Topics

Talk 01

The AI CEO

What Changes When The Person Signing The Check Understands The Technology

Best for: Executive teams, boards, CEO peer groups, leadership summits

Most AI strategy fails in the boardroom, not the server room. Leaders approve initiatives they cannot evaluate, then wonder why the results never arrive.

Trent walks executives through the decisions only they can make: which problems deserve AI, what to fund and what to kill, how to read a vendor pitch, and what governance actually has to cover. He uses real deployments, including the ones that went badly, to show where leadership attention changes the outcome.

What the room walks out with

• A decision framework for evaluating any AI proposal in under ten minutes
• The four questions that expose a vendor who cannot deliver
• How to structure an AI budget that survives a bad first quarter
• What to delegate, what to own, and what to never approve

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Talk 02

Pick The Right First Problem

Why Most AI Pilots Die And How To Choose One That Does Not

Best for: Operations leaders, department heads, transformation teams

Organizations do not fail at AI because the technology is not ready. They fail because they chose a problem that could not show a result before the sponsor lost patience.

A practical talk about selection. Trent lays out the characteristics of a first AI project that pays for the second one: high volume, clear success criteria, tolerant of imperfection, owned by someone who wants it. Audiences leave having scored a real problem from their own organization against the framework.

What the room walks out with

• The scoring model for ranking candidate AI projects
• Why the highest-value problem is usually the wrong place to start
• How to set success criteria your CFO will accept
• The three problem types to refuse outright

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Talk 03

The Work Only Humans Should Do

Automation, Judgment, And Where To Draw The Line

Best for: Full-staff audiences, HR and people teams, conference main stage

The question is not whether AI takes your job. It is which parts of your job were never worth your attention in the first place.

The talk Trent gives when a room is anxious. He separates the work that machines handle well from the work that requires judgment, relationship and accountability, then shows teams how to redraw their own line. Candid about job displacement rather than dismissive of it.

What the room walks out with

• A framework staff can use to audit their own week
• Why the handoff matters more than the automation
• How to talk to a nervous team without overpromising
• Roles that grow in value as AI spreads

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Talk 04

Small Team, Big Mission

AI For Organizations With No Budget And No Slack

Best for: Nonprofit leadership, boards, foundation convenings, association events

Nonprofits are told AI is for enterprises with innovation budgets. The opposite is true. The fewer people you have, the more every recovered hour is worth.

Built for mission-driven organizations. Trent covers donor engagement, grant research and drafting, volunteer coordination and the constant inbox, using free and low-cost tools. Every recommendation is tested against a real constraint: no IT department, no procurement cycle, and a board that will ask about donor data.

What the room walks out with

• The first three AI workflows worth a small team's time
• Donor data, privacy and what to promise your board
• Grant writing with AI without losing your voice
• A 30-day adoption plan that costs under [$X]/month

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Talk 05

Build, Buy, Or Wait

The Only Three Options And How To Tell Them Apart

Best for: Technology leaders, CIOs and CTOs, product teams, investors

Every AI decision reduces to three choices. Most organizations pick wrong because they evaluate the demo instead of the decision.

Trent builds custom AI for a living and still tells most rooms to buy. This talk explains when that is right, when off-the-shelf quietly fails, and when the correct answer is to do nothing for six months. Includes the real cost structure of each path.

What the room walks out with

• True cost comparison across the three paths
• The integration questions that decide build versus buy
• How to run a vendor evaluation that surfaces weakness
• When waiting is the disciplined choice

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Talk 06

Trust At Scale

Governance, Risk And Disclosure For Regulated Organizations

Best for: Public companies, financial services, healthcare, legal, government

The organizations with the most to gain from AI are the ones with the most to lose from getting it wrong. That is not a reason to sit out.

Drawing on his work inside a publicly traded company and with regulated clients, Trent covers practical governance: what to document, where humans must stay in the loop, how to handle disclosure, and what an audit trail needs to contain. Built for organizations answerable to regulators, boards and the public.

What the room walks out with

• A governance checklist that fits on one page
• Where human review is non-negotiable
• What to tell customers, regulators and shareholders
• Building an audit trail before you need one

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Talk 07

Tools, Tricks And Traps

How To Tell Real AI From An Expensive Demo

Best for: C-suite, procurement, technology committees, boards, investors

The AI industry is very good at selling. A demo is engineered to work. Your workflow is not. The gap between those two facts has consumed an enormous amount of corporate budget.

Trent has been pitched by hundreds of AI vendors and has been the vendor in the room himself. This talk takes executives inside the sales playbook: the metrics that mean nothing, the demos built on cherry-picked data, the pricing that looks cheap until volume arrives, and the pilot designed to be impossible to cancel. He names the patterns, then hands the room a set of questions that cut through them in the first meeting.

