The Fox Cities Chamber is proud to present the AI Business Summit, the premier event for businesses, innovators, and professionals looking to explore the power of artificial intelligence in the workplace. This one-day event brings together industry experts, thought leaders, and cutting-edge businesses to discuss practical AI applications, emerging trends, and real-world case studies that are shaping the future of business.
She’s back. Economist and top-50 professional futurist Rebecca Ryan returns to the AI Summit to kick us off. The truth? Everyone’s tired of AI hype. Rebecca is, too. She cuts through the AI noise and brings fresh insight with that practical, Wisconsin-wise business sense. This year, she’ll share her take on:
Rebecca Ryan, NEXT Generation Consulting, Inc.
Rebecca Ryan is a noted top 50 professional futurist, economist, best-selling author and entrepreneur. She is the founder of NEXT Generation Consulting through which she partners with government leaders across the country. Looking a generation ahead, she outlines strategies in urban planning, economic development and workforce development to ensure communities are well equipped for future trends and challenges. Rebecca is a graduate of Drake University with a certificate in Strategic Foresight from University of Houston; she is the Resident Futurist at the Alliance for Innovation and on the Executive Committee of the global Association of Professional Futurists.
As a futurist and economist who’s tracked hundreds of AI-related signals and projects across dozens of organizations, Rebecca Ryan has a birds-eye view of what works and what wastes money. Plus, her team has been running AI pilots since 2023. In this workshop, she’ll share the patterns she’s observed, the questions mid-sized businesses should ask before spending a dime, and the framework for deciding what to automate and what to keep human. There will be lots of time for Q&A and you’ll leave with a practical roadmap from a Wisconsin-based futurist and business owner.
Rebecca Ryan, NEXT Generation Consulting, Inc.
Rebecca Ryan is a noted top 50 professional futurist, economist, best-selling author and entrepreneur. She is the founder of NEXT Generation Consulting through which she partners with government leaders across the country. Looking a generation ahead, she outlines strategies in urban planning, economic development and workforce development to ensure communities are well equipped for future trends and challenges. Rebecca is a graduate of Drake University with a certificate in Strategic Foresight from University of Houston; she is the Resident Futurist at the Alliance for Innovation and on the Executive Committee of the global Association of Professional Futurists.
This co-presentation pairs a data scientist’s perspective with a CIO’s perspective to give business leaders a complete picture of AI: what it actually is, and what it takes to put it to work responsibly.
Part 1 (Emmett) demystifies the technology itself. Using a “tool shed” metaphor, he explains the difference between traditional machine learning and large language models, where each one shines, where each one fails, and why every failure is predictable once you understand how the tools work. He closes with the hottest topic in AI — autonomous agents — and gives the audience a practical framework for deciding when automation is appropriate and when it isn’t.
Part 2 (Adam) picks up where the technology leaves off: now that you understand the tools, how does a leadership team prepare an organization to use them? Drawing on Miron Construction’s real-world rollout, Adam covers data governance, real use cases, adoption, and the three risks most organizations discover too late — skill erosion, AI-generated low-quality work (“slop”), and the paradox of time savings that create work surges. He closes with the people-first philosophy that has guided Miron’s approach: AI is an accelerator of knowledge and experience, not a replacement for it.
The audience leaves with both the technical literacy to evaluate AI tools and the leadership playbook to deploy them responsibly.
Emmett Gordon, Jewelers Mutual
Adam Clifford, Miron Construction
Blue Door has taken a collaborative approach to AI adoption shaped by its own internal experience. They implemented AI across its own team—testing tools, redesigning workflows, and navigating adoption challenges firsthand. Those lessons became the catalyst for a cohort-based model designed specifically for small businesses.
Rather than tackling AI one business at a time, AI Together brings similarly sized businesses—or those within the same industry—into a facilitated cohort. Working from a proven playbook, participants identify practical AI tools they can implement in parallel, reducing cost, lowering adoption risk, and learning from one another along the way. The cohort also reviews AI governance, data security, and privacy considerations to ensure adoption is responsible, transparent, and aligned with business and customer trust.
Designed for small businesses with intermediate AI knowledge, this session shares the research, framework, and lessons learned that will guide a pilot cohort—offering a realistic, people-first path from AI experimentation to everyday business value.
Heidi Strand, Blue Door Consulting
Andy Wojtowski, Blue Door Consulting
AI is embedded in processes throughout your organization, from marketing to human resources to operations and part of everyday business workflows. The question is no longer whether your organization is using AI, it’s whether you’ve implemented the right guardrails to mitigate the risks that come with it. During this presentation, our presenters will walk through common, day-to-day uses of AI within organizations and explain the potential legal and operational risks you may already be exposed to – often without realizing it:
This session focuses on practical, proactive guardrails, including structured review processes, clear disclosure standards, vendor and contractual protections, data governance and cybersecurity controls, and a documented, enterprise-wide AI policy. AI can drive efficiency and innovation but only when supported by intentional governance. The right guardrails don’t slow innovation; they protect it.
Mike Bendel, Intellectual Property Attorney at Amundsen
Mike Bendel is an intellectual property attorney who helps clients protect and leverage their innovations. He provides strategic counseling on patents, trademarks, copyrights, and trade secrets, with a growing emphasis on the legal implications of artificial intelligence, including IP ownership rights for AI generated content. He also helps his clients develop and implement policies to mitigate risks related to AI’s use of data.
