Closing Keynote
Thursday, November 5, 2026, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM EDT
AI Mission Education: From Assessment to Action - Applied Strategies for Learning, Governance, and AI Success
Dr. Ed Hoffman
CEO, Knowledge Strategies, LLC
Joti Balani
Founder & CEO, Freshriver.ai
About the Presentation
Most organizations are running AI experiments without the human infrastructure to make them succeed. Pilots stall. Investments underperform. Governance lags dangerously behind deployment. The reason is not technological. It is structural. Organizations are asking their people to lead AI initiatives without ever teaching them how to define the problem AI is meant to solve, govern the workflows it touches, or measure whether it delivered anything of value at all.
This keynote session changes that. Drawing on practitioner experience across Fortune 500 companies, regulated industries, and mission-critical government workflows, the session presents five applied strategies that take organizations from AI confusion to confident, governed, outcomes-driven adoption. These are not frameworks derived from theory. They are the exact steps that have been tested across financial services, healthcare, government, and technology sectors, with measurable results.
You will engage with the complete AI Mission Education arc: starting with trust and relationship-building, moving through AI-powered strategic assessment, stakeholder alignment, workflow simulation, and economic impact calculation. Each strategy is grounded in the conviction that AI must be human-led, education-first, and governed from the top. Without that foundation, it will not deliver at all.
This is a session for project leaders, organizational executives, and practitioners who are done waiting for AI to sort itself out and are ready to lead it. You will leave not just informed but equipped: with tools, a sequenced methodology, and the strategic clarity to put AI to work on the problems that matter most.
Enterprise AI does not fail because the models are weak. It fails because the people, teams, and organizations deploying it were never equipped to lead it. The missing variable is not a better algorithm. It is a human who can define the right problem, govern the right workflow, and build the organizational conditions that turn AI ambition into measurable results. This session delivers that human capability, applied, practical, and ready to use.
About Dr. Ed Hoffman
Dr. Hoffman is CEO of Knowledge Strategies, LLC, providing research, education, and consulting in support of organizational performance. He serves as a Strategic Advisor to the Project Management Institute and as a Senior Lecturer in the Master of Science in Information and Knowledge Strategy program at Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies.
After 33 years, Dr. Hoffman retired from NASA as a senior executive. He was appointed NASA’s first Chief Knowledge Officer in 2011 and was the founding director of the NASA Academy of Program/Project and Engineering Leadership (APPEL), a role he held for over 20 years. He received the NASA Outstanding Leadership Medal in 2010.
Dr. Hoffman is co-author of The Smart Mission: NASA’s Lessons for Managing Knowledge, People and Projects (MIT Press, 2022), winner of the Axiom Business Book Award, and co-author of Shared Voyage: Learning and Unlearning from Remarkable Projects (NASA, 2005).
About Joti Balani
Joti Balani is Founder & CEO of Freshriver.ai. Her work starts with the question most AI programs skip: what is the precise financial outcome this organization needs – and is the AI being built to answer that question, or a different one? She has sat on both sides of that question, including as a member of a corporate Board Audit Committee during a period of significant M&A, and leading GenAI strategy and delivery inside a major regulated healthcare organization through 2025.
She has applied the precise money question discipline across regulated financial institutions, commercial real estate, mortgage technology, and federal contracting, each time defining the financial outcome before the technology was chosen, to a standard that passes CFO and board scrutiny. Columbia University SPS AI Advisor & Speaker · PMI Global Executive Council, Nashville (2024) · PMI AI Essentials Guide contributor (2024) · IIL International Project Management Day: AI in Project Management (2024) · NSA/NSF AI GenCyber Camp, Indiana University of Pennsylvania (2023, 2024) · Trenton Computer Festival, The College of New Jersey (2024) · Innovate100 NJ 2025 · CES (2023) · FinTech Connect (2023).
International Institute for Learning
880 3rd Ave, 5th Floor
New York, NY 10022
+1-212-758-0177
+1-800-325-1533
Virtual Learning Support: +1-212-515-5100
Administration/Production: +1-212-515-5074
© 2026 International Institute for Learning. All rights reserved.
