# Opening Address — Transcript

How many of you were here last year? Okay, how many of you remember the tsunami talk? All right, the intention behind that was to scare you into doing something. This year, my job is to just say, hey, this is what today looks like, because we've got another person that's here to tell you what the landscape's looking like in the future.

So I don't have to do that. Okay? And he's not necessarily going to try to scare you either. We all know that we need to be scared.

OK, so my name is Paul Gormley. I'm a growth project manager from CIRIS at Iowa State University. And today, I'm also your summit director. So you say, what is CIRIS?

CIRIS is a Center for Industrial Research and Service. And what do we do there? Well, we help small and medium-sized industry do just about everything they do better. We do that in areas like executive strategy and growth, operational excellence and workforce.

We have specialists that can do things in those areas and know the proper resources to bring in when they can't do them. Okay? They help with projects. They help with education.

Anytime you've got a question, you can call on those experts. We have almost 35 to 40 of those people working with you on a daily basis. Now, one of the things you'll notice here is under emerging topics, there are a little thing here. I think I said to people, don't have your cell phone on.

And I'm pretty positive I shut off everything, but whatever. It was a demo. Okay. Artificial intelligence.

So this is an emerging topic. We all know it's more than an emerging topic or emerging. But what we're doing at Cirrus with artificial intelligence is helping educate people in each of these areas when it comes to AI. We're empowering, we're augmenting the capabilities that we already have and that you already have with artificial intelligence. because it's not a thing into itself.

It's something that we need to attach to all the expertise that we already have, right? For a while, we're going to need somebody to talk about it. But after a while, it's just going to become AI. It's going to be helping us.

All right. So my external focus is working on three main things right now. Working with companies, mainly small and medium-sized organizations in the state of Iowa, to build AI understanding and adoption to help organize and define AI strategy and support AI implementation. Now, I can't do that all.

I have resources that help me. You're going to learn about a few of those people. One of the things that I'm trying to do is the AI Summit for Industry, and you're going to see some people today that are helping me do that. I want to thank the subcommittees that helped bring this together to give us the ideas, to make suggestions on how we can make this better from year to year.

So I'd like these folks to stand up in order. So we've got the program subcommittee. They helped arrange this and put it together and say, this is what it should look like. We tweaked a little bit.

So these folks, not taking orders very well, please stand. And recognize yourself. There you go. Thank you.

Sponsorship. Maybe some of them don't remember they were on a committee. They tried to black it out or something. Sponsorship.

These are the folks that helped us bring in sponsors for this event so we could do even better. So please stand if you were in the sponsorship committee. Okay. Speakers, these were folks that helped me decide who would be on the docket and who might be alternates and maybe who didn't get chosen.

So these are the folks that were on that. And please stand. Don's already standing. Excellent.

Marketing, these are the folks that got the word out and gave us advice on what's the best way to get to the folks that need to hear about this. So please stand if you were on the marketing committee. All right. Thank you, Travis.

And finally, technology. So I hope some of you actually got a chance to look at the website that we have with the structured data and all of those things and what we were doing. The technology team came together and said, what could we do to help demonstrate the use of artificial intelligence? And they came up with it.

They developed it. I'd like for those people to stand. The technology team. And then one significant thank you.

I'm going to tell this quick little story. I started to put things together. I developed a website. I put some structured data together, and I showed it to the team.

And some of the people on the team said, that's nice, Paul. And then Adam said, that's really nice. It's a great start. And he said, why don't you just let me do something over the weekend?

And he came up with what we've got in the form now. It's a much more organized system for being able to keep this stuff together. You're going to be able to get it so much more easily than in the form that I was going to give it to you. So I want Adam and any of his team that are here, because they work pretty hard on this, to stand.

And we'll give him a little round of applause too, because they did a terrific job on this. Thank you, Adam. All right. So now I'm going to have some more people stand.

