empowerED26 Speaker Showcase
Learn more about this year's speakers and their presentations.
Sharon Castillo
Beyond Clicks: Designing Simulations to Build Real-World Skills
Product users are bombarded with information and passive feature-focused training. However, to solve complex real-world problems, users need to build adaptable skills. This workshop will introduce practical design patterns that you can use to create meaningful simulations. Our approach will help you create interactions that reinforce the implications of user choices, not just the clicks. You will have opportunities to apply these patterns to typical scenarios that learning designers encounter. We will demonstrate techniques for leveraging AI to build simulations using standard tools, reducing the heavy maintenance of virtual labs or live lab environments. We will conclude with a discussion on how this approach provides opportunities to create engaging and powerful learning experiences that you can deploy flexibly across delivery channels (on-demand, ILT, in-app, community, or documentation) to meet users exactly where they are. This workshop is interactive with activities where you will 1) apply the design patterns to your own organizational challenge, 2) see how "vibe-coded" simulation design (selection, pattern, and prompt refinement) up-levels the learner experience, and 3) apply the technique to a common scenario. Discuss potential options to deploy these simulations. You will walk away with a blueprint for building and an implementable artifact for designing a simulation scenario.
Sharon is the Senior Director of Customer Acceleration at Okta where she scales customer adoption and deep engagement through impactful enablement. Her focus is on creating unified experiences that support users and their organizations throughout their maturity journey. This includes digital content, in-app knowledge, community, and certification to meet data-driven business outcomes. Her experience ranges from early stage, high-growth start-ups in emerging markets, to established global leaders with complex product catalogs.
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Julie Cochrane
The SmartScAIle™ Model: A Practical Framework to Accelerate Content Development
Let’s face it: Customer Education teams are under pressure. You’re expected to produce more content in more formats faster than ever, usually without extra resources or a magic wand. That’s where the SmartScAIle™ Model steps in as your workflow-savvy sidekick, offering a practical, ethical, and surprisingly fun way to scale content development with just the right amount of AI support.
This isn’t your typical sit-and-soak workshop. We start with the SmartScAIle™ Bottleneck Assessment, an interactive Sherlock-style diagnostic that helps you pinpoint exactly where your content process slows down. Intake chaos? Drafting delays? Never-ending review loops? Cross-team bottlenecks? Outdated assets haunting your LMS? We’ll find the culprits. Then you’ll meet your new workflow superhero: the five-stage SmartScAIle™Model. Think of it as your roadmap for accelerating productivity, highlighting where AI can make the biggest immediate impact: Clarify Inputs, Accelerate Drafting, Standardize and Reuse, Streamline Reviews, and Sustain and Update.
The real fun begins when you roll up your sleeves. You’ll apply SmartScAIle™ to real CE scenarios, explore how each stage aligns with your team’s AI readiness level from basic tools to emerging capabilities, and dive into hands-on exercises, peer exchanges, and guided practice. No endless slide decks, just practical skills you can use tomorrow. You’ll leave with something tangible: a personalized SmartScAIle™ AI–Enabled Workflow Map outlining your highest-impact improvements for the next 30 days. Big company or small team, AI beginner or early adopter, SmartScAIle™ adapts to you, ensuring progress is clear, achievable, and energizing.
Julie is a customer education and enablement executive who builds and scales global learning organizations that drive product adoption, customer success, and revenue growth. As Vice President of Global Educational Services at Charles River Development, she led the launch of a multi-tiered customer education ecosystem that delivered measurable business impact, including significant cost savings and sustained year-over-year growth. Julie is known for turning complexity into clarity by aligning stakeholders, modernizing learning operations, and designing education programs that are practical, scalable, and deeply customer-centric. A frequent industry speaker and active member of the CEdMA community, she brings a candid, practitioner’s perspective grounded in what actually scales, especially when resources don’t.
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Beth Hipple
The Partner Playbook: Scaling ILT With Partners Without Sacrificing Instructional Quality
Scaling instructor-led training through industry partners is one of the fastest ways to expand capacity—if you build the program deliberately and protect instructional quality from day one. This Use Case Deep Dive shares a practical playbook to both launch and operate a partner‑delivered training program without sacrificing the learner experience.
