The AI-Evolving CTO: Redefining Technology Leadership in the Age of Intelligence

The role of the Chief Technology Officer is undergoing a seismic shift. No longer just the steward of infrastructure and systems, today’s CTO must lead with an AI-first mindset, balancing innovation, ethics, and enterprise value. In this forward-looking session, Eric Riz explores how AI is transforming the responsibilities, expectations, and strategic influence of the modern CTO.

Through real-world examples and future-state thinking, Eric will examine how technology leaders can evolve their skillsets, reimagine their org charts, and align AI adoption with business outcomes. From shaping data strategy and governance frameworks to navigating regulatory risk and cultural resistance, this session will arm CTOs and technology executives with a blueprint for leading their organizations through AI-driven transformation.

Whether you're already building with AI or just beginning your journey, this session will challenge assumptions, offer practical frameworks, and redefine what it means to be a technology leader in the age of intelligence.

AI Ethics - Balancing Innovation and Responsibility

As artificial intelligence continues to redefine how we work, live, and interact, organizations are racing to unlock its potential, often without clear ethical guardrails. In this session, Eric explores the intersection of AI ethics and real-world deployment, equipping attendees with a framework to responsibly implement AI solutions while maintaining trust, transparency, and compliance.

Through practical examples drawn from enterprise deployments, policy development, and regulatory shifts, Eric will examine the complex ethical challenges posed by generative AI, algorithmic bias, data ownership, and the limits of automation. Attendees will leave with actionable insights into establishing ethical oversight, integrating responsible AI principles into product design, and aligning innovation with human-centric outcomes.

Whether you're a business leader, technologist, or policymaker, this session will help you navigate the AI landscape with clarity, conscience, and confidence.

The Hidden Cost of Digital Debt

In today’s digital age, the rapid accumulation of data is overwhelming organizations—leading to an often-overlooked crisis: digital debt. Like financial debt, digital debt compounds over time, stifling innovation, inflating costs, and exposing businesses to compliance risks.

This keynote dives into the growing problem of digital debt and reveals how a well-crafted document strategy can be the solution. Learn how to streamline information, enhance collaboration, reduce redundancy, and unlock the full potential of your digital assets. Whether you manage a small team or a global enterprise, this talk will provide practical insights to help you regain control of your digital landscape, reduce risk, and pave the way for sustained growth and innovation.

Join us to discover how tackling digital debt can transform your organization’s efficiency and set the foundation for future success.

The Ultimate Microsoft Copilot Workshop: Harnessing AI for Productivity and Innovation

In this interactive and hands-on workshop, participants will dive into the capabilities of Microsoft Copilot, exploring how to fully leverage AI-powered tools to enhance productivity, automate tasks, and drive business innovation. From integrating Copilot into everyday workflows to using it for advanced enterprise scenarios, this session is designed to empower professionals and organizations to unlock the true potential of AI within the Microsoft ecosystem.

Mastering Microsoft Teams: Advanced Techniques for Power Users

Dive deep into the advanced functionalities of Microsoft Teams designed for power users who want to optimize their collaboration experience. This session will cover in-depth features, integration techniques, and customization options that can elevate your organization’s productivity and streamline workflows. Participants will walk away with practical skills to leverage Teams at a more strategic level.

From Chat to Strategy: Unlocking the Full Potential of Microsoft Teams

In today's hybrid work environment, Microsoft Teams has evolved beyond a simple communication tool into a central hub for collaboration and strategic planning. This session will explore how organizations can leverage Microsoft Teams to drive productivity, enhance teamwork, and achieve their strategic objectives. Attendees will leave with actionable insights on integrating Teams into their organizational strategy for maximum impact.

Governing CoPilot for Microsoft 365

As organizations increasingly integrate AI-driven tools like Microsoft 365’s CoPilot into their daily operations, ensuring effective governance becomes crucial. This session, "Governing CoPilot for Microsoft 365," offers a comprehensive guide to navigating the complexities of governing AI within your organization. Participants will gain insights into the potential risks associated with CoPilot, including data privacy, compliance, and ethical AI usage. The session will cover essential governance principles and provide practical strategies for policy development, user training, and continuous monitoring. Through real-world case studies and best practices, attendees will learn how to align CoPilot’s capabilities with organizational goals while mitigating risks. This session will equip your organization with the tools needed to govern AI responsibly and effectively.

