Agenda | Seattle 2026
Closed-door sessions
The answers are in the room. Come prepared to intensely debate and bring examples and lessons learned; this is where collective intelligence is best.
1. ROI is an organizational achievement, not a technical one. Capital is flowing; proof is not.
- Confidence has outrun measurement. What separates the projects that show real P&L impact from the ones that quietly stall, and what does disciplined capital allocation look like in practice?
- Returns come from redesigning how work flows, not from layering agents onto existing processes. Where has that paid off without boiling the ocean, and how?
- Our people, performance, and learning systems were built for human teams, not hybrid ones. How are we re-planning our workforce to capture value?
2. The bottleneck has moved from the model to our own foundations and architecture, and the bet underneath it.
- Most pilots stall before production, what are we learning on data, integration, evaluation, adoption and auditability that delivered outcomes?
- The architecture choice, whether a single integrated stack, an open and portable one, or a sovereign build, is hard to reverse once agents are wired in. How are we making the call and keeping optionality at scale?
- Tokenomics has become a board-level concern, and value is settling in the orchestration layer that routes work to the right model at the right cost. What routing and cost controls actually work?
3. Trust, control, and crossing borders.
- Governance is better understood as the thing that lets us move faster than the brake that slows us. What does a working control stack that grants autonomy at pace look like today?
- Identity and lifecycle management are the missing primitives. What controls, in identity, oversight, and the ability to revoke authority, are we requiring before we widen an agent's remit?
- The rules are fragmenting by jurisdiction faster than most global operating models can absorb. How do we stay compliant without building a separate stack for every region?
Open-door sessions
These go wider than the closed room, come with a point of view, and stay open to being moved.
A. The frontier of autonomy.
In conversation with Head of Agentforce and EVP, Salesforce.
Single agents are giving way to multi-agent systems, agents that transact, and agents that supervise other agents, with more autonomy over longer time horizons and emerging agent-to-agent ecosystems across vendors. We are seeking the read on what is real, what is hype, and what we should be architecting, staffing, and governing for over the next eighteen to twenty-four months.
B. Owning the learning loop.
In conversation with Head of Frontier Tuning, Microsoft Labs and CTO of Agri-Food
The frontier debate has shifted from model capability to who captures the value. The argument gaining ground is that the firm that wins builds and owns a learning loop on top of rented models, turning its people's judgment into a proprietary asset rather than ceding it to a few large models. We are seeking outside perspectives on how value actually flows between models, platforms, and enterprises, and whether owning your own intelligence is realistic or rhetoric.
C. The external risk surface.
In conversation with Head of AI Implementations, Palantir and Advisor: U.S. National AI Advisory Committee, DARPA.
Two outside forces are moving faster than most operating models can absorb. On threats, prompt injection is becoming the new malware, agents are emerging as both an attack surface and an insider-threat vector, and the shift is already reshaping security practice and cyber-insurance underwriting. On rules, the EU Act, China's new agent framework, the Five Eyes guidance, and Singapore's graduated-autonomy and liability models are converging and diverging at the same time. We are seeking outside perspectives on where attack and defense are heading, and where regulation is actually going, so we can build for it rather than react to it.
D. The political economy of agents.
In conversation with CEO, Wand AI and Futurist, Author of The Agentic Age
The broadest question, and the one with the least consensus. As agents absorb more work, the debate is turning to societal permission, the concentration of value in a few models, and the effect on jobs, industries, and the social contract. We are seeking outside voices to push our thinking beyond the walls of the enterprise, on what this means for how we lead, hire, and position our organizations.
Executive Technology Board (c)