AI is moving fast, and our community is moving with it. Right now, across Northeast Ohio, people are testing, building, and applying AI in their everyday work.
That’s why we’re excited to announce:
AI Success Stories: Practical AI from Our Community
📅 Monday, April 20, 2026
📍 In-person
🎟 Free, registration required
🍴 Food & beverages served
This evening event brings together professionals, students, and practitioners from across disciplines to share practical, real-world AI experiences.
We’re hosting this event in collaboration with PMI Northeast Ohio and Cleveland AI and Data. AI Success Stories will take place at Cuyahoga Community College, School of Creative Arts, whose generous support helps make this evening of networking and shared stories accessible to our regional tech community.
▣ This isn’t a conference.
▣ It’s not a vendor showcase.
▣ It’s not a theoretical discussion about the future of AI.
It’s a room full of people sharing what they’ve actually tried and what they’ve learned.
Why You Should Attend
AI adoption doesn’t happen because of big announcements or trend reports. It happens when:
- You see someone like you use it successfully
- You understand the workflow, not just the tool
- You hear what worked and what didn’t
- You leave with ideas you can try tomorrow
Across UX, project management, engineering, data, marketing, and education, professionals are integrating AI into daily practice. But those stories often stay inside teams or organizations.
If you’ve been curious about AI but unsure how it applies to your work, this event is built for you. If you’re already experimenting and want to deepen your thinking, you’ll find peers doing the same.
AI Success Stories are about skill-building, perspective, and practical momentum.
What to Expect
The evening runs from 5:30 PM to 8:30 PM and includes:
- 30 minutes of networking and refreshments
- 6 fast-paced, 10-minute lightning talks
- A closing group Q&A
- Dedicated networking time afterward
Each speaker will follow a simple storytelling structure:
- The problem or opportunity
- The AI tool(s) or approach used
- The outcome or result
- A key lesson learned
Short talks keep the energy high and the insights focused. You’ll hear a range of applied examples across industries and roles.
Speakers and Bios
Carla Anderson
AI Enablement for Ohio’s Workforce
As an AI strategy consultancy working with Northeast Ohio organizations, we kept hitting the same wall. Companies wanted to adopt AI but their teams lacked the foundational skills to take the first step. Generic online courses weren’t bridging the gap. So we built one ourselves.
This talk shares the story of how we created AI Catalyst Institute, a cohort-based training program designed specifically for working professionals in Ohio. I’ll walk through the problem we saw in the field, the curriculum decisions we made (and why), what happened when we started running real cohorts with local organizations, and the biggest lesson we learned along the way: that the real barrier to AI adoption isn’t the technology, it’s confidence.
About Carla
Carla has spent over a decade building tech operations systems that help teams work clearly and consistently. Over the last year, she’s moved into applied AI, focused on workforce development, upskilling, and strategic advising. Outside of work, she volunteers her time to organizations supporting women in tech and leadership.
Christina Burnett
Don’t Forget That It’s Still Just a Machine
I’ll share an example of how our team’s belief in an AI tool’s abilities led to a small but important oversight. By thinking it could read all our files, we missed a key limitation.
This talk will highlight the importance of including skepticism and testing as a standard practice when integrating AI into your work.
About Christina
Christina is a senior product manager at Champ Titles focused on building practical, user-centered solutions for state governments. She’s continuously exploring ways to incorporate Al into work and life, and is excited to share a simple, but relatable, Al experience with the audience.
Michael Clingerman
Designing at the Speed of Thought: What UX Means When AI Does the Building
Artificial intelligence has handed designers a superpower most schools have not caught up to yet.
In this talk, Michael walks through how a small distributed team built an eight-product enterprise platform in months by pairing AI agents and MCP capabilities with a rigorous Concept-Direct-to-Code UX discipline.
The result was not just faster delivery. It was a fundamentally different relationship between research, design, and engineering. For students entering the field, this is the landscape you are walking into, and the opportunity is bigger than it looks.