What the room walks out with

• The seven signals that a demo will not survive your real data
• Questions that separate a product from a wrapper on someone else's model
• How AI pricing actually scales, and where the surprises hide
• The pilot structure that protects you instead of the vendor
• When the honest answer is to build it yourself, and when it is not

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Talk 08

What ChatGPT And Claude Actually Do

Why Most People Are Using A Reasoning Engine Like A Search Box

Best for: All-staff audiences, professional associations, chambers of commerce, sales and marketing teams, professional services firms, and any organization that has bought licences without seeing the return

You cannot get good work out of a tool you fundamentally misunderstand. Almost nobody in the room has been told what these things actually are, so they trust them in the places they should not and doubt them exactly where they are strongest.

Most organizations now pay for ChatGPT or Claude and quietly wonder where the productivity went. Trent opens the hood. He explains in plain language what a language model actually is, what it is doing when it answers, and why that explains nearly every frustration people have with it: the confident wrong answer, the generic output, the thing it nailed on Tuesday and fumbled on Thursday. Then he shows the working difference between a two-line request and a properly framed one, live, on the kind of task the audience actually has. He covers where each tool is genuinely stronger, what should never be handed to either of them, and the handful of habits that separate people getting real leverage from people who tried it twice and went back to doing the work themselves. No prompt-engineering mysticism and no hype. The room leaves understanding the tool, which is the only durable way to use one well.

What the room walks out with

• What a language model is actually doing when it answers, in language anyone can follow
• Why it sounds most confident exactly when it is least reliable, and how to catch it
• The difference between asking and briefing, demonstrated live on real work
• Where ChatGPT is stronger, where Claude is stronger, and why serious users keep both
• The work you should never hand either of them, whatever the vendor says

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Talk 09

When Excellent Is Possible, Great Won't Do!

The Standard That Separates Organizations That Matter

Best for: Full-staff audiences, sales teams, leadership retreats, association conferences, graduations

Great is a comfortable place to stop. It is good enough to be praised and just short of what you were actually capable of. Excellence is the standard you set when nobody is watching and no one would have known the difference.

Trent's signature motivational keynote. He makes the case that "great" has become the enemy of excellence in most organizations, because great gets rewarded, and anything rewarded gets repeated. Drawing on his own path from operator to chief executive, he shows how the gap between great and excellent is almost never talent or budget. It is the willingness to redo work nobody asked you to redo. The talk lands hard on personal accountability without shaming anyone, and closes with a standard the room can actually hold themselves to on Monday.

What the room walks out with

• Why organizations that reward "great" quietly cap their own ceiling
• The three places excellence is decided, all of them invisible to customers
• How to raise a standard without becoming the person nobody tells the truth to
• A personal commitment each attendee defines before leaving the room

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Talk 10

Small Business Thinking And Other Bad Habits

The Habits That Quietly Cap What You Can Build

Best for: Business owners, founders, entrepreneurial groups, chambers of commerce, franchise networks, sales organizations

Most businesses are not limited by their market, their capital or their competition. They are limited by habits the owner developed when the company was small, and never revisited once it was not.

A direct, sometimes uncomfortable talk about the thinking that keeps capable operators stuck. Trent names the habits he had to break himself on the way to running a company inside a publicly traded parent: doing work you should have delegated two years ago, pricing from fear, hiring people who will not challenge you, treating revenue as a scoreboard instead of a system, and confusing being busy with being in business. Delivered with the authority of someone who has built, scaled and answered to a board, and with the honesty of someone who made every mistake on the list.

What the room walks out with

• The seven small-business habits that stop scaling the moment you grow
• Why your pricing is a belief problem before it is a market problem
• How to tell the difference between a bottleneck and a person
• What to stop doing this quarter, chosen before the session ends

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Talk 11

The Future Is Bright, But There Is A Dimmer Switch Included

What Nobody Tells You About The Part You Control

Best for: College and university students, HBCU campuses, student entrepreneurship programs, scholarship and fellowship cohorts, career services events

Everyone tells you the future is bright. Nobody mentions that the switch is on the wall in your room, that it has a dial rather than an on and off, and that you are the only person who can reach it.

Trent toured with the UNCF speaking to college students about entrepreneurship and business building, and this is the talk that came out of it. He is honest about the two things students are rarely told together: that the opportunity in front of them is genuinely enormous, and that most of what determines how much of it they get is in their own hands. He covers the daily decisions that dim the light without anyone noticing, the difference between a plan and a wish, and how to build something while you are still in school rather than waiting for permission. Delivered with the energy of a former morning radio host and the credibility of someone who has built brands into national retail, published a book, and closed multi-million dollar enterprise agreements.

What the room walks out with

• The four habits that quietly turn the dial down, and how to catch them early
• How to start a business with the resources a student actually has
• Why the people around you matter more than the idea you have
• One thing to do this week, chosen before leaving the room

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