SUMMIT SESSIONS
This is the day Seattle's AI community stops watching what's happening and starts deciding what's next. Panels, key notes, 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!
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Keynotes
FIRESIDE
Opening Keynote — Fireside with OpenAI & Geekwire
Todd Bishop, Editor and Co-Founder of GeekWire, sits down with Vijaye Raji, CTO of Applications at OpenAI, for a live conversation in front of the Summit audience. They'll dig into the AI story of the moment, with real-time questions from the room
Shift AI Live: Closing Keynote — Space & AI
Shift AI podcast host Boaz Ashkenazy sits down with a special guest for a live fireside on the intersection of AI and space. A conversation about where the technology is now, where it's heading, and why it matters.
Panel Discussions
Explore diverse perspectives from industry leaders, researchers, and policymakers shaping the AI landscape in Seattle.
Morning
Opening Keynote — Fireside with OpenAI & Geekwire
Todd Bishop, Editor and Co-Founder of GeekWire, sits down with Vijaye Raji, CTO of Applications at OpenAI, for a live fireside conversation in front of the Summit audience. They'll cover the latest trends shaping AI, what's making headlines right now, and where the industry is actually heading. Expect a candid back-and-forth on the news of the moment, with real-time questions from the room.
The AI Infrastructure Race
The compute buildout is happening at unprecedented speed and scale. This panel digs into who's winning, what it costs, and where the Pacific Northwest fits in the global race.
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.Â
The Startup Playbook: Building an AI Company in 2026
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. Plus the question enterprise buyers now force on every startup: how early do you have to take security and privacy seriously, and what does moving fast actually cost you there?
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.
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.
Closing Keynote: Shift AI Live, Space & AI
Shift AI podcast host Boaz Ashkenazy closes out the Summit with a live fireside conversation exploring the intersection of AI and space. Boaz and a special guest will dig into how artificial intelligence is reshaping everything from satellite systems to mission planning, and why the space industry is becoming one of AI's most important proving grounds.