About Michael
Michael is a hybrid Qualitative Researcher, Principal UX Designer, Independent Contributor, and Project Manager with 20 years of experience helping companies elevate user experiences and scale strategically. His expertise spans ethnographic research, remote testing, voice UX, AI-driven interfaces, and enterprise design systems. He regularly leverage tools like Claude.ai, ChatGPT, MidJourney, and Perplexity.ai, with automation through Make.com, to accelerate research and design workflows.
Dave Huber
From Prompt to Production: what a company wide, 6-week hackathon taught us about AI adoption.
We launched Copilotpalooza, a company-wide hackathon focused on building real, working Copilot Agents to solve everyday business problems. The opportunity wasn’t just to experiment with AI—it was to see whether people across roles could design useful, usable AI experiences that actually delivered outcomes. In this lightning talk, I’ll share how teams used flavors of Copilot to rapidly move from vague pain points to functional prototypes in weeks. We’ll look at what worked, what surprised us, and what broke our assumptions about AI literacy, UX, and adoption.
About Dave
Dave is SVP of Intelligent Automation at Quadax, where he leads an enterprise AI strategy focused on value creation across internal productivity, revenue cycle workflows and products, and IT enablement.
Known for a governance-first approach, he helps organizations turn AI ambition into real-world adoption by building AI-informed cultures through education, collaboration, and disciplined execution.
Ruthy Lichtenstein
Bringing clarity to dismissed daily chaos: a new era for chronic patients
Ruthy’s talk is about endometriosis and the gap in Healthcare, how we bridge this gap with AI, and why we need women’s data and usage to create an equal future for a world based on AI.
About Ruthy
Ruthy is a designer and entrepreneur, founder of TheYellowHub.org and recently joined Ma-Pott.com as a co-founder.
Out of her own personal experience, Ruthy has been working on a solution for endometriosis patients in the past 5 years. Finally, the tech has advanced enough to support what patients need, and MaPott is here to change how endo patients manage their day to day lives, and impact the 11 year gap between symptoms and diagnosis.
Anurag Saxena
What I Learned Building Software with AI Agents
Everyone’s experimenting with AI. But not everyone actually ships production code with it. After integrating agentic coding tools into my real software development workflow, I learned that the real difference isn’t the model but the context you give it.
In this talk, I’ll share what actually works for me: writing tests so the agent has something to be wrong against, keeping configuration minimal, and reaching for extra tools only when they’re truly needed. Keeping it simple actually works!
About Anurag
Anurag Saxena is a Software and Data Engineer at Cleveland Clinic Research, where he builds Data and AI-driven platforms to support Cancer research and treatment. A pragmatic practitioner, he focuses on the realities of shipping production code with agentic tools, advocating for optimal configuration and robust testing over chasing the latest model hype. Anurag also serves the tech community as the Program Chair for PyOhio and a Co-Organizer for the Cleveland Python Meetup.
Register to Attend
Attendance is free, but registration is required.
Whether you’re actively implementing AI or just beginning to explore it, this event is designed to meet you where you are.
You’ll leave with:
- Concrete examples of AI in action
- New ideas to test in your own work
- Insight into tools being used locally
- Connections with professionals and students across disciplines
A Community Effort
At UX Akron, our mission is focused on advancing user experience education and building strong professional connections across Northeast Ohio.
AI adoption is cross-disciplinary. We’re excited to partner with PMI Northeast Ohio and Cleveland AI and Data to learn, share, and grow in AI skills and collaborations.
We’re also grateful to Cuyahoga Community College, School of Creative Arts for serving as our event sponsor and venue partner. Their support helps make this learning opportunity accessible and community-centered.
Join Us on April 20, 2026
AI is already shaping how we design, manage projects, analyze data, and build products. The question isn’t whether it matters. The question is how we engage with it thoughtfully and practically.
On April 20, we’re creating space for that conversation.
If you have a story to share, we invite you to send a speaker proposal.
If you want to learn, connect, and gain practical insight, we invite you to attend.
We look forward to seeing you there!
