The race to adopt Artificial Intelligence has reached a critical crossroads. While global investment in AI is at an all-time high, statistics show that a staggering number of projects fail to move beyond the pilot phase, leaving leaders caught between the fear of falling behind and the reality of diminishing returns.
Join us for an immersive day designed to move beyond the hype of generative AI and tackle the strategic realities of the full AI Lifecycle. The journey to ROI isn't just about the final output; it’s about how you build, deploy, and scale models within the mechanical and strategic framework of the modern enterprise.
Through a series of expert-led sessions and real-world case studies, we will explore how a Lifecycle-First strategy on the open hybrid cloud can rescue your ROI. You will learn how to orchestrate the entire pipeline—from data engineering and model fine-tuning to seamless deployment and continuous monitoring—transforming experimental prototypes into sustainable enterprise workflows.
Why Attend?
- De-risk Your Strategy: Learn why 80% of AI projects stall and how to ensure yours is in the 20% that succeed.
- Master the Lifecycle: Discover why Inference is the most critical (and often overlooked) stage of the AI journey.
- Leverage the Ecosystem: See how Red Hat and our strategic partners provide validated, open-source frameworks to accelerate your time-to-value.
Additional information: This is a strategic event for business and IT leaders, not a hands-on technical workshop.
Agenda:
9:00 AM - 9:15 AM | Keynote with Steven Huels
Speaker: Steven Huels, Vice President of AI Engineering & Product Strategy at Red Hat
9:15 AM - 9:40 AM | Session 1
Title: Bridging the AI Value Gap: From Investment Anxiety to Operational Excellence
Speaker: John Graham, Senior Director, Red Hat
Abstract: The "ROI Paradox" is real, but it's not a dead-end. The path to operational excellence begins by shifting focus from all-encompassing, high-risk AI transformations to precise, high-value workflow optimization. This session addresses the anxiety of investment and how the right strategy can support a practical, data-driven blueprint for a focused AI portfolio, ensuring your next dollar spent delivers sustainable, scalable returns.
9:40 AM - 10:00 AM | Session 2
Title: Why Your AI Strategy Starts and Ends with Inference
Speaker: Rob Greenberg, Principal Product Manager, Red Hat AI
Abstract: In the world of AI, model training is like building a car, but Inference is the act of driving it—the true moment of business value. Too many organizations focus on the "build" while neglecting the "run," leading to high costs and slow performance in production. This session demystifies Inference—the process of a trained model making real-time predictions—and explains why optimizing it is the most critical stage of the AI lifecycle for business success. We will demonstrate how Red Hat’s inference capabilities with' AI Inference Server and tools like vLLM at the core, are leveraged on the open hybrid cloud to not only reduce latency and operational costs but also to enable a seamless transition from experimental AI to essential, high-impact enterprise workflows. This includes a deep dive into real-world customer case studies that moved from "experimental" to "essential" by prioritizing their Red Hat-powered inference architecture.
10:00 AM - 10:30 AM | Session 3
Title: Scaling Customer Success with Optimized AI
Speaker: Monica Livingston, AI Platform Leader
Abstract: What does a "successful" AI implementation actually look like in a global bank or insurance firm? It looks like seamless customer experiences and reduced operational friction. This session explores the architecture of success in Financial Services. We will discuss how optimizing the AI lifecycle—specifically inference at scale—enables real-time decisioning in trading, lending, and customer service. Attendees will gain insight into the specific use cases that are currently driving the highest ROI in the sector and hear how industry leaders are overcoming the "high failure rate" statistics to build robust, compliant, and profitable AI ecosystems.
10:30AM - 10:50 AM | Break
10:50 AM - 11:10 AM | Session 4
Title: Accelerating Impact: Delivering Validated AI Solutions with Cisco and Gruve.Ai
Speaker: Panel
Abstract: The single biggest threat to AI ROI is an unacceptable time-to-value. When critical deployments stall for months, market advantage is lost. This panel session, featuring Red Hat and our strategic partners, focuses on delivering immediate impact. We showcase how our co-innovated, validated open source frameworks cut through technical debt and integration hurdles, providing ready-to-deploy solutions on the open hybrid cloud. Our partners will share real-world examples of leveraging Red Hat-optimized inference architectures to drive immediate, measurable results in the financial sector. Learn how we ensure a truly seamless experience, from initial strategy to global scale on a unified Red Hat platform, guaranteeing the "fear of falling behind" is replaced by a clear market lead.
11:10 AM - 11:30 AM | Session 5
Session Title: A Conversation about Highly Regulated Data Center Modernization
Abstract: Red Hat and Intel
Financial institutions face an unprecedented challenge: deploying transformative technologies at scale while navigating complex regulatory requirements and evolving security threats. Join Intel and Red Hat technology leaders as they discuss how leading banks and financial services companies are turning these constraints into competitive advantages—delivering measurable ROI and faster product launches through a comprehensive strategic approach to today's data center modernization.
11:30 AM - 12:00 PM | Session 6
Title: Services and Consulting
Speaker: Matt Ammerman, Senior Manager, NAPS Technology Practice
Abstract:
Abstract: Getting started with AI for most organizations is not about simply choosing an LLM and employing a chat bot. Actual real-world, business critical, implementations of AI can be overwhelming. The speed of adoption, the complexity of solutions, the changing landscape of guidelines, and more. In this session, we’ll explore how Red Hat’s approach to services - a framework consisting of 3 pillars: Consulting, Training, and Technical Account Management (TAM) - can help you navigate AI from identifying meaningful use cases and your team’s readiness, to getting those first AI workloads fully operationalized and supported.
12:00 PM - 12:05 PM | Wrap Up
Event date: Thursday, March 05, 2026 | 09 a.m. ET
On-demand event: Available for one year afterward
