Special Speakers

Brian Baute

Human-Led, AI-Powered: How to Thrive in an AI-Native World

Higher education is in one of the most consequential technology shifts in history. Institutions must innovate faster and deliver better personalized outcomes for students, while operating leaner, reaching greater scale, and facing increasing competitive pressures. Cloud and AI are the foundation for how universities will teach, research, and operate in the next decade.

Brian speaks and writes about the future of higher ed cloud strategy & economics, AI, and leadership in complex institutions.

Bio

Brian is a former university CIO who now helps institutions navigate cloud, AI, and digital transformation at AWS.

His perspective comes from both sides of the table. He spent two decades inside higher education, including serving as CIO and business school instructor at Queens University of Charlotte, and IT leadership roles in the University of North Carolina system and at Elon University. Now at AWS, he translates between institutional reality and technological possibility, in both directions.

Outside of work, he is drawn to endurance challenges, from full and half marathons to Spartan races to multi-day Special Forces-led GORUCK events, because progress happens outside our comfort zone.

Liz Ngonzi

Human-Centered AI: Leadership, Creativity, and the Future of Work

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded across industries, the role of human judgment, creativity, and leadership is becoming more, not less, essential. Drawing on real-world applications across sectors, the session will offer a practical, human-centered framework for navigating AI in ways that strengthen critical thinking, expand creative capacity, and support responsible innovation. 

Bio

Elizabeth (Liz) Ngonzi is a global human-centered AI strategist with more than 25 years of experience across technology, digital transformation, and leadership. She focuses on how artificial intelligence can strengthen human judgment, leadership, and accountability in complex institutional environments.

She serves on the Board of the American Society for Artificial Intelligence (ASFAI) as Founding Chair of the Ethics & Responsible AI Committee and is the Originator and Editor-in-Chief of AI for Humanity: Human-Centered Strategies for Innovation and Impact, an AI-powered platform and global living anthology.

Liz is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at New York University’s Center for Global Affairs, where she teaches AI-powered storytelling and leadership, and an Industry Advisor to Cornell Tech’s Studio Program. She is also the Founder & CEO of The International Social Impact Institute®, through which she advises leaders and institutions navigating AI-driven transformation.

Steve Berg '89

Steve Berg graduated from Miami in 1989 with a BS in business administration. He, thereafter, earned an MBA and the CFA designation. Steve has had many corporate finance experiences since then, but there are two experiences that help qualify him to be a speaker today. The first is that he started a venture capital fund in 2018 focused on AI, data analytics, and cybersecurity. Steve raised over $100 million and invested in many startups, including two unicorns. The second is that he left that venture fund late in 2025 to join a startup and become an operator in the AI world. One of Steve’s responsibilities at the startup is to drive AI technology into the company’s products and into the employees’ productivity tech stacks.

Noah Zender '22

Noah Zender graduated from Miami University in 2022 with degrees in Economics and Startup Entrepreneurship. During his junior year, he worked alongside Steve, an early AI investor at Lytical Ventures, getting a rare early glimpse into where the industry was heading. That curiosity led him to build products for a $1.5B AI startup in Arizona, where six months in, ChatGPT launched and changed everything. That company was acquired by Workday in the largest tech acquisition in Arizona history. Today, Noah works in AI Deployment at Cursor, an applied research team building the future of how software gets made.

Warning: Don't Get Caught on the Wrong Side of the Growing AI Divide

"The future is already here; it's just not evenly distributed." In the world of artificial intelligence, some organizations and people are already operating in a fundamentally different world, while others are barely getting started. In this fireside chat, Steve Berg brings a business and investment perspective on AI, while Noah Zender offers insight from the technical and deployment side of the field. They will explore why AI adoption varies so widely, what cutting-edge use cases look like, and how students can prepare for the opportunities and challenges ahead. The session will help identify the AI skills (and human being skills) that matter, better understand the changing job market, and think more strategically about how to stand out in an economy increasingly shaped by AI.