Main Stage Agenda - 2026 Futures Summit. Online registration by Cvent

Artificial intelligence is reshaping how we learn, work, and create opportunity. In this keynote, Chancellor Sonya Christian will share a vision for how California Community Colleges can lead through this transformation, using AI to expand opportunity, strengthen teaching and learning, and prepare students for a rapidly changing economy. She will explore what this moment requires of our colleges, the importance of moving with both urgency and purpose, and how California’s community colleges can help shape an AI future that puts students and communities at the center.

California Community College students Cecilia and Bre Onna share how they used AI to tackle real-world challenges through the Agentic Self experience. From TIMI, an AI translation tool designed to bridge language and cultural gaps, to Atlas, a platform envisioned to strengthen nonprofit organizations, their work demonstrates what becomes possible when students are empowered to identify problems, imagine solutions, and help shape the future with AI.

**There will be an intermission directly after this panel**

California Community College students are shaping the future from two directions at once — writing the code that builds robots and wielding AI to tell stories on screen. This session brings together a CCC robotics student and the system's top AI REELs film producer to share how they're using emerging technology to create, compete, and innovate. The AI REELs competition invites students to explore AI both as a storytelling tool and as subject matter, and the featured producer's winning film will showcase one (or both) of those approaches in action. Together, the panelists offer a grounded, student-voice look at the technical and creative skill-building happening across the CCC system.

This session explores the intersection of clean energy innovation, sustainable facilities, music and film production, and climate action across the California Community Colleges system — spotlighting how sustainability can move from the back office to center stage and onto the screen. Panelists will examine the role of live performance and media production in making the clean energy transition visible, tangible, and inspiring, alongside climate content in music curriculum, event production workforce pathways, and solar- and battery-powered facilities.

What happens when a campus becomes a stage and sustainability becomes a spectacle? Closing out the day's clean energy conversation, this live performance featuring X Martinez — turning renewable energy from policy into a felt, shared experience. The live performance highlights the growing role of live music and media production in climate engagement, amplifying how event production, public engagement, and the arts can make the clean energy transition visible, tangible, and inspiring for students and communities alike.

AI is already reshaping how faculty teach and how students learn—the question is whether colleges can transform fast enough to keep pace. This session brings together three vantage points on that challenge: Kiran Kodithala of N2N on building AI-native student support and success infrastructure; Susan Adams, associate director of Teaching and Learning at Achieving the Dream, on scaling AI-informed pedagogy and professional development across a national network of community colleges; and Kavitta Ghai of Nectar AI on the tools reshaping the classroom experience itself. Together, they'll explore what real transformation looks like when AI moves from pilot project to institutional practice—the wins, the friction points, and what it takes to bring faculty, staff, and students along together.

As AI reshapes the skills employers need, community colleges are being asked to move faster on workforce data, apprenticeship pathways, and industry partnerships than ever before. This session brings together perspectives from industry and workforce intermediaries on what that shift looks like in practice: Sowyma Kannan of IBM on apprenticeships, SkillsBuild, and how employers are using AI and data analytics to define emerging skill needs; Dr. Hernan Londono of Lenovo on technology partnerships that support workforce readiness; and Tiffany Hsieh, senior director in JFF's Center for Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work, on how AI is reshaping workforce and education systems at scale. Hsieh helps lead JFF's AI strategy and programs, supporting education and workforce organizations on AI initiatives, convening cross-sector partners, and translating research into actionable insight—work that has drawn coverage from Fortune, Work Shift, Education Week, and Inside Higher Ed. Together, panelists will unpack how data analytics, AI tools, and cross-sector partnerships can align to build workforce pipelines that actually match where jobs—and skills—are headed.

This keynote opens the closing session, setting the tone for the dynamic Make Possible conversations that follow. It consolidates the Futures Summit’s program around one throughline: every framework, partnership, and innovation discussed at the Summit exists to unlock what’s possible for students, now. The talk moves from a vivid image of student potential to a challenge for the room, carry the day’s ideas forward as concrete commitments, viewed through the STEEP lenses (Social, Technological, Economic, Environmental, Political) that make “possible” real for California’s community college students.

Discovery used to run through gatekeepers' labels, critics, curators. Now algorithms decide who breaks through. This uniquely orchestrated session brings five perspectives: Sociocultural, Technology, Environment, Economics, and Policy (STEEP), to one question: how do we guide this shift instead of just living through it? A look at who AI helps surface, who it buries, and why community college students closest to the ground, most adaptable, least tied to old gatekeepers are positioned to lead the way.

Visionary

Impact

Engagement

Gold

Signature

Silver

Bronze

Exhibitor

Branding