President of the Digital Poland Association, representing leading companies from the digital and technology sector in Poland. He has been actively engaged at the European level for years, working with Digital Europe, where he served three terms as a Board Member.

He is a member of the Digital Council advising the Polish Minister of Digital Affairs on national digital policy. He is also the initiator and leader of the CEE Digital Coalition, bringing together industry organizations from Central and Eastern Europe to strengthen the region’s voice in shaping the EU digital single market. His work focuses on innovation, digital skills, and technological security.

Francesca Rossi is an IBM Fellow and the IBM Global Leader for responsible AI & AI Governance.

She is based at the T.J. Watson IBM Research Lab, New York, USA. Her research interests focus on artificial intelligence, with special focus on constraint reasoning, preferences, multi-agent systems, computational social choice, neuro-symbolic AI, cognitive architectures, and value alignment. On these topics, she has published over 220 scientific articles in journals and conference proceedings, and as book chapters.

She is a fellow of both the worldwide association of AI (AAAI) and the European one (EurAI). She has been president of IJCAI (International Joint Conference on AI) and of AAAI.

She has a long and deep experience in AI governance and best practices for corporate AI ethics and risk assessment.

She is a member of the board of the Partnership on AI and she co-chairs the Responsible AI working group of the Global Partnership on AI. She also co-chairs the OECD Expert Group on AI Futures and she has been a member of the European Commission High Level Expert Group on AI, that led to the European AI Act.

At IBM, she leads AI research projects and she co-chairs the IBM AI Ethics board, which provides the coordinated governance around all AI ethics activities for the whole company. Some of the assets that the board provides include an internal use case AI risk assessment process, several software tools, education material, developers’ playbooks, and AI risk analysis documents such as the recently published ones on generative AI and agentic AI.

Dr. Cullen Bass is an experienced adjunct professor and cybersecurity professional specializing in information security, cybersecurity, AI-enabled security, physical security, and network administration. He has taught at Barry University and the University of the Cumberlands and brings extensive industry experience as a network security engineer and IT supervisor.

Dr. Bass holds a doctoral degree in cybersecurity and information assurance, a master's degree in information technology, and a bachelor's degree. His technical expertise includes cloud security, enterprise network security, firewalls, risk mitigation, disaster recovery, and emerging technologies. His background provides valuable perspectives on securing AI-enabled organizations, managing technology risks, and building resilient cybersecurity frameworks for the evolving digital environment.

Dr. Jeffrey Pirim is an experienced higher education administrator, educator, and researcher with expertise in organizational development, innovation, digital transformation, and AI-ready organizational strategy. He has extensive experience in academic operations, online education, faculty and course scheduling, curriculum development, and student advising at Washington University of Science and Technology. He is also a professor at Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches organizational development and innovation.

He holds a Ph.D. in Educational Leadership, a master's degree in International Studies, and a bachelor's degree in Economics. His background also includes teaching research methods and statistics, conducting educational research, and publishing on education, leadership, and public policy. His experience in organizational development and innovation provides a strong foundation for helping leaders prepare people, processes, and institutions for the effective adoption of AI and emerging technologies.

Dr. Kara Burk is President of Washington University of Science and Technology in Virginia, an institution built for a labor market where AI expires skills faster than credentials. He holds a Doctor of Education from Northeastern University and works at the intersection of instructional design, educational technology, and institutional strategy. He speaks on what AI does to the talent pipeline — and on what employers should stop expecting a degree to guarantee.

Former Corporate Vice President, Microsoft Corporation, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist

Long before anyone spoke of foundation models, Jawad Khaki was building the ground they stand on.

Across a career running from 1979 twenty of those years at Microsoft, where he served as Corporate Vice President — he worked at the core of operating systems, networking, and cloud computing. The distributed infrastructure that today makes AI economically possible was assembled by engineers doing exactly that work, at exactly that time. He brings a builder's memory of how a technology becomes ordinary, and of what gets decided early that nobody can undo later.

Milena Perka operates at the intersection of governance, finance, law and business strategy.

As a Board-Level Business Partner, she supports Executive Leadership and Board Members in navigating complex financial, regulatory and organizational challenges. Her experience spans strategic finance, corporate governance, risk management, compliance, AI regulation and business transformation.

She specializes in translating complex regulatory and business requirements into practical decision-making frameworks, governance structures and sustainable operating models.

Throughout her career Milena Perka have worked across finance, legal, compliance, operations and technology functions, leading international initiatives and supporting organizations in building effective governance and decision-making structures.