Cincy AI Week Recap 2026

Cincy AI Week 2026: What I Heard, What Stuck, and What It Means for Your Business

This year was all about what people are actually doing with AI.

The answer, across three days and hundreds of speakers, was clear: the gap between curious and committed is closing fast. Businesses aren’t asking whether AI is worth exploring anymore. They’re asking how to govern it, scale it, and make sure it doesn’t get out of hand before they’ve built the right foundation.

Here’s what I heard:

AI is answering your customers’ questions. Are you in that conversation?

Pete Blackshaw from Brankrank.ai opened with a number that should stop any business owner cold: 3.5 billion prompts are sent to AI tools every single day. People are asking AI for vendor recommendations, product comparisons, and service decisions. And AI is answering based on what it can find.

The question isn’t whether your customers are using AI to make purchasing decisions. They are. The question is whether your business shows up when they do.

Diane Hammons walked through what it actually takes to be visible in AI-powered search and it’s not the same playbook as traditional SEO. This is the 2010-2011 SEO moment for a new generation. The businesses that figure it out now won’t just rank higher. They’ll build trust while competitors are still wondering what changed.

Jennifer Panepinto added another layer: AI exposes the gaps in your messaging. If your brand voice is inconsistent, your value proposition is muddy, or your content is all over the place, AI will reflect that back to you in how it describes your business to potential customers. Uncomfortable? Yes. Useful? Absolutely.

And Andrea Larsen brought it to life in the most practical way, showing what it looks like to brainstorm live with clients, mock up websites in real time, and help people see what’s possible faster than a traditional discovery process ever could. AI isn’t replacing the creative conversation. It’s accelerating it.

These sessions all had a clear theme: AI is a mirror. It shows you where you’re clear and where you’re not. The businesses willing to look will have a real advantage.

The ROI numbers from this year aren’t hypothetical.

Every year I hear people say “the ROI on AI is hard to measure.” That was less true this year.

Justin Grieshop from CBTS reported a 73x return on their AI investment — across 71 employees, 8 use cases, in 8 weeks. That’s not a projection. That’s a result from a Cincinnati-area company doing real work with real teams.

James Carman from Callibrity shared a workflow story that made the room go quiet: a process that used to take 3 hours now takes 3 minutes. Not 3 hours to 45 minutes. Three minutes. Then do the same for another workflow and another.

What I appreciated most about James’s framing was this: he called first-attempt failures the cost of learning, not the cost of wasting time. First attempts don’t get you further from your goal. They get you closer. That mindset shift matters because a lot of businesses stall out after one bad AI experiment and decide it “doesn’t work.” James made the case that the first attempt is the tuition, not the mistake. And he emphasized that human oversight isn’t optional, it’s what makes the results trustworthy enough to act on.

Governance is the work nobody wants to do until they have to.

One of the most sobering and, honestly, most important moments of the week came from Max Nevermann at IMEG.

They had 1,100 AI agents running inside their organization. After putting governance in place, they got that down to 120. Not because AI wasn’t working. Because too much of it was running without structure, creating duplicates, overlap, and tools nobody could account for.

Think of it like a home renovation that got away from you. You started with one contractor, added three more without telling anyone, and now work is happening in every room simultaneously with no project manager. Things are getting done, but nothing is getting finished right.

Governance is the project manager. And the time to hire one is before you have 1,100 agents, not after.

This is a pattern I’m watching across SMBs too. Early AI adoption tends to be fast and decentralized, someone on the marketing team tries one tool, someone in ops tries another, someone in sales is doing their own thing. That’s fine at the start. But without a simple framework for what’s approved, what’s redundant, and what actually connects to business outcomes, you end up with sprawl. IMEG showed what it looks like to clean that up. The lesson: start building that framework now, not when you’re buried in it.

Ohio is building something, and it’s worth paying attention.

Payal Thakur from Jobs Ohio showed up with a clear message: Ohio is positioning itself as a national AI leadership state. There are real investments, real infrastructure conversations, and real policy work happening.

Zach Heck from Taft walked through the current landscape of AI regulations, policies, and disclosures, both what’s in place and what’s coming. This is the part most businesses tune out because it sounds like a compliance headache. But here’s why it matters: the businesses that understand the policy landscape now won’t be scrambling to retrofit their AI practices later. Think of it like knowing building codes before you start construction, not after the inspector shows up.

And Todd James from Aurora Insights brought the strategic lens with his session on agentic commerce, the shift from AI as a tool you use to AI that acts on your behalf. Browsing is becoming delegating. That’s a different kind of AI relationship, and the businesses that understand it early will be in a very different position than those who figure it out after the fact.

Your knowledge walks out the door when people retire. AI can change that.

Katie Trauth Taylor from Narratize shared a number that has stayed with me: 40% of a company’s institutional knowledge unique to that individual disappears when someone leaves the org. 😲 How are you capturing that tacit knowledge today?

This isn’t a new problem. Every organization loses expertise when people leave. But most businesses treat it as an inevitable loss rather than a preventable one. AI is finally giving us tools to capture institutional knowledge, the way things actually get done, the workarounds that work, the context that only lives in people’s heads, before it walks out the door.

The businesses that start documenting processes and capturing expertise now will feel very different from those who don’t five years from now. It’s the difference between a company that runs on knowledge and one that’s constantly retraining from scratch.

What Kate and I brought to the room.

Kate Berner and I led two sessions this year, and both were full.