These are the speakers. I was looking at the 2024 event. The pictures were much bigger in the first one. We had almost 20 speakers in the first one.

We have 38 this year. You are going to get to see whatever it is that you want to see today, I believe. You're also going to be able to take away that information and be able to use it in the near future when we talk about the raw data and things. Let's have all the speakers stand and be recognized at this point.

I didn't even tell them to distribute, and they did. That's excellent. It's excellent. Okay, and then we have three special speakers today, our plenary speakers, J.C.

Hoyer, who's going to be giving our keynote this morning, Dr. David Cook, the president of Iowa State University that will be addressing us at noon, and then Dr. Robert Ivester, who is from the National Institutes for Standards and Technology that apparently got cut off on my projection here. What I want you to also do is if you haven't been to the website, cirrusai.com, this is where it's happening.

This is where everything is. Your agenda is here. You can look at speakers and presentations here to get a good idea of what you're doing. You can use the AI toolkit, which I hope that you had a chance to do.

You should be able to pull down the data, put it in your large language model and say, where should I go? This is who I am. What's your recommendation? If you didn't do that, might be kind of tough right now, but give it a shot.

And then the FAQs. This is full instructions. Most websites don't have to have instructions. This one has a lot of data in it and things that you can use.

This tells you how to use it. All right, a little bit about our layout today. Right now, you're sitting in 240, 230, and 220. You've been through the registration and partner booths.

This is the main room. So if anyone says main room, this is where you come. These are the track rooms. So when we disperse after, you know, getting into session two, this is where you go.

You will also use 220, 230, and 240 as another track room. And definitely for the facilitated discussions. Facilitated discussions are a place, they're kind of like a panel, except it's not. We bring in the experts from one of the tracks and you come in and we have a conversation.

I facilitate it, I keep it going. Usually well attended. And one thing I will say is it's not recorded. So that's the one thing about this whole event that's not going to be recorded is those particular sessions.

And there will be a session in this room. from 11 o'clock on for those. Okay? Right, the restrooms are there. Last year we had a fire alarm, so everyone needed to know where the stairs or where the emergency exits were.

Don't take the elevator, take the emergency exits. And this is very important. At lunchtime, we want to get out of our, wherever we are, and back into this room quickly. There will be inside exchange tables.

They will be set up at the tables. And if you are interested in a topic, you can read that table. It's on the website as well. Okay.

And there will be some of the tables that are facilitated. And there are some tables that are, I don't want to talk AI. So you've got your choice, right? So you can do that.

But when you get out of your session, you're going to want to go out and around the back. So it's going to be around that backside. And then our lunch will be right about here. That's where the tables we set up, come right back in and get to talking.

Then we'll have the president later in the afternoon, or later in that session. Your room moderators. If you're in a track room, in this particular room, I'll be the moderator. I'll be facilitating the conversations.

But we have Gail Nasbergen, Jake Barons, Kirk Holland, and Don Ely. If they are here, could we have them stand? Don's already standing. Gail's in the back.

The other two are over there. So if you have any questions about those particular tracks, they know what's going on in those rooms. And if you have any questions about anything, Jennifer knows it all. So she's our event manager, and she knows everything that's going on here.

If you need any help, get a hold of her, and she can take care of things for you. Okay? The exhibitors today, I saw great interaction with the exhibitor booths out here. They're still out in the area, probably be there during breaks, maybe a little bit during lunch.

Have a conversation with them. I'd talk with each one of them. They all have interesting angles on artificial intelligence. And finally, our premier sponsor.

I want to thank Precision Systems or Precision X Systems for their sponsorship. They came on board very early. They believed in what we were doing. And I guess that's all I can say.

I want them to tell you a little bit about themselves. Casey Webster and Dave Mahusky will be doing the intro for our keynote address. Before I bring them up, are there any questions that I can answer now? And if you have a question, more than likely other people do too.

Any questions? Okay. Well, let's get ready to have a great day.