empowerED26 General Speaker Showcase
Speaker presentations, including those from our Thought Leader Partners, are being added as they are finalized. Please check back regularly.
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 a customer enablement and digital success leader who helps organizations scale adoption and drive measurable business impact. With experience spanning high-growth startups to global enterprises—including Okta, DataRobot, VMware, and Salesforce—she specializes in building education programs that meet customers and partners where they are. For a decade, Sharon led a consulting practice, guiding companies from high-touch, resource-intensive approaches to digital-first learning experiences that accelerate product adoption and long-term retention without sacrificing the human element. Sharon believes the best programs blend innovation with pragmatism—using data to inform decisions while staying focused on real-world results.
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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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Kevin Dunn, PMP
Making AI Work for You: A Practical Framework for CEd AI Use-Case Discovery and Prompt Design
If you’ve ever left an AI session thinking, “That’s great in theory, but how do I actually apply this to my work?” this workshop is for you. In this hands-on session, you’ll move beyond examples and buzzwords to build your own AI-powered workflow from scratch. Together, we’ll walk through a structured framework to: (1) identify where AI can drive real value in your daily work, (2) prioritize the ideas that matter most based on effort and impact, and (3) design the prompts that bring those use-cases to life.
This is not another “50 ways to use AI” talk. It’s a guided building session where you’ll think, rank, and prompt your way to something that’s immediately actionable. You’ll leave with a fully-formed use-case and a tested prompt designed for your unique context.
Kevin leads the Customer Education, Community, and AI programs at Airtable, where his team's work measurably improves product adoption, user sophistication, and customer retention. Prior to Airtable, Kevin spent 8+ years at HubSpot helping build and scale HubSpot Academy, where he led the teams responsible for driving the education and credentialing programs for HubSpot's global partner ecosystem. He was also the longtime host of Agency Unfiltered, a weekly podcast that interviewed leaders of agencies and services providers about growth and scale. He cares deeply about authentic leadership, empowering and supporting high-performing teams, and (obv) the New England Patriots' return to glory.
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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 (Frequent, Annoying, and Repeatable) 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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Niyati Shah
Beyond Education: Designing a Digital-First Customer Enablement Operating Model at Scale
As customer portfolios grow into the thousands or tens of thousands, traditional customer education and high-touch success models begin to break down. Instructor-led training, certifications, and bespoke enablement remain valuable, but on their own they cannot sustainably drive adoption, retention, and expansion at scale.
This session introduces a practical framework for evolving from a training-centric approach to a digital-first customer enablement operating model. Drawing on real-world experience building and scaling enablement platforms supporting 20,000+ accounts across SMB, mid-market, and enterprise segments, the talk focuses on how to design systems that scale outcomes, not just content.
Attendees will explore the core building blocks of scalable enablement, including customer segmentation and maturity modeling, lifecycle mapping, content and channel orchestration, automation triggers, and success measurement. Rather than centering on tools, the session emphasizes decision-making frameworks that help teams determine when to invest in high-touch experiences, when to shift to digital, and how to align enablement efforts with business goals. Participants will apply a simple maturity rubric to assess their current enablement approach and use a practical blueprint to identify high-impact opportunities for scale. Attendees will leave with a repeatable model they can adapt to their organization, enabling them to relieve pressure on teams while improving customer adoption and long-term value.
Niyati Shah is a senior leader in digital customer success and enablement with over 15 years of experience designing and scaling global, data-driven adoption and education programs for high-growth SaaS organizations. She has led digital customer success, customer education, and certification initiatives at GitLab, Lacework, and MongoDB, where she co-founded and launched MongoDB University, serving over 1.5 million learners across 196 countries. Niyati specializes in helping organizations move beyond high-touch, one-to-many models by building scalable digital CS motions grounded in segmentation, lifecycle design, and self-serve enablement. Her work focuses on aligning education, content, and engagement systems to drive product adoption, retention, and long-term customer value at scale.