Two-day summit tackles AI safety, trust, jobs, autonomous vehicles,
education and ethics — from a Pittsburgh neighborhood where AI
companies are expanding in real time
As the national debate intensifies over the acceleration, security, and real-world impact of artificial intelligence, AI Horizons 2026, an initiative of the AI Strike Team, brings 1,000 technology, government, and corporate leaders to Pittsburgh on Thursday and Friday, September 17–18. Given the urgency and rapidly evolving nature of the national conversation around AI, we have expanded capacity for AI Horizons.
The summit convenes at Bakery Square—the anchor of Pittsburgh’s expanding “AI Avenue”—to address enterprise adoption, physical robotics, workforce disruption, and federal policy.
“We started this three years ago because we believed Pittsburgh had to be at the center of this next economic epoch—not watching it happen from the sidelines,” said Joanna Doven, CEO of the AI Strike Team. “Now the national conversation around AI is moving at a dizzying pace, and Pittsburgh has exactly the people who should be helping make sense of it—from one of the world’s leading minds in AI safety building Gray Swan here, to Skild AI pushing the frontier of physical AI, to PPG and Wabtec putting AI to work in the real economy. We can’t choose between being responsible and being competitive—we have to figure out how to do both. That’s what AI Horizons is about: putting the builders, the adopters, the policymakers and even a Catholic monk in the same room to wrestle with what this technology means for our economy, our workforce and ultimately, for us as humans.”
AGENDA SNAPSHOT
20 cross-sector AI discussions — full agenda here.
Thursday, Sept. 17: Trust, Policy & The Physical Economy
9:00 AM — AI ACCEPTANCE: TRUST IS HOW WE GROW
Focus: Cybersecurity, model safety, and enterprise deployment as prerequisites for economic growth.
Speakers: Leigh-Ann Russell, CIO & Global Head of Engineering, BNY; Andrew Moore, CEO, Lovelace AI; Zico Kolter, PhD, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, Gray Swan AI (Head of Machine Learning Department, Carnegie Mellon University); Sharon Goldman, Founder & Journalist, Ground-Level AI; Joanna Doven, CEO, AI Strike Team.
11:30 AM — CITIES THAT THINK: PUTTING AI TO WORK FOR COMMUNITIES
Focus: Municipal AI integration across infrastructure, public services, and urban management.
Speakers: Corey O'Connor, Mayor, City of Pittsburgh; Jumbi Edulbehram, Global Business Development, Smart Cities, NVIDIA; Joe Depa, Global Innovation & Technology Leader, EY.
1:20 PM — THE ROAD TO AUTONOMY
Focus: Federal regulatory structures and safety frameworks for autonomous transportation.
Keynote: Jonathan Morrison, Administrator, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).
2:30 PM — THE JOBS BEHIND AI: ROBOTS, ENERGY & THE PEOPLE WHO POWER IT
Focus: Power generation, physical infrastructure, and skilled labor supply chains backing AI development.
Speakers: Jake Loosararian, Co-Founder & CEO, Gecko Robotics; Toby Rice, President & CEO, EQT Corporation; Shawn Steffee, Business Agent, Boilermakers Local 154; Moderator: Salena Zito, National Political Reporter, Washington Post / New York Post.
3:45 PM — PENNSYLVANIA BUILDS
Focus: Pennsylvania’s industrial baseline and state-level policy in the next era of technology.
Keynote: Josh Shapiro, Governor, Commonwealth of Pennsylvania.
Friday, Sept. 18: Physical AI, Compute & Education
9:00 AM — THE “CHATGPT MOMENT” FOR ROBOTS
Focus: Physical foundation models, commercial deployments, and autonomous hardware scaling.
Speakers & Remarks: Dave McCormick, U.S. Senator (PA) (Special Message); Abhinav Gupta, Co-Founder & Chief Scientist, Skild AI; Sarthak Vaish, Partner, McKinsey & Company.
11:30 AM — WHO GETS TO BUILD AI?
Focus: Compute allocation, capital intensity, and open-access innovation models.
Speakers: David Meaney, PhD, Vice Provost for Research, University of Pennsylvania; Abby Smith, President & CEO, Team Pennsylvania; Samuel Reeves, Founder & CEO, FORT Robotics.
12:00 PM — SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT: PENNSYLVANIA CREATES
Focus: Statewide technical literacy initiative positioning K-12 students as AI builders and developers.
Speakers: Dr. Carrie Rowe, Secretary of Education, Pennsylvania Department of Education; Steven Butschi, Director of Education, Google; Bodong Chen, PhD, Associate Professor, University of Pennsylvania; Gregg Behr, Executive Director, The Grable Foundation.
1:20 PM — CAN WE TEACH AI WISDOM?
Focus: Technical alignment, machine ethics, and moral framework integration in advanced reasoning systems.
Speakers: Ben Levinstein, PhD, Research Scientist, Anthropic Alignment Team; Yaser Sheikh, PhD, CEO, Sooth AI (Former VP, Meta Reality Labs); Fr. Paul Taylor, O.S.B., President, Saint Vincent College; Moderator: John P. Slattery, PhD, Executive Director, Carl G. Grefenstette Center for Ethics in Science, Technology, and Law, Duquesne University.
MEDIA ACCESS & B-ROLL OPPORTUNITIES
35+ Live Robotics & Physical AI Demonstrations: Active deployment of autonomous systems, hardware inspection tech, and industrial robotics throughout Bakery Square.
Executive Working Session (Thursday, 1:00 PM): Closed-door briefing with enterprise CIOs and CTOs led by Keith Ferrazzi, Founder & Chairman, Ferrazzi Greenlight (Pool still photography and camera access).
Pennsylvania Creates Interactive Labs: K-12 students and developers collaborating in real time on software builds.