“Adapt With AI: Build a Living Workflow That Doesn’t Go Stale as AI Advances.” This session was designed around a real problem: most AI workflows break the moment a tool changes or a new model comes out. We walked through how to build workflows that flex with AI rather than getting rebuilt every six months. The goal isn’t a perfect system. It’s a system that can evolve.

“Claude for Beginners Workshop and Interactive Session” was hands-on from minute one. Real practice with applied learning and a room full of people who had been curious about Claude but didn’t know where to start. The energy in that room reminded me of something I believe pretty deeply: most people aren’t resistant to AI. They’re just waiting for a safe place to try it.

Both sessions reinforced what we keep seeing across every training we lead. The barrier for most people isn’t capability. It’s confidence. Once they see it work for them, in their words, for their actual job, something clicks.

The session that made the room lean forward.

Chris Thomas from YNDR does something rare for a technical speaker: he makes you forget you’re learning something hard. His sessions on building operational agents with Claude Code weren’t just demonstrations, they were live builds, in real time, with the kind of energy that makes you want to open your laptop and try it yourself.

Chris covered how agents go from process to production, and what it actually takes to build something that works outside of a demo environment. If you’ve been curious about AI agents but felt like the technical gap was too wide, Chris is the person who closes that gap for large enterprises.

Do yourself a favor and go follow him.

The real headline from this year.

Cincy AI Week 2026 wasn’t about convincing anyone that AI matters. That conversation is over.

This year was about the next set of questions: How do you govern it when it scales? How do you measure the ROI? How do you build workflows that don’t collapse six months from now? How do you capture institutional knowledge before your best people leave? How do you show up in a world where AI is answering your customers’ questions before they even reach your website?

These are not futurist questions. They’re this-year questions.

Ohio is building something real. The businesses showing up to conversations like this are the ones who’ll be ahead of it, not just riding the wave, but helping shape where it goes.

A huge THANK YOU for the nomination and honor of being selected as an AI Catalyst in our community. I was completely shocked. I couldn’t do this without the whole AI community and my CincyAI cohost Helen Todd. It literally takes a village.

Congratulations to all the winners!

AI Rising Star — Kerry Oslund
Cincy Catalyst — Kendra Ramirez
Guardian of Good — Josette Riep, PhD
Future Builder — Tyler Mantel
Inclusive AI — Eric Frayer
AI Next Generation — Hannah Joseph (10th grade powerhouse)

HUGE Thank you to Zack Huhn, Summer Crenshaw, Jon Salisbury and Carl Fraik, the whole team and the 100s of volunteers to make this all happen! Can’t wait for 2027!

We help small and mid-size businesses cut through the noise and build AI practices that actually work.

In this interview with Dr. Iyanu (yes, doctorate in AI, go follow him), I share my journey into AI, emphasizing the importance of human-centric AI, practical implementation strategies, and the future of AI in business. Discover how to start small, build organizational AI fluency, and leverage AI for transformational change.

Topics Covered Include:

Kendra’s journey into AI and technology
The shift from copy-paste AI to orchestration
Building AI fluency in organizations
The concept of bring your own AI agent (BYOA)
Change management and organizational transformation with AI (hear my big ahah moment that will help you unlock your AI Champtions)
*From our conversation, we decided to take this info and turn it into a workshop. Let us know if you want info on it. It will be hybrid.

We also just announced our private digital community of CincyAI Champions:

For $25/month or $250/year ($50 off!), access our paid member portal with: BIG thank you to the 105 members that have signed up already!

• 6 CincyAI Human Huddle virtual interest groups: AI for beginners, AI for intermediates, AI for advanced, AI for Women, AI for Arts and Creative, and new AI for nonprofits.

• Limited time only: “CincyAI Founding Champion” Badge
• CincyAI Champions Member Directory
• Monthly Office Hours with Helen & Kendra — Bring your AI questions each month.
• Cincinnati Area AI Job Board
• CincyAI & Community Partners Events Calendar
• CincyAI Champion Matchups
And more!

Limited time only: 30 days free trial as we’re seeding the community — join now to get your Founding CincyAI Champion member badge!!

https://app.heartbeat.chat/cincyai/invitation?code=D73D97#choose We are loving our digital community.

June 24 Interact for Health from 1-3 Georgetown, OH hands-on AI Simplified for nonprofit session. Free to attend. https://lp.constantcontactpages.com/ev/reg/z7kctmn/lp/8f0ebe68-7308-4c5e-ad9b-7ce4ebdf8542

September 3 8-10 am hosted by Clermont Chamber. Our AI in Actioin session https://business.clermontchamber.com/eventcalendar/Details/2026-clermont-classroom-class-1-ai-in-action-stop-watching-start-doing-real-tools-real-results-1752414?sourceTypeId=Hub

We provide AI Enablement (AI Speaking and Training, AI Readiness, AI Strategy, Workflow Automation, and Implementation). Our clients love that we sit side by side with them in our human centered approach to AI.

**For those new to my work, I have been in tech my whole career. Over 15 years of running my digital agency (website, social media, and lead generation) and 7 years of helping businesses navigate AI. Over the three years and, I’ve had the privilege of leading over 250 AI sessions and speaking sessions (over 20,000 people), empowering businesses to embrace the transformative potential of AI. My passion lies in simplifying complex technologies to help organizations grow, innovate, and thrive.

I am so excited that you are on this journey with me! Thank you! 🤗

I have been writing weekly about AI here for almost three years. You can search all of my enewsletters here if you are looking to brush up on a certain topic. kendratech.substack.com