Craig Kubiak, Labor & Employment Attorney at Amundsen Davis
Craig Kubiak is an experienced Labor and Employment attorney and litigator who advises employers on compliance with workplace laws and defends them in complex disputes. He helps clients navigate the evolving legal landscape around artificial intelligence in hiring, ensuring that automated tools comply with anti-discrimination laws and promote fair, lawful employment practices.
Tiffany Woelfel, Business Litigation Attorney at Amundsen Davis
Tiffany Woelfel is a seasoned litigator with extensive experience in intellectual property and employment law. She advises and represents clients on disputes involving IP ownership, often in the context of AI-driven work and employee-created innovations. She helps businesses navigate complex issues around authorship, trade secrets, and emerging technologies in the workplace.
Credit and Rebill (CR/RB) requests are a common but costly operational challenge in large enterprises—often submitted through fragmented channels, researched manually, and processed reactively with little visibility or data capture. In this session, the speakers will share a real-world case study of how multiple teams came together to solve this problem end-to-end.
No single function could have delivered this solution alone. While AI and automation played a critical role, human expertise, judgment, and collaboration were equally essential to designing guardrails, validating logic, and ensuring the solution worked in practice—not just in theory. Attendees will see how they combined front-end validation, Python-based eligibility logic, and centralized intake and tracking with strong human-in-the-loop design to eliminate unnecessary research, reduce follow-ups, and create a true single source of truth.
Rather than focusing on theory, this session emphasizes practical application: how to identify high-friction processes, where AI and automation create immediate value, and why the human element is critical for adoption, trust, and long-term sustainability. The result is measurable time savings, improved data quality, and the ability to shift from reactive processing to proactive, preventative insights.
Melissa Wege – Senior Finance Operations Manager & Citizen Developer at U.S. Venture, Inc.
Melissa Wege is a Finance Operations Manager at U.S. Venture, Inc., headquartered in Appleton, WI. In her role, Melissa is a driving force behind optimizing financial processes, enhancing operational efficiency, and collaborating across the organization to streamline end-to-end processes. Melissa is also a Citizen Developer and is dedicated to “Finding a Better Way” by leveraging Microsoft Power Platform tools to implement innovative solutions that transcend finance and benefit the entire organization. She is passionate about mentoring and empowering others, whether it’s guiding the next generation of finance and citizen development professionals or supporting her “Little” through her involvement with Big Brothers Big Sisters of East Central Wisconsin. Melissa values staying engaged with her community and is a recent graduate of the 2024-25 Leadership Fox Cities program through the Fox Cities Chamber of Commerce.
Josh Rapavi, U.S. Venture, Inc.
The most meaningful AI gains in small business usually do not start with a large-scale strategy or formal company initiative. They start with one owner, manager, or employee who begins using AI in practical ways to save time, improve work quality, and solve everyday business problems. When one person builds real AI fluency in their daily work, that capability can quickly extend into customer service, marketing, operations, communication, and decision-making across the business. This session provides a practical, personal roadmap for building useful AI skills without hype or technical complexity. Using a prompting framework and a structured 10-week adoption plan, participants will see how small, consistent habits with AI tools can lead to meaningful gains for both the individual and the small business. Whether you are new to AI or still in the occasional experiment stage, you will leave with a clear path forward.
John Muraski, UW Oshkosh
The greatest risk to any AI initiative, whether you are rolling out an enterprise tool like Copilot or Gemini, or launching a tailor-made AI solution, is not a technical failure; it is a human one. Organizations are investing significantly in AI, but many struggle to see a tangible return because the technical go-live is often met with user resistance or inconsistent engagement. Drawing on a real-world case study of a Microsoft Copilot rollout for 5,000 employees, this session provides a practitioner’s blueprint for moving beyond the deployment phase to achieve actual ROI realization. Amanda will break down a three-step framework:
Participants will learn how to identify the adoption triggers that drive long-term retention and avoid the common training mistakes that lead to underutilized technology. Whether you are building custom AI tools or purchasing enterprise solutions, you will leave with a scalable strategy to ensure your organization does not just launch AI, but actually profits from it.
Amanda Van Den Elzen – Founder, BetterWork
Amanda Van Den Elzen is a tech-savvy learning consultant and the founder of BetterWork, a professional development consultancy focused on helping people and teams thrive in the age of AI. Amanda is known for translating complex technology into simple, usable tools for everyday work. She’s trained hundreds of professionals on emerging platforms like Generative AI and Microsoft Power Platform, and she specializes in designing learning that sticks. With a passion for empowering others through practical, tech-forward learning, Amanda continues to shape the future of work by building one skill, one team, and one breakthrough at a time.
Everyone’s talking about AI chatbots and copilots — but the next wave is already here. Agentic AI systems can research, decide, and act on behalf of your business with minimal human oversight. This session cuts through the hype to show what agentic systems actually look like in practice today, drawing from real implementations in manufacturing, telecommunications, and professional services. Attendees will see live examples of AI agents handling multi-step business workflows, learn the practical difference between a chatbot and an autonomous agent, and walk away with a clear-eyed view of what’s ready for deployment now, what’s coming in 12-18 months, and where the hype still outpaces reality.
Caleb Waack
The gap between learning about AI and using it effectively is where many organizations stall. Pete will focus on key takeaways from the summit, practical ways to apply what you’ve learned within your organization, and a forward-looking perspective on where AI is headed next. You will walk away with a clear view of AI’s direction, a grounded sense of your organization’s standing, and practical steps to move from insight to action.
Pete Dulcamara, Pete Dulcamara & Associates, LLC