Strategic Leadership in the Age of AI

A One-Day Executive Program
Presented by PSU's School of Business

Prepare Your Organization for the AI Future
How to move from AI experimentation to measurable

This immersive executive program is built around real stories from practitioners who lead and scale AI in their organizations. They will share what worked, what didn't, and what they would do differently. Sessions will cover the frameworks for prioritizing AI investments, deciding when to build vs. buy, and measuring business value.

Click here for a downloadable flyer. Questions?
Please email Strategic-AI@pdx.edu for more information.

Program Details

Date	Friday, September 11, 2026 8:30 am - 5:00 pm PT
Location	Karl Miller Center Portland State University 615 SW Harrison Street Portland, OR.
Audience	Senior executives interested in strategic AI leadership.
Cost	$995 (includes materials, lunch, and certificate of completion). Early Bird Discount: Apply SB20* at checkout and save 20% when you register by August 15, 2026.*

Register for the Strategic Leadership in the Age of AI program here.

"What a great way to learn about AI. It was wonderful to set apart the time and really focus on the topic, alongside great colleagues. We walked away with more knowledge and confidence, ready to put it to use on Monday."

— Nanette Reid, Business Banking Regional Executive, West Region (Attendee January 2026)

Agenda

Session 1: Beyond the Hype: Building Value in AI (Use Cases)
Session 2: Leading AI Adoption & Measuring Impact
Session 3: Organizational Governance & Ethical Dilemmas Workshop

What You Will Learn:

Prioritize Use Cases and Design Workflows
Build a sequenced plan for scaling AI and rethink how work actually gets done

Lead AI Adoption
Navigate resistance, build buy-in, and measure ROI using practical tools

Put Ethics & Governance into Practice
Understand organizational vulnerabilities and tackle privacy, risk, and governance decisions

Featured Speakers

Manoranjan (Mano) Acharya
Technology Strategist, Google
“The Economics of AI: Just Because AI Can Do It, Should It?”
Manoranjan Acharya, PhD, MBA, orchestrates high-impact Technology Strategy at Google, driving the intersection of complex engineering and business scale. In his session, Dr. Acharya cuts through the hype to examine what it truly takes to transition from AI experimentation to real, sustainable ROI. He will break down the critical operational, organizational, and economic realities required to deploy AI successfully at enterprise scale. His session will challenge leaders to ask not just whether AI is capable of solving the problem but whether it is the best tool for the job and if so, what is the best way to scale it.
LinkedIn →

Jeff Sponaugle
Chief of Artificial Intelligence, Surescripts
“A Technologist’s Guide to AI for Business Leaders”
Jeff is a technologist with a gift for making complex concepts broadly accessible. From co-founding Kryptiq to leading technology and AI at Surescripts, he operates at the intersection of technology and real-world impact. Surescripts is the leading network connecting pharmacies, providers, and health systems across the nation, where efficiency gains have to be balanced against cybersecurity risk, uptime, and accuracy. His session will focus on what business leaders need to know about AI to ask the right questions and make good decisions: when AI should be used (and when it shouldn't), where the real value is, and how to move an organization forward when not everyone is ready.
LinkedIn →

Kristi Flores
CMO and SVP, Partnerships, Accruent
“Connecting AI Strategy to Everyday Workflows”
Kristi is deploying AI across a large organization operating within Fortive, a publicly traded industrial technology conglomerate - balancing corporate AI initiatives and shared resources against the specific needs of Accruent's business units serving real estate, facilities, and asset management customers. She is rolling out AI across marketing, sales, and partner programs simultaneously, running internal hackathons to surface ideas and rethinking the customer experience. Her session will focus on connecting AI strategy to everyday business workflows: how to prioritize where to start, how to build momentum across functions, and how to move from experimentation to results.
LinkedIn →

Susan Anderson
Chief Services Officer, HR Solutions, Mitratech
“Building Competitive Advantage Through AI”
Susan has led AI adoption inside a PE-backed legal and HR technology company, managing 30 products and seven Salesforce instances. When early AI rollouts stalled, her team paused to fix the underlying data before moving forward. Her session walks through the leadership choices behind that journey: how to get a third of an organization engaged with AI in under 90 days, when the operational groundwork matters more than the technology, and how to use AI to change a business model, not just make the existing one more efficient.
LinkedIn →

YOU SPOKE, WE LISTENED
As part of our curriculum refresh, we asked Portland-area executives what's getting in the way of AI progress at their organizations. Individuals are often experimenting on their own, but there's no shared strategy, no coordination across teams, and no clear path from scattered pilots to real organizational change. That feedback guided our focus on how to build organizational capability and on inviting practitioners who personally lived through an AI deployment at scale.

"Everyone in our organization is doing something with AI, but we're not coordinated." — Senior Executive, Marketing/Consulting

"Real-world examples will be the highest-value content. Seeing how someone's actually using AI in their organization, beyond editing emails and summarizing calls." — Director, Transportation Industry

"I'm missing a framework for how to deploy AI across a large, multi-function organization." — Vice President, Energy Industry