We’ll start with the essentials to stand up the program: how to select the right partners, build partner enablement, and establish program expectations. You’ll see how to package a baseline asset set—standard agendas, instructor slides, demo projects, and hands‑on prompts—with timing and instructor moves encoded for consistency.
Then we’ll unpack a repeatable Partner Quality Alignment framework you can run in any context; Baseline and guardrails: versioned assets and “what good looks like” criteria; Instructor enablement: practice → teach → observe → feedback loop with demo rubrics.
Attendees will leave with two tangible tools they can adapt immediately: a Partner ILT Program Starter Checklist and a Quality Dashboard (questions, scoring, thresholds). Whether you’re launching your first partner cohort or scaling a portfolio, you’ll walk away ready to scale fast and keep instructional quality high.
Beth is the Manager of Technical Instruction at dbt Labs, where she leads the strategy, design, and delivery of customer education programs that help data teams succeed with dbt. Drawing on experience in both teaching and analytics, Beth focuses on turning complex concepts into practical, learner-centered experiences that drive product adoption, confidence, and real-world impact for customers.
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Amina Khattak
No Time, No Budget, No Problem: A Custom GPT Launched My Certification Program Into Orbit
When faced with the challenge of building a certification program—without a dedicated budget, team, or psychometric vendor—I turned to generative AI. This session tells the story of how I single-handedly built a custom GPT to review LaunchDarkly certification exam questions, enforce psychometric best practices, and align every item to our learning objectives.
Powered by a curated reference set of internal course materials, exam blueprints, and trusted guidelines, this GPT became a high-impact reviewer and coach. It flagged ambiguous stems, offered improvement suggestions, and kept reviewers grounded in real training content—all without hallucinations or generalizations. The result? I achieved a $40K savings with the in-house GPT that turbocharged item development, improved consistency, and accelerated our certification timeline.
If you're wondering how to scale quality without scale-sized funding, or how to empower your team with AI that’s actually useful and on-brand, this talk is for you.
Amina has been in the customer education space for many dog years. She has scaled technical training programs at startups no one’s ever heard of to large, well known enterprises. Currently, she leads the customer education function at LaunchDarkly, a platform for developers to ship with confidence by combining feature flags, observability, experimentation, analytics, and AI configuration to de-risk every release and reduce outages. Amina is also a full-stack software engineer and as such is able to strategically orient and manage learning technology stacks with a high degree of technical fluency. She’s also gone down the rabbit hole of AI-assisted coding (aka vibe coding) and is Team Cursor at the moment, though she has room in her heart for numerous AI tools. Despite all the AI hoopla, Amina is a Toastmaster who believes strongly in the value of in-person public speaking. As a salty sailor, Amina is more often on water than on land during her weekends and holidays, chasing the wind and waves on her catamaran.
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Blair Mishleau
“Where’s That Resource?” How We Built an Internal Knowledge Base to Scale Customer Education Awareness Across Teams
When customer education resources are scattered across shared drives, docs, spreadsheets and more, even the best resources become invisible. At Patreon, the Creator Education team faced this challenge firsthand—hundreds of help articles, videos, and playbooks existed, but no one could centrally find them, trust their accuracy, or request maintenance.
This session walks through how we (as a team of one) tackled that chaos by designing a scalable Creator Education Internal Knowledge Base (IKB) that centralizes content, improves discoverability, and establishes clear ownership and maintenance workflows. You’ll explore the framework used to audit, structure, and tag more than 600 resources across multiple tools, plus how we layered AI-driven search to make internal discovery easy. After a short demo of the framework, you’ll work in small groups to map your own organization’s learning ecosystem using a provided template. By the end, you’ll leave with a clear understanding of what makes an internal knowledge base sustainable (whether you’re a team of one or part of a large enablement organization), and a tangible worksheet to kick-start your own IKB strategy.