Prompt with Purpose: Elevating Enterprise Productivity through Copilot, Claude and ChatGPT

The quality of what you get from Copilot depends on the quality of what you put in. In this session, Eric explores how purposeful prompting, anchored in goals, context, and trusted sources, transforms Microsoft 365 Copilot from a helpful assistant into a strategic productivity partner.

Participants will learn the Prompt with Purpose framework, a practical model designed to elevate AI interactions from simple questions to meaningful, results-driven dialogue. The session breaks down how to:

Set clear goals that define the desired outcome and shape Copilot’s reasoning path.

Specify context so Copilot understands not just what you’re asking, but why it matters.

Reference reliable sources to ensure accuracy, compliance, and organizational trust.

Define expectations around tone, structure, and insight depth to produce polished, usable outputs.

Through live examples in Teams, Word, Excel, and Outlook, Eric demonstrates how GPT-5’s session memory, voice integration, and extensibility make prompting a critical digital skill for today’s enterprise. Attendees will see how these techniques enhance everything from report writing to meeting summaries and data insights, turning Copilot into a true extension of human capability.

Whether you’re an IT leader designing your organization’s AI strategy or a professional striving for smarter workflows, this session delivers practical tools and repeatable methods to help you and your teams prompt with purpose and achieve more with confidence.

From Pilots to Production: an Enterprise Playbook for LLM Adoption

Most organizations experimenting with large language models (LLMs) are stuck in pilot mode, running isolated use cases, generating excitement, but struggling to scale real business value. The gap between experimentation and enterprise-wide adoption isn’t technical alone; it’s operational, cultural, and strategic.

This session delivers a practical, enterprise-ready playbook for moving LLM initiatives from proof-of-concept to production. Drawing on real-world experience across regulated and data-intensive environments, we’ll break down what actually works: aligning use cases to business outcomes, establishing governance and security guardrails, preparing your data estate for AI, and designing scalable architectures that integrate with existing systems.

Attendees will gain a clear framework to evaluate readiness, prioritize high-impact opportunities, and avoid the common pitfalls that derail AI programs. We’ll also explore how to operationalize LLMs responsibly, balancing speed with control, while enabling teams to confidently adopt AI in their daily workflows.

Whether you’re leading AI strategy, modernizing your data platform, or enabling tools like Microsoft Copilot, this session will equip you with the structure, language, and execution model needed to turn early momentum into sustained enterprise value.

Key Takeaways:
• A step-by-step framework for moving from LLM pilots to production at scale
• How to align AI use cases with measurable business outcomes
• Governance, security, and compliance considerations for enterprise AI
• Data readiness and architecture patterns that enable scalable adoption
• Practical lessons learned from real-world enterprise deployments

The Decision Stack: Where Rules End, AI Begins, and Humans Matter Most

As organizations accelerate automation, a new challenge is emerging: not everything should be automated the same way.

Some decisions are deterministic and repeatable, perfect for rules. Others are ambiguous, contextual, and evolving, better suited for AI models. Most enterprise workflows now require a combination of both, with humans playing a critical role in oversight, exception handling, and continuous learning.

Yet many organizations struggle to define where rules end and models begin. The result is over-engineered systems, misplaced trust in AI, or rigid processes that fail to adapt.

This session introduces a practical framework for designing AI-augmented decision systems that balance automation, intelligence, and human judgment.

Drawing on real-world implementations, we’ll explore:

How to distinguish between rule-based automation and model-driven decisioning

Where AI adds value, and where it introduces unnecessary risk
Patterns for combining rules, models, and human input in a single workflow

How to design human-in-the-loop systems for validation, escalation, and learning

Governance approaches to ensure transparency, accountability, and control

Attendees will leave with a clear, actionable approach to building decision systems that are not only automated but adaptable, trustworthy, and aligned to real business outcomes.

Copilot Is Ready. Is Your Tenant?

Microsoft 365 Copilot is transforming enterprise productivity, but organizations are discovering that purchasing licenses is substantially easier than preparing their environments for responsible AI adoption.

