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Friday, September 25, 2026 - 11:30am to 12:30pm

Part 2: The Power of Synthetic & Collective Intelligence

Now that you’ve tapped into the wisdom of the room, it’s time to supercharge it. In Part Two of this immersive experience, we bridge human experience with the power of modern AI tools to take problem-solving to the next level. While human groups provide deep context, empathy, and lived experience, AI offers rapid pattern recognition, endless iteration, and synthetic perspectives that shatter blind spots even faster.

In this hands-on workshop, you will learn how to transform AI tools from simple search replacements into active, dynamic partners in your brainstorming sessions. Whether you’re dealing with a software testing nightmare, complex team dynamics, or a strategic roadblock, you’ll discover how to prompt, challenge, and iterate alongside AI to generate unconventional solutions, simulate real-world scenarios, and pressure-test your team's ideas in real time.

We won't just take AI output at face value—we will dig in, critically evaluate suggestions, refine multi-step prompts, and build robust implementation plans that anticipate potential blockers before they happen. Every participant will leave with a personalized AI-Augmented Problem Playbook tailored to their specific challenge, along with practical workflows to facilitate AI-powered problem-solving sessions back with their own teams.

Bring your laptops, your real-world challenges, your critical thinking, and be prepared to co-create with the future of collective intelligence!

Melissa Benua
Vega

Melissa Benua has worked in nearly every software development role - dev, test, DevOps, and engineering leadership - at companies ranging from Boeing and Microsoft to gaming startups and hypergrowth data platforms. She's built and scaled high-availability services for Bing, Cortana, Xbox, and PlayFab, and led the engineering teams that generated millions of lines of AI-written code per week at mParticle and Rokt while cutting bug escape rates by 20%. Today she serves as CTO at Vega and as a tech advisor through queenofcode.dev, helping founders from pre-Seed through Series A build and ship production software. Melissa speaks on engineering fundamentals in the agentic era: the planning, testing, CI, and observability disciplines that don't just survive AI velocity, but enable it. Her thesis - safety isn't the opposite of speed. It's the engine.

Alison Wade
Coveros

Alison Wade is the President of Events and Media and an accomplished executive dedicated to the business of software. For the past fifteen years, she has worked with industry leaders developing programs for software development and testing professionals. She currently serves as the Program Chair for AI Con USA, STAREAST, and STARWEST. Alison strives to increase awareness of diversity in the software industry concerning both the workforce and the role of software beyond commercial products and IT departments. In 2015, Alison launched Women Who Test, a program dedicated to women in software testing womenwhotest.com. You can find her at @awadesqe or @womenwhotest.