Blair runs the creator education program at Patreon, focused on building scaled education that helps creatives earn more money doing the work they love. He’s passionate about smart systems and processes to make sure programs are efficient and sustainable. He’s won multiple awards recognizing his contributions and innovation in the industry. Blair lives in Chicago with his fiancé, Trevor, and cat, Sergio.
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Eric Mistry
Finding Practical AI Opportunities: Frameworks, Process Thinking, and Tactical Implementation
In an era where AI tools are evolving faster than most teams can adapt, identifying where and how to apply them effectively is critical. This session equips participants with practical frameworks and methods to uncover meaningful AI opportunities within their existing workflows.
We’ll begin by exploring a simple yet powerful approach to process breakdown—a method for deconstructing complex workflows into their core steps and decisions. By learning how to visualize processes at a granular level, participants will discover how to identify inefficiencies, bottlenecks, and moments of cognitive load that are ideal for AI augmentation. Next, we’ll dive into the FAR Framework (Feasibility, Automation, Return) and related tools that help evaluate and prioritize AI opportunities for real-world impact. From there, we’ll explore how to match opportunities with the right AI tool stack, including large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and emerging technologies like Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Through real examples and guided exercises, attendees will leave with a structured, repeatable process for finding, testing, and implementing AI-driven improvements in their daily work—no technical background required.
Eric is Zapier’s AI & Automation Transformation Lead, focused on turning AI hype into habits that actually stick. He helps teams adopt AI and automation in practical, human-centered ways that save time, reduce toil, and make work feel lighter. With experience across customer education, enablement, onboarding, agentic AI, prompt engineering, and systems thinking, he thrives in the messy middle where ideas become repeatable workflows. Known for translating between technical and non-technical audiences, Eric helps organizations move from experimentation to adoption with practical systems that save time every week. He is also the author of the Customer Education Bi-Weekly Newsletter, and when he is off the clock, he is a pun-loving dad of two.
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Gabrielle Sun
Video Storyboarding at Scale Without Losing Quality: From One-Shot Prompts to a Human-in-the-Loop Agentic Pipeline
Video remains one of the most effective ways to teach concepts, share thought leadership, and deliver how-tos. There is no shortage of AI-assisted writing/video tools, yet teams may find themselves spending more time rewriting AI boilerplate content than shipping fast, because outputs miss product context, audience needs, pacing, and meaningful insights. The problem isn’t all about the model and prompts; it’s also the workflow. Strong storyboards do not come from a single prompt; rather an orchestrated pipeline with different prompts/sub-agents doing their own jobs: intake, context building, screen planning, creative direction, and voice-over generation, with human review where needed.
Backed by two competitive hackathon wins and real user data, this session introduces a quality-gated, agentic storyboard pipeline that inserts human judgment at two critical checkpoints to scale output without sacrificing quality.
Pipeline overview:
Input: Video creation request & Source content
-> Calling Topic Research Agent → Output: Context Pack
-> Calling Video Brief Builder Agent → Output: Video Request Briefing
Human Gating 1: Review Video Request Briefing and provide feedback
-> Calling Video Director Agent → Output: Screen Outline & Story Arc
Human Gating 2: Review Video Outline & Story Arc
-> Calling Writer Agent → Output: Storyboard V1 with visuals and per screen timing
Live build:
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a 3–5 minute thought leadership storyboard
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a 60–90 second how-to storyboard
What you’ll leave with:
You’ll leave with reusable prompt templates and an “evaluation before generation” checklist to scale quality without scaling chaos.
Gabrielle is a Senior Instructional Designer at Ernst & Young and Learning 30U30 honoree. Coming from an engineering and instructional design background, she is passionate about turning messy source content into production-ready learning and enablement assets in structured ways. Her work spans employee upskilling, tool adoption, and change management, translating SME knowledge into clear learning journeys. She blends core instructional design craft (needs analysis, objectives, assessment design, scenario-based learning, and iterative stakeholder review) with AI-enabled production workflows to ship learning at scale.
Over the past year, Gabrielle developed a pipeline that helps teams move beyond “one-shot prompting” and toward repeatable, quality-driven workflows, defining quality criteria before scaling with AI and building systems that keep speed from killing substance.