AI & Your Agency New Orleans

Made possible by

Monday, March 22 - Tuesday, March 23, 2027

Wednesday, March 24, 2027 — Full Workshop Day Add-on

The Conference Centre on 11 • 11th floor • Pan American Life Center

601 Poydras Street • New Orleans, LA 70130 (map)

Overview

MEET YOUR SPEAKERS

Bri Bellavati

Chief Operating Officer at SmartLogic

AI Did What?! A Live Show & Tell of Real AI Experiences

AI is moving too quickly for polished case studies to tell the whole story. AI Did What?! brings the experimentation into the room, with a live show-and-tell focused on real ways people are using AI in their work, what actually happened, and what they learned along the way.

You’ll leave with practical examples you can borrow, adapt, or avoid, plus a better sense of what peers are actually doing with AI right now. The goal is less theory and more useful evidence from people putting these tools to work.

Dale Bertrand

Founder and CEO at Fire&Spark

Selling AI Retainers: Turn In-House AI Expertise Into Revenue

Most agencies have invested heavily in AI, but far fewer have figured out how to turn that investment into revenue.

Dale will share Fire&Spark’s four-step approach to selling AI retainers, from using training as discovery, pricing an outcomes-based pilot, to delivering value quickly and expanding the work into an ongoing engagement. He’ll ground the framework in real client work, including AI engagements with a Fortune 500 bank and a national healthcare brand.

You’ll leave with a practical path for turning what your team is already learning into services clients will buy, including how to use low-risk pilots to open doors, price around business outcomes instead of hours, and convert successful experiments into recurring revenue.

Khushbu Doshi

COO at E2M Solutions

Workshop Info Coming Soon!

Get Your Workshop Ticket

Ben Fox

Founder & CEO at ZeroArc

Give Your AI the Keys (Without Losing the House)

Connecting AI to the systems where your agency actually operates changes what it can do. It also changes the risk.

Ben will explore what happens when AI moves beyond a standalone chat window and into email, Slack, texts, calendars, project-management tools, contracts, financial systems, CRMs, and all the other places the real work lives.

You’ll leave with a more practical way to think about rolling connected AI out across a team without simply handing over the keys and hoping for the best. The conversation will focus on where greater access creates real leverage, where it creates exposure, and how to give people useful AI capabilities without losing control of the systems and information that run the agency.

Jason Khoo

Founder & CEO at Zupo

The AI Visibility Arms Race: How to Win by Competing Differently

As more companies chase visibility in ChatGPT, Claude, Google AI, and other AI-generated answers, many are competing for the same broad prompts and recommendations.

Jason will show that the bigger opportunity is to compete more deliberately by focusing on the buying situations, industries, customer needs, and questions where you or your client has a real advantage.

You’ll leave with a framework for identifying high-value AI visibility opportunities, developing a prompt strategy around the customers that matter most, and connecting those insights to SEO and content strategy. Instead of trying to win everywhere, you’ll have a clearer way to decide where being recommended by AI can actually matter to the business.

Wil Reynolds

Founder / co-CEO / VP Innovation at Seer Interactive

How I Scaled Myself and Why That Was Both a Good and Bad Thing

Wil Reynolds wanted to understand why some client and business-development wins felt like luck instead of the result of a repeatable process.

AI gave him a way to scale his attention across clients and opportunities, identify where he could add the most value, and build systems that keep him closer to the work without being everywhere at once. In his session, he’ll walk through the stack he built, how it works, and what changed once he started using it.

You’ll leave with ideas for using AI to amplify your own judgment, relationships, and impact instead of simply automating tasks. You’ll also hear the other side of that leverage: what can go wrong when you scale yourself, and what Wil has learned about where humans need to stay in the loop.

Sebastian Chedal

CEO at Fountain City

Presentation Info Coming Soon!

Seth Brown

CEO at Lullabot

The No Fire, No Hire Stalemate: What AI Is Actually Doing to Agency Jobs

The most important effect AI is having on agency employment may not show up in layoffs.

Seth will look at the data behind the “no fire, no hire” environment and show that the disruption is happening at the entry point. Agencies still need senior judgment, but AI is making much of the junior execution work that develops that judgment harder to justify. The result could be an industry that keeps experienced people while weakening the junior pipeline that creates the next generation.

You’ll leave with a different way to think about AI, hiring, apprenticeship, and the future agency talent pool. Seth will examine what happens when routine work disappears before replacing the learning it provided, why waiting for demand or better AI to solve the problem is risky, and what agency leaders can choose to keep practicing, teaching, and transferring before those capabilities are gone.

Gant Laborde

President at Infinite Red, Inc.

Be the Viktor: How to Manage Your First AI Employee

Gant put an AI employee inside the place where his company actually works.

In this session, he will explore how to turn an “AI employee” from a thought experiment into a management problem: what do you give it access to, what work should it own, how do you supervise it, and what changes when software begins participating alongside the rest of the team?

You’ll leave with lessons from Gant’s experience, including a clearer way to introduce AI workers into real agency operations. The goal is to move past the novelty of agents and start asking the same questions we ask about any new teammate: what is the job, how do we manage performance, and where does human judgment still belong?