Pittsburgh TechFest 2026

Artificial intelligence is rapidly becoming the most productive, and potentially overprivileged, member of your workforce. Employees are feeding sensitive information into AI tools, organizations are connecting coworkers to corporate data, and autonomous agents are gaining the ability to read, write, execute, and make decisions. Meanwhile, attackers are using the same technology to accelerate phishing, vulnerability discovery, impersonation, and social engineering.


The numbers suggest this is no longer theoretical. Employee use of unapproved “shadow AI” had tripled to 45%, while vulnerability exploitation became the leading breach entry point at 31%. At the same time, OWASP now identifies prompt injection, sensitive-information disclosure, supply-chain risk, and excessive agency among the major security risks facing generative AI systems.


In this energetic, practical session, we will separate AI hype from AI risk and fearmongering and discuss how to embrace AI without accidentally giving it the keys to the kingdom.

Legacy systems don't just slow analytics—they limit what an organization can ask of its data. This session examines an end-to-end digital transformation journey at a century-old industrial distributor, involving the retirement of aging, siloed technologies and the transition to a modern data platform designed for scale.
But the harder challenge was not the technology—it was the people. Every migration meant replacing tools and processes that teams had relied on for years. Success depended as much on change management as on architecture: identifying and sequencing the rollout, managing resistance, communicating a vision people could embrace, and building trust before the new platform had proven itself.
With the foundation in place, the transformation opens a new opportunity: combining AI with analytics to move beyond static dashboards toward more adaptive, predictive, and actionable insights.
Attendees will hear what can break during a transformation of this scale—both technically and organizationally—and leave with a practical framework for leading change through a major technology shift: not simply managing the project plan but managing the people who must adopt and sustain the change.

Sex trafficking is a complex international problem. One of the biggest challenges for public safety is this type of crime goes underreported. To protect and serve victims, law enforcement must be proactive in identifying exploitation. This is where technology can make a difference. At Marinus Analytics, we build software to help investigators sift through a massive amount of data and turn it into actionable insights, helping them to uncover victims, missing persons, and organized crime rings.


In this talk, I’ll share how Marinus Analytics is using technology to help public safety and other organizations combat sex trafficking across the United States and around the world. I’ll discuss the challenges of building technology to address a problem that is constantly evolving and difficult to define, and how a small team of technologists uses lean innovation to make a meaningful impact on a global scale.