empowerED26 Speaker Showcase
Speaker presentations, including those sponsored by our Thought Leader Partners, are being added as they are finalized. Please check back regularly.
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.
About Sharon: 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.
About Dan: Dan is a Staff Learning Experience Designer at Okta and has experience developing and deploying complex training solutions in global environments for internal and external teams. He executes large-scale blended learning experiences with measurable outcomes aligned with business objectives aimed towards customer success. He is the recipient of CEdMA's 2025 Pinnacle Award.
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.
About Julie: 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.
Turn Customer Education into a Competitive Differentiator for Sales
If your customer education program isn't making your Strategic Account Executives' jobs easier, it's probably costing you more than you think. This session shares the real story of transforming Quickbase University from a reactive support function into a strategic revenue enabler that sales actively champions in deals. We'll explore how escaping traditional LMS constraints and embracing product-adoption-focused microlearning turned customer education into a competitive differentiator—one that accelerates sales cycles, protects renewals, and unlocks expansion revenue.
You'll learn:
- How TSIA's Three Crises Framework (Value-Proof Crisis, Commercial Gap, and Foundational Data Crisis) reveals why traditional LMS platforms are silently failing customer education programs
- The five critical shifts that transformed our approach: eliminating legacy constraints, investing in searchable microlearning, empowering customers with control, building adaptive learning paths, and creating revenue-focused data visibility
- Practical strategies for positioning customer education in three critical deal types: new logo acquisition, renewal conversations, and expansion/upsell opportunities
- How to shift from “here's a course link" to “here's exactly which training correlates with higher feature adoption" in conversations with sales
- The metrics that matter to executives—connecting education directly to customer lifetime value, expansion velocity, churn prevention, and sales cycle acceleration
- Four critical success factors for replicating this transformation in your organization
You'll leave with a proven framework for becoming a trusted learning advisor to your sales organization, positioning education as the strategic asset that separates winning deals from losing them.
About Ashley: Ashley DeKerlegand brings over 12 years of learning and development expertise to her role at Quickbase, where she leads Quickbase University and CX Enablement with a data-driven approach to create high-impact learning experiences. Her dual focus on customer success and employee enablement stems from her belief that empowering internal teams is just as critical as educating customers in driving overall success.
With an MS in Instructional Design, Ashley leverages analytics and emerging technologies to develop innovative, scalable learning solutions. She is passionate about aligning education strategies with business goals, ensuring both customers and employees have the tools and knowledge needed to thrive in today's fast-paced SaaS industry. Her commitment to continuous improvement and innovation in customer education reflects her dedication to understanding industry trends and customer needs.
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.
About Kevin: 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.
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.
About Beth: 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.
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.
About Amina: 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.
After leading three customer education platform migrations in just a few years, Lila Krutel—Head of Customer Education at Gainsight—can say with confidence: switching your LMS is never really about the LMS.
It’s about what the process forces you to face. What content no longer serves your learners. Where your team has outgrown old assumptions. And what “modern” customer education actually looks like in a world shaped by AI, in-product learning, and customers who expect help everywhere—not just in an academy.
This candid, practitioner-first session skips vendor comparisons and gets real about the lessons you only learn by doing the work. Lila will share what she intentionally let go of during each migration, how her approach to content structure and discoverability has evolved, and how success metrics shifted along the way. Attendees will walk away with a clearer picture of what LMS migrations reveal about their programs—and what they should rethink before the next platform decision lands on their desk.
Attendees will leave with:
- A clear sense of what’s worth rebuilding during a migration, and what’s better left behind
- Real examples of how success metrics change as education programs mature and how to not lose key data during migration
- Hard-earned lessons on what to plan for next time (redirects, theming, UAT, and launch support)
- Bonus: a forward-look at what education teams might face in the coming years as AI and short-form, in-context learning are reshaping content strategy across all learning surfaces
About Lila: Lila is the Director Global Education Services & Technical Communications at Gainsight where she currently leads the education and documentation teams at Gainsight, with a focus on growing their eLearning, live training, and certification programs to support customer enablement and product adoption. Prior to joining Gainsight 11 years ago, Lila worked with several Bay Area software companies in roles ranging from implementation, to client operations, and curriculum development. Lila resides in Portland, OR, where she lives for summers and the chance to pick her own berries, peaches, and cherries.
The LMS market has changed more in the last two years than in the previous decade. AI innovation is accelerating, vendors are consolidating, licensing models are shifting and platform specialization is increasing. At the same time, contract renewals are forcing a hard question: Is our LMS still the right fit, or should we reconsider?
With more than 1,000 systems competing for attention, organizations approaching renewal face a critical decision: renew with confidence or replace with purpose. This session shares new independent research from Talented Learning’s analysis of more than 250 learning system vendors, combined with insights from recent renewal validations, business case studies and migration projects.
You will learn how learning vendors truly differentiate and how to navigate renewal using a practical four decision gate framework. The session also introduces Talented Learning’s 2026 RightFit Grid, LMS Renewal Decision Scorecard and Renew or Replace Business Case Template which are vendor neutral tools designed to clarify fit, reduce risk and support confident renewal or replacement decisions.
Attendees will learn the following critical skills:
- Understand how the 2026 learning systems market is differentiating beyond AI hype.
- Apply a decision gate framework to determine whether to renew or replace.
- Use practical vendor neutral tools to drive confident renewal decisions.
About John: John is Founder, CEO and Lead Analyst at Talented Learning. He is a fiercely independent consultant, blogger, podcaster, speaker and educator who helps organizations select and implement learning technology strategies, primarily for extended enterprise applications. His advice is based upon 30 years of learning industry experience, serving as a trusted LMS selection and sales adviser to hundreds of organizations.
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.
About Blair: 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.
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.
About Eric: 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.
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 customer value.
About Niyati: 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.