Overshared SharePoint sites, inconsistent permissions, unmanaged Teams, excessive content retention, and incomplete data classification can undermine the security and value of a Copilot deployment before the first prompt is entered.

This session introduces a practical Microsoft 365 Copilot readiness framework that examines identity, information architecture, permissions, data protection, compliance, and operational governance. Drawing on enterprise deployment experience, attendees will learn how to identify high-risk gaps, prioritize remediation, and build a repeatable deployment roadmap using Microsoft Purview, Entra ID, SharePoint, Teams, and Microsoft 365 administration capabilities.
The session moves beyond general readiness advice to demonstrate how to turn assessment findings into actionable controls and measurable improvements.

Attendee takeaways
- Evaluate tenant readiness across six technical and governance domains.
- Identify common SharePoint, Teams, and OneDrive exposure risks.
- Build a prioritized 30/60/90-day Copilot readiness roadmap.

From Copilot to Agents: Building Enterprise AI That Actually Works

Enterprise AI is moving beyond individual productivity assistants toward intelligent agents that retrieve knowledge, execute workflows, and support business decisions. But creating an impressive demonstration is not the same as building a reliable, secure enterprise solution.

This session explores the journey from Microsoft 365 Copilot and SharePoint agents to more sophisticated experiences using Copilot Studio, Power Automate, Microsoft Graph, and Azure AI services. Attendees will learn how to evaluate candidate use cases, select appropriate implementation patterns, govern data access, and establish human oversight for consequential actions.

Through realistic enterprise examples, we will examine architectural choices, identity and permissions, workflow orchestration, error handling, testing, operational ownership, and ongoing performance measurement.

Participants will leave with a practical model for deciding what to automate, which AI experience to use, and how to move from prototypes to sustainable production solutions.

Attendee takeaways
- Choose between Copilot, SharePoint agents, Copilot Studio, and custom AI solutions.
- Design an agent architecture with secure connectors and approval controls.
- Apply a production-readiness checklist covering testing, monitoring, cost, and governance.

Microsoft 365 Security by Design: Purview, Entra, Defender, and Copilot

Securing Microsoft 365 is no longer about configuring individual security products. As organizations expand their use of Copilot, agents, unmanaged devices, and hybrid collaboration, they need an integrated security architecture that connects identity, endpoint access, information protection, threat detection, and compliance.

This session demonstrates how Microsoft Entra ID, Intune, Defender, and Purview can work together to establish practical security guardrails across Microsoft 365.

We will explore Conditional Access, managed application protection, sensitivity labels, Data Loss Prevention, external sharing restrictions, and monitoring controls through an enterprise scenario. Particular attention will be given to balancing strong protection with usable collaboration and AI-enabled productivity.
Attendees will learn how to translate security requirements into deployable policies, validation procedures, evidence artifacts, and clearly assigned responsibilities.

Attendee takeaways
- Map common enterprise risks to Microsoft 365 security controls.
- Understand how identity, device, and data protection policies reinforce one another.
- Build an implementation plan with control owners and audit evidence.

Before Copilot, Pay Down Your Digital Debt: A Microsoft 365 Remediation Playbook

Your organization has invested in Microsoft 365 Copilot. But what happens when the information it discovers is duplicated, outdated, poorly classified, or accessible to the wrong people?
The effectiveness of enterprise AI depends heavily on the quality, accessibility, and governance of its underlying information. For many organizations, years of unmanaged Microsoft 365 growth have created substantial Digital Debt across SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, and enterprise content repositories.

This technical session converts the Digital Debt concept into a hands-on Microsoft 365 remediation strategy.

Attendees will learn how to assess information sprawl, identify high-risk permissions, improve information architecture, apply Microsoft Purview classification and retention controls, and establish sustainable content lifecycle practices.
Using practical examples and a structured remediation framework, the session demonstrates how organizations can reduce unnecessary content, improve knowledge discovery, strengthen governance, and prepare more trustworthy information foundations for Copilot and enterprise agents.

Attendee takeaways
- Assess Digital Debt across SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, and information governance.
- Prioritize cleanup through a risk-and-value scoring model.
- Develop an actionable 90-day remediation plan supporting Copilot and agent readiness.