
After a career spent translating complicated technology, athenahealth CMO Stacy Simpson has arrived at a deceptively simple measure for AI: does it return time, attention, and clarity to the people using it?
Jennifer Rankin Byrne is the founder and principal of MERIT Coaching Communications Consulting in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she coaches leaders and communicators to sharpen their voice, build executive presence, and lead with authenticity. She brings more than two decades of communications leadership, including years as Vice President of Corporate Communications at PBS and earlier roles at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, AOL, and Turner Broadcasting/CNN. Her practice blends real-world corporate experience with a curiosity-led, customized coaching approach summed up in her tagline: 'Communicate with purpose. Grow with confidence.'
Lisa Lahde is Vice President of Marketing at NVIDIA, where she leads campaign marketing for priority industries and the Omniverse platform. A veteran tech marketer with roots in social media and community management, she joined NVIDIA around 2016 and has helped shape the company's storytelling around AI, autonomous systems, and the industrial metaverse. She produced NVIDIA's 'I Am AI' docuseries, contributed to Forbes BrandVoice as an AI innovator profiler, and moderated the OpenUSD session at GTC 2024 in San Jose. Outside the GPU giant's orbit, she runs the persona of @JewelryHunter - a longtime indie fashion enthusiast who blogged about emerging jewelry designers.

Dan Temkin is a Senior Technical Product Marketing Manager at Kong (formerly Mashape), one of the world's leading API management platforms. With over a decade of experience in API strategy spanning roles at IBM and Kong, Temkin sits at the intersection of complex distributed systems and the business language needed to explain them. Based in Madison, Wisconsin, he shapes how enterprises think about API security, AI governance, and the economics of running LLMs at scale - authoring widely-read Kong blog posts, speaking at Apidays and AWS re:Invent, and helping translate the architecture of Kong's $424M-funded platform into decisions that matter to engineering and executive teams alike.
Medha Agarwal is a General Partner at Defy VC, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Woodside, California, where she partners with founders from day zero through Series A. With roots at Redpoint Ventures (7 years as Partner), Bessemer Venture Partners, and two founder stints of her own, she brings a rare blend of operator instinct and institutional investing muscle to sectors including vertical SaaS, fintech, AI-first companies, healthcare technology, and marketplaces. A Harvard College and Harvard Business School alumna, Medha is also a prolific writer—her Medium essays on vertical SaaS and AI pricing have become required reading in startup circles—and was named one of Business Insider's 66 Rising Stars of Venture Capital in 2023.

Dorie Clark is a strategy consultant, executive education professor, and bestselling author recognized four times by Thinkers50 as one of the top 50 business thinkers in the world. Named the #1 Communication Coach in the World by the Marshall Goldsmith Leading Global Coaches Awards, she teaches at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business and has written four books published by Harvard Business Review Press and Portfolio/Penguin. A former political campaign press secretary, documentary filmmaker, and Grammy-winning jazz album producer, Clark is also an active Broadway investor and musical theatre lyricist-in-training - living proof that the 'long game' she preaches is one she plays herself.

Ashley Faus is Head of Lifecycle Marketing, Portfolio at Atlassian, a keynote speaker, Stanford instructor, and author of 'Human-Centered Marketing: How to Connect with Audiences in the Age of AI' (Kogan Page, 2025). She's best known for the 'Content Playground' framework - rejecting the linear marketing funnel in favor of a non-linear, audience-driven content ecosystem. A former musical theater major turned B2B marketing strategist, she argues that trust is the one thing AI cannot automate, and has built a career proving it.