

Melissa Jurkoic
Lifetime technologist devoted to improving the human experience through tech
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Actions
Melissa has worked in the tech industry for over 25 years in roles ranging from Junior Software Engineer to her current role as the Chief Operations Officer at Benson Consulting, Inc.
At Benson Consulting Inc., her focus as COO is on driving operational excellence through strategic leadership and leveraging her expertise in software development and business strategy.
She holds a Bachelor’s in Computer Science from the University of New Hampshire and an executive certificate in Management and Leadership from MIT.
She has volunteered with organizations globally including ChickTech, Everwise, WITI, NH Tech Alliance, Microsoft DigiGirlz, wiseHer, Girl Scouts and AnitaB.org.
Concurrently, as a co-founder of Diversify Thinking, she advocates for diversity and inclusion, channeling her passion into initiatives that create community and real change. Her work is dedicated to creating environments where a diversity of great minds can thrive and make impactful contributions to technology and society.
Links
Area of Expertise
Topics
The Illusion of Adoption: Why Your Tech Investment is Failing Without Proficiency
Organizations across industries are sinking millions into digital transformation, yet most fail to measure the one metric that truly determines ROI—user proficiency. High adoption rates look impressive on paper, but beneath the surface, unused features, inefficient workflows, and frustrated employees erode operational value.
The result? Tech investments that never reach their full potential.
This session exposes the hidden gaps in traditional adoption measurement and introduces a data-driven framework for evaluating proficiency at scale. Attendees will learn:
• Why adoption metrics alone create misleading success stories
• How poor proficiency leads to financial losses across industries—from missed revenue in hospitality to inefficient workflows in healthcare and manufacturing
• Strategies for quantifying the impact of partial adoption on KPIs like RevPAR, productivity rates, and operational efficiency
• Actionable solutions for improving long-term proficiency while maintaining compliance and security
Beyond Automation: Measuring AI Proficiency to Unlock True Business Value
AI adoption is accelerating across industries, but implementation alone doesn’t guarantee success. Organizations often focus on surface-level engagement metrics—system logins, automation rates, and AI-driven outputs—without assessing whether employees truly understand and leverage AI capabilities.
The result? Billions lost in unrealized ROI as AI tools remain underutilized or misapplied.
This session redefines AI adoption by introducing a proficiency-first framework that ensures organizations extract real value from their AI investments.
Attendees will gain insights into:
• The hidden gap between AI implementation and actual workforce adoption
• Why traditional tech adoption metrics fail to capture AI utilization
• Practical strategies for measuring AI proficiency beyond engagement statistics
• The impact of AI-driven decisions on operational efficiency, revenue, and customer experience
Users Don't Have to Suffer in the Cloud
The cloud has a lot to offer organizations - this is unquestionable.
It is clear - the cloud has extraordinary potential to disrupt how IT manages applications and how IT delivers services to end users.
The strategies to move to the cloud for enterprises usually steer towards either migrating their data centers to IaaS and PaaS (think Azure or AWS) or fully replacing on-premises applications with SaaS alternatives (Salesforce, ServiceNow, Office365 for example).
These strategies can introduce serious challenges for end-users. The impact to the end-user experience is often not considered in these plans.
What if there was a third option? Where the user experience was centralized and the data integrity was preserved.
There is. A hub and spoke architecture doesn't sacrifice user experience or data integrity and frees the enterprise to make the right technology decisions without impacting user adoption.
Why a Diverse Team is Crucial to Startup Success
Team diversity refers to differences between members of startup team. Those differences can include demographic differences (like age, race, sex, ethnicity), personality (extrovert, introvert, and differing Myers-Briggs types) and functional (as in skill sets, like engineering, design, copywriting, and marketing).
How does team diversity impact your customers' experience from the moment they learn about you through their journey with you?
You will attract and relate to customers how look like you. They will understand your messaging and you will understand their needs. If you don't represent the right dimensions of diversity, you are leaving an amazing experience behind.
The Message in My Mess: Journey to Find Meaning in the Moments
"All change is hard at first, messy in the middle and so gorgeous at the end." - Robin Sharma
We often dismiss our past experiences and mistakes to not be part of our story. We claim our success in spite of our past, not attributing any of those events to have influenced it. Being a woman in a male-dominated industry created a lot of challenges in her life and at times felt isolating. She did not take the time to look back at her past and realized without doing that, she would never be ready to embrace her future. By sharing our stories, we can help others, stand together, and move forward. Meet Melissa in the mess, discover insights about your own journey through her story and get ready to embrace your future.
Meet Melissa in the mess, discover insights about your own journey through her story and get ready to embrace your future.
Cloud With Chris Sessionize Event
CodeCampSDQ 2023 Sessionize Event
Neurodiversity as a Superpower in the Tech World Sessionize Event
DeveloperWeek 2023 Sessionize Event
Build Stuff 2022 Lithuania Sessionize Event
Code PaLOUsa 2022 Sessionize Event
Devintersection & AngleBrackets Spring 2022 Sessionize Event
Devintersection & AngleBrackets Fall 2021 Sessionize Event
Build Stuff 2021 Lithuania Sessionize Event
DeveloperWeek Austin 2021 Sessionize Event
droidcon Italy Live 2021 Sessionize Event
PASS Data Community Summit 2021 Sessionize Event
Colorado Springs Tech (un)Conference 2021 Sessionize Event
iSAQB Software Architecture Gathering 2021 Sessionize Event
CollabDays New England - Microsoft 365 2021 Sessionize Event
JCON 2021 Sessionize Event
Scenic City Summit 2021 Sessionize Event
ContainerDays 2021 Sessionize Event
Music City Tech 2021 Sessionize Event
Code PaLOUsa 2021 Sessionize Event
Data Geeks Saturday Conference Sessionize Event
TechStrong Con Sessionize Event
Cloud Community Conference Cologne Sessionize Event
SimpleWebConf 2021 Sessionize Event
Euruko 2021 Sessionize Event
Techorama 2021 Spring Edition Sessionize Event
#DataWeekender v3.1 Sessionize Event
Destination: Scale Sessionize Event
IWD East Africa Summit 2021 Sessionize Event

Melissa Jurkoic
Lifetime technologist devoted to improving the human experience through tech
Boston, Massachusetts, United States
Links
Actions
Please note that Sessionize is not responsible for the accuracy or validity of the data provided by speakers. If you suspect this profile to be fake or spam, please let us know.
Jump to top