SUMMIT SESSIONS
This is the day Seattle's AI community stops watching what's happening and starts deciding what's next. Panels, keynotes, and a live podcast taping across infrastructure, the workforce question, life sciences, quantum, creative practice, the shape of human connection in the AI era, and more!
Keynotes & Firesides
Fireside Conversation with OpenAI & GeekWire
GeekWire's Todd Bishop sits down with OpenAI's Vijaye Raji for a conversation on where frontier model development is headed next. They'll dig into the technical and strategic choices shaping these systems, with a closer look at the cybersecurity challenges that come with building and deploying AI at scale. Expect a candid discussion on both the opportunities and the risks.
Detect The Hallucinations Before They Occur: Milli-Intercept AI Technology “Resect NeuroWave”
Hallucinations occur in milli-second speeds, today we can only observe after the occurrence. Resect identifies the location of tokens where a hallucination is likely to occur during generation, not post-hoc. Then isolates the faulty section, while providing an audit trail of the entire interaction. Join Mike Steep and Tim Walton of Resect for a fireside conversation on how they’re catching hallucinations in real time.
Shift: AI Live — Closing Fireside on AI for Good
Shift AI podcast host Boaz Ashkenazy closes out the Summit with a live fireside conversation on AI for Good, joined by Matthew Loys Duncan, Head of Future of Work & AI at Microsoft, and Chris Emura, Executive Director and Head of Applied Science & Technology at the Allen Institute for AI (Ai2). Together they’ll explore how AI is being put to work on some of society’s toughest challenges, and what it takes to make sure its benefits reach the communities that need them most.
Panel Discussions
Explore diverse perspectives from industry leaders, researchers, and policymakers shaping the AI landscape in Seattle.
Morning
Compounding Advantage: How Washington's Industries Set Up the AI Era
Software, life sciences, energy, and aerospace didn't cluster in Washington by accident. Leaders from each sector on how those strengths built on one another over decades — the talent that moved between them, the research base they share, the infrastructure they made possible — and why that combination positions the region to compete globally in the AI era. A look backward that explains what the state has to work with going forward.
Keeping it Real: Creativity, Music, and the Human Experience
Musicians, filmmakers, and visual artists are reshaping their crafts with AI as both a medium and a collaborator — and pushing back where it doesn't belong. This session looks at what's emerging when creative practice meets generative tools: the work that couldn't exist otherwise, the techniques being invented in real time, and the unsettled questions about authorship, consent, and compensation. Artists on what they're making, what they're refusing, and what it's costing them.
AI at Work: Hype vs Production
Agents have become a daily driver on some teams and nowhere near it on others. Practitioners share what's actually working when AI starts running real pieces of the job — where the ROI is measurable, where the governance gets hard, and what breaks in production that never breaks in a pilot.
Unlearning the Playbook: Building an AI Startup When the Rules Change Every Year
Building has gotten fast enough that last year's assumptions expire before the roadmap does. Founders on what they believed in 2024 and 2025 that simply isn't true anymore, how they're thinking about defensibility when a competitor can ship your feature over a weekend, and when a wedge product has to become a bigger vision.
The AI Infrastructure Race
As AI scales, the real bottleneck isn't chips, it's power. This panel brings together leaders from utilities, data center development, nuclear innovation, and national security to unpack how the race to build AI infrastructure is fundamentally a race to secure energy.
The Workforce Question: An Honest Look at What AI Creates and Replaces
AI is changing what work looks like, and most of the public conversation is either boosterish or apocalyptic. This panel takes the honest middle: the jobs being created, the jobs being reshaped, the ones genuinely going away, and how fast any of it is really moving. Employers, workforce leaders, and educators on what the region's strategy should be — and what workers should be doing about it right now.
AI & Life Sciences: From Code to Cures
From target discovery to clinical decision support, AI is changing how life sciences research gets done and how care gets delivered. Researchers and operators on what has actually moved from the lab into practice — where models are compressing timelines, where regulatory and data realities slow things down, and what the next few years look like for patients. Washington's life sciences cluster gives this one a hometown angle.
Quantum + AI: The Convergence Begins
Quantum computing and AI are beginning to intersect in ways that go beyond conference-panel speculation. Researchers and builders on where the work is genuinely promising, where the claims outrun the results, and what a realistic timeline looks like — for optimization, for materials, for cryptography. With significant quantum research happening in the Pacific Northwest, this is a look at what the region is building toward and how AI accelerates it.
Closer or Further Apart: AI and the Human Connection
AI is increasingly mediating how we connect — with friends, customers, therapists, even partners. This session examines what that's adding and what it's displacing: the loneliness it eases and the loneliness it may deepen, the care it extends to people who had none, and the relationships it quietly stands between. On this panel we discuss the implications and interactions between AI and humans.
AFTERNOON
Two Assignments: Teaching With AI vs. Teaching About AI
Some teachers are using AI to build lessons and grade work; others are trying to teach students what it is and when not to trust it. Most are doing both, with little guidance. Educators from K-12 and higher ed on what's actually happening in classrooms right now — what's working, what districts are getting wrong, and what real policy looks like when the technology moves faster than any curriculum cycle.
