AI is moving fast. Your oversight needs to move faster.
As AI reshapes every industry, the question for public company directors and CEOs is no longer whether it matters but how fast their organizations can move while still protecting the trust that underpins long-term value.
The 2026 AI Leadership Forum will bring together large enterprise board members, CEOs, and leading experts for a highly interactive, one-day program designed to sharpen strategic judgment and accelerate enterprise readiness.
Through immersive simulations, hands-on workshops, expert panels, and rapid-fire AI startup showcases, participants will pressure-test decisions, debate tradeoffs, and leave with practical frameworks you can use immediately—board dashboards, strategic bet maps, workforce readiness plans, and governance prompts that will elevate your oversight.
This is not a conference where you are in “listen only” mode. It’s an impactful working session for the directors and CEOs responsible for navigating the tension between speed and stewardship—and ensuring their organizations are ready to compete in the AI-accelerated economy.
Real-life simulations that surface the consequences of AI missteps, governance gaps and trust failures.
Panels and peer discussions that translate insight into board-level action.
Tackle AI governance, growth strategy and workforce transformation with tools you can use right away.
AI Interstitials that show how startups are collapsing cost structures and redefining competition.
A focused briefing on enforcement trends and global standards shaping board liability in 2026.
Real-world lessons in innovation, culture, risk and governance from large-scale transformation.
CEO & Co-Founder, KYP.ai
CEO & Founder, EMA
Board Member, Portland General Electric; Former Chief Legal Officer, eBay and Agilent Technologies
CEO, Global Data Innovation
Group Chief Technology Officer, Atos
CEO & Founder, Cantellus Group
Executive Advisory, Cantellus Group; Former Chief Data Officer & Chief Privacy Officer, Mastercard
Chairman, KYP.ai; Former Executive, Microsoft
CEO, IgniteTech, GFI Software, Khoros
Board Member, Ossia Inc.; Former Assistant Director for Cybersecurity, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy
This opening session sets the tone for the day by engaging directors and CEOs in a shared leadership conversation about how organizations govern AI as it accelerates from experimentation to enterprise impact. Rather than focusing on specific use cases and debating winners and losers, the discussion will center on the board–management partnership: how C-Suites and Boards stay aligned as AI reshapes how decisions are made, who makes them, and how quickly consequences materialize when the pace of change outstrips traditional oversight models.
The format is deliberately interactive. A panel of CEOs will frame a small number of foundational questions—about pace, accountability, escalation, and governance boundaries—and then turn the conversation to the room. Attendees will break into short table discussions to reflect on how these tensions are playing out inside their own organizations, before returning to the panel to surface patterns. The session culminates in a shared view of the leadership agenda boards and CEOs must own together in 2026: how to move with urgency while strengthening—not eroding—the trust that underpins long-term value.
This highly interactive session will help directors and CEOs pinpoint where AI is creating—or quietly eroding—value faster than boards expect. A panel of experts will frame the conversation with pointed questions: why some companies escape pilot purgatory while others stall, which business models are already shifting under AI pressure, and what early signals indicate an initiative is drifting off course.
Then the real work begins. After each panel exchange, participants will break into rapid table discussions to pressure-test the ideas against their own organizations—surfacing hidden value, diagnosing barriers to speed, and debating which AI bets should be accelerated or abandoned. It’s a working session designed to connect expert perspective with real-world boardroom implications by sparking debate and challenging leaders to look differently at where competitive advantage will emerge next.
Questions You’ll Answer:
Imagine this:
These aren’t hypotheticals—they’re happening now. Throughout the day, short AI Interstitials will spotlight startups already redefining these markets—collapsing cost structures, resetting customer expectations, and moving from prototype to scale in weeks, not years. Each interstitial offers a focused glimpse into where disruption is taking hold—and why boards and CEOs of large enterprises cannot afford to move slowly as AI rewrites the competitive landscape.
In this brief session, we’ll spotlight the quiet but critical shift from AI as a productivity tool to AI as an autonomous actor—initiating actions, making decisions, and coordinating work across systems. If an AI agent makes a decision that materially impacts customers, regulators, or markets—who is accountable, and how would your board know it happened?
Through real-world examples, we’ll surface why many boards are already behind the curve—and why agentic AI demands a fundamentally different approach to oversight. The conversation sets the stage for a deeper, hands-on working session later in the day.
competitive landscape.
In this 45-minute immersive, high-pressure simulation, attendees will step directly into a boardroom confronting an unfolding AI incident—one with real operational, ethical, and reputational consequences. You’ll receive a rapid-fire briefing, assess incomplete and conflicting information, and work as a “board” at your table to determine the company’s next move under time constraints and stakeholder scrutiny. As the scenario evolves, new facts, risks, and pressures will surface—forcing you to confront the judgment calls real directors face as AI systems misfire, drift, or behave unpredictably.
Each table will identify oversight gaps, debate the immediate decisions the board must make, and map how each option will either build or erode trust with customers, employees, regulators, and investors. The session will conclude with a debrief, comparing how different “boards” responded and extracting what this means for strengthening AI governance, reporting, and crisis readiness in your own organization.
AI regulation—both in the U.S. and abroad—is collapsing the distance between “we’re monitoring this” and actual board liability. This briefing will cut through the noise to focus on what matters most for public-company directors and executives: the enforcement trends already underway, the provisions of the EU AI Act that will hit U.S.-listed companies first, and the accelerating expectations emerging from the SEC, FTC, DOJ, and state attorneys general.
This isn’t a legal update—it’s a line-of-sight warning. You’ll walk away with a clear understanding of where regulators are concentrating scrutiny, where your disclosures and board processes are most exposed, and what must change now to avoid becoming the next headline example of AI oversight failure.
As AI evolves from tools to autonomous actors, boards face a fundamentally new governance challenge: overseeing systems that can initiate actions, interact with other systems, and adapt in real time—often faster than human review cycles allow. Using live examples and simplified demonstrations, we’ll walk through how AI agents already initiate actions, coordinate across systems, escalate (or fail to escalate) issues, and make decisions with real financial, operational, and reputational consequences.
Participants will then work in table groups to examine these scenarios from a boardroom lens: Where should decision boundaries be set? What must remain human-controlled? How do boards ensure auditability, escalation, and accountability when actions happen at machine speed? The discussion will surface the new governance questions agentic AI creates—around authority, controls, reporting, and fiduciary responsibility—before these systems quietly scale inside organizations.
What does it take to build AI at scale inside a complex, global enterprise? In this closing fireside conversation, we’ll sit down with a senior leader from a global organization that has successfully integrated AI across its business—from customer experience and operations to risk management and governance.
We’ll explore the strategic blueprint behind their transformation: how the board and C-suite aligned on priorities, how the company built trust into every stage of its AI development, and how leadership balanced innovation, risk, and culture to deliver measurable business results.
This conversation will pull together the themes of the day with a real-world example of what it looks like to lead responsibly at speed.
To ensure a high-quality experience, attendance is limited. To secure your spot and preferred workshop session, we recommend registering early.
The event will be hosted at the offices of Latham & Watkins, 505 Montgomery Street, Suite 2000, San Francisco, CA.
