Ground Truth: AI for Business Summit 2026

Speakers

• Jirs Meuris, AV. Duane Rath Professor Associate Professor, Management and Human Resources
• Joe Ramundo, Managing Director, Accenture
• Laura Sardegna, Senior Director of GTM Strategy and Operations, Snap Inc
• Ben Fiechtner, President, UiPath
• Tom Mottola, Global IT Director, Abbott

The organizations that will ultimately win are those that treat AI investment and human development as complementary. This session tackles three questions every leader is asking: What is my team actually thinking about AI? What can leaders do to unlock its potential? And how do I design a future where my team doesn’t just keep up with AI but gets ahead?

Speakers

• Tarun Kushwaha, Professor, Marketing
• Yu Ma, Assistant Professor, Operations and Information Management
• Rodrigo Remis, Group Director, Agentic AI
• Peter Steiner, Senior New Product Development Manager, Spectrum Brands
• Denise Blomquist, Vice President, Medtronic

One of the greatest promises of AI has been productivity. But how do you actually capture that, particularly at an enterprise level? This panel will explore key principles and factors needed to capture productivity gains at scale including management decisions, where to loop in humans, and assessing business goals. 

Speakers

• Matt Seitz

Every company is adopting AI. Within a few years, your competitors will have the same tools, the same models, the same use cases.  So what actually creates advantage?

This interactive workshop will help you identify your unique advantages and build a deployment plan you can put into action next week.

Speakers

• Neeraj Arora, Academic Executive Director, Marketing Leadership Institute 
• Ken Nelson, Chief Commercial Officer, Deloitte 
• Paul Hoban, Head of Analytics, AirBnB
• Alan Stoffer, Director, Marketing Leadership Institute

AI is transforming how consumers discover, evaluate, and interact with brands. From personalization to AI-driven search and shopping assistants, the customer journey is changing fast. This panel explores how AI is affecting consumer expectations, what it means for marketers,and how brands can balance automation, trust, and authenticity.

Speakers

• Garrett Norton, Associate Director of Partnership & Operations Finance, Arrowhead Financial, Professional MBA Candidate
• Shuting Zheng, Associate Brand Manager, General Mills, Alumna  
• Austin Heard, MBA Candidate, Technology Strategy & Product Management
• Louis Berns, Student, Entrepreneurship & Supply Chain Management
• Kate Hutchinson, Student, Marketing 
• Ramadan Raji, Masters Student, Business Analytics

No one is experiencing AI-driven change like current students and young professionals. As the first generation to graduate in an AI-focused business world, they’ll share their perspectives on education, recruiting, entry-level work, and the workforce they are joining.

Speakers

• Page Moreau, Associate Dean for Research, Wisconsin School of Business
• Carrie Seymour, Director of Consumer Insights, Kohler
• Siddhartha Agarwal, CEO, JazzX AI
• Michelangelo D’Agostino, VP of AI and Machine Learning, Grainger
• Nate Carson, GenAI Solutions, Uber

Innovation and creativity have always driven successful business ventures. This panel explores recent experimental research and business case studies into how AI is affecting product research and innovation in today’s companies.

Patrick Lucey

Chief Scientist, Stats Perform

AI in sport isn’t new, but tools like ChatGPT have transformed expectations. Users no longer just consume data; they expect to converse with it and generate their own insights. This talk introduces the new paradigm and shows how it can be delivered through a scalable stack of perception, language, and domain-specific reasoning models.

Christian Peters

Assistant Professor of Accounting, Wisconsin School of Business

When it comes to AI the biggest risks are not technical, they are human. This talk explores research on how human error plays a role in AI adoption and how business practitioners can effectively work together.

Patrick Burnton

SVP, FP&A, Applied Systems

As AI becomes embedded in enterprise workflows, finance teams are both users and stewards of AI. This session examines how AI is transforming core finance processes and why understanding AI cost drivers, allocation, and value realization is becoming a key to success.

Mahka Moeen

Associate Professor of Management and Human Resources, Wisconsin School of Business

How does AI move from early incubation to widespread adoption? This talk explores how progress depends on resolving uncertainties in technology, demand, ecosystems, and institutions, and how they determine why some AI applications scale and others don’t.

Michael Costa

Partner, StoneTurn

This talk features real-world examples that show how AI is increasingly driving litigation consulting outcomes across a range of business scenarios and industries.

Ishita Chakraborty

Assistant Professor of Marketing, Wisconsin School of Business

Not all AI needs to work alone. Learn what the research says about when to deploy fully automated AI versus human-AI teams in your marketing research and customer service pipelines.

Jonathan Kuether

Partner, Bain & Company

How can AI enhance merchant effectiveness and efficiency at retailers? This talk explores how AI can surface hidden insights and partner with humans to improve category management outcomes, assortment decisions, and negotiations results.

Min-Seok Pang

Professor of Information Systems and Analytics, Wisconsin School of Business

Just like AI provides firms a powerful tool to accelerate business transformation and innovations, it also gives their adversaries powerful weapons and ammunition to disrupt ongoing business operations, harm customers and other stakeholders, and threaten the existence of firms. How should leaders prepare for and respond to increasingly powerful AI-driven threats?

Bryan Seefeld

Director of Strategic Planning, Switch

As AI chip demands soar, the industry is shifting from individual data centers to massive, integrated Gigawatt Campuses. This talk explores how the scale of AI is transforming the physical landscape and why the campus, not the building, is the new unit of innovation.

Jordan Tong

Department Chair, Operations and Information Management, Wisconsin School of Business

How should AI systems be designed to draw out what humans know that the AI does not? This talk explores frameworks for human-AI collaboration that enable stronger joint performance in settings like forecasting, scheduling, and hiring.