confines. The ubiquitous glut of available information no longer requires us to know topics to this level of detail. Market realities are also such that nobody has the budget to employ only specialists any more. Developers have needed to learn to become designers, testers, data-experts, security-aware, AI-cognizant, and capable of communicating with various stakeholders.

When your industry epitomizes unfettered change, you need to rely on generalists, not specialists; synthesizers, not knowledge keepers. How can you attract, hire, and benefit from technologists who identify as problem solving value adders rather than programmers of a specific language? How can you encourage their growth and measure success? Even more, how do you lead them yourself?

In this talk we will discuss the rise of the generalist knowledge worker who creates value even in the face of information overflow and AI.