AI in enterprise
The three hardest truths shaping enterprise AI in 2026This session reveals the three critical shifts that determine who wins:
- The great AI ROI reckoning: If you can't show business impact in three to six months, you're done.
- The rise of true autonomous agents: Agents now make decisions and adapt without a human script.
- The forward-deployed engineer boom: FDEs will be the highest-paid talent for integrating AI with legacy systems.
Featured speakers

Jarrod Vawdrey
Field Chief Data Scientist

Jarrod Vawdrey is a fixture in the data science community, and is Advisor and former CEO of A42 Labs, a leading provider of AI and ML software and services for building, deploying and managing business critical data workloads at scale. Jarrod holds multiple patents in the field of AI and data science.

Dylan Storey
Senior director, data science services

I am a scientifically minded leader with a background that includes microbial food safety research and a genome science PhD. I enable companies to build and maintain organizations and platforms for the capture and organization of data so that they may make better decisions based on evidence. My data work experience has been focused on empowering data-driven decision making and expanding data capabilities through training, technology, and process improvement. I have built high-performing teams that consistently deliver the highest throughput without burnout or churn, and I emphasize leadership by example and with empathy. I spent nearly a decade leveraging high performance computing to analyze and manage large, complex data sets in my academic research. My professional interests include process and decision automation through machine learning and common sense, software development, data engineering/architecture, and reproducible research. I earned my PhD from University of Tennessee and completed both my BS and MS at Cal State Fresno.