Technology & Innovation Summit
North America

AI is just a boatload of potential without a strategy to make it a valuable contributor to business outcomes. Looking at AI through the lens of high-performance IT (HPIT) gives technology leaders a pragmatic framework to plan, execute, and communicate an AI strategy with direct business payoffs in productivity, optimization, and growth. In this session, we will lay out the framework for weaving AI impact into your high-performance strategy to enable business success, co-create value, amplify impact, and transform business.

• Assess the potential for traditional and generative AI on business growth, productivity, and execution
• See how HPIT guides your AI investments and strategy for impact
• Plot your first steps with a genAI strategic plan

Speakers:
Ted Schadler, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Beyond the current cloud shift still underway in enterprise software, changes are already on the horizon. Enterprise software is now entering a new era driven by AI and composability. These shifts have major implications for software buying, use, cost, and skills. The shift will threaten established vendors and pave the way for new entrants. This session will focus on emerging shifts in enterprise software and what they mean to customers. We will also discuss how major enterprise software vendors are changing — or not — in this new emerging world. In this session you will:

• Learn the new emerging models for enterprise software
• How AI and composability are changing the way you buy and use enterprise software
• Get a POV on how the current enterprise software giants are faring in the shift

Speakers:
Liz Herbert, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The future world includes smart, connected experiences in every industry and across every major business function. Powering these experiences requires technology investments. Some are flashy new emerging technologies. Some are foundational investments that help power these experiences where you need them. This session explores the smart world across major industries and tech functions through real-world stories while discussing the major technologies needed to power these realities. In this session you will:

• Explore smart scenarios of the modern and future world
• Highlight the emerging technology required to enable these realities
• Dig into the foundational tech needed to power this inspiring stories

Speakers:
Andre Kindness, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Michele Pelino, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Vector databases are pivotal for storing and accessing high-dimensional data (e.g., video, images, documents) that is fundamental to GenAI applications. Organizations can harness vector databases for use cases like optimizing customer recommendations and experience, detecting real-time data anomalies, and strengthening fraud detection capabilities. In this session you will:

• Learn how to effectively harness vector databases and top use cases and deployments
• Hear insights into the evolving vendor landscape of vector databases

Speakers:
Noel Yuhanna, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

AI continues to lead emerging technologies, demanding long-term risk-taking commitment. In this panel, experts will explore AI’s evolving landscape, its implications for clients, and strategies for adapting to future changes. The discussion will highlight AI’s transformative potential and how businesses can prepare for upcoming shifts. In this session you will:

• Understand the future trajectory of AI and its impact on industries
• Get practical advice to navigate the changing AI landscape

Speakers:
Brian Hopkins, VP, Emerging Tech Portfolio, Forrester
Mike Gualtieri, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Srividya Sridharan, VP, Group Director, Forrester

The high-performance IT organization must manage across multiple capabilities. From portfolio management to change management, from stakeholder management to engineering, IT capabilities are extensive and diverse and require the right talent, competencies, and automation. In 2024, Forrester released an integrated IT architecture describing both the capabilities and the underpinning automation they need to take your organization to the next level. Whether you call it IT4IT or “the business of IT,” IT leaders and enterprise architects will benefit from this comprehensive, holistic view. In this session you will:

• Learn how to apply the reference capability model as an assessment
• The solutions that IT management itself needs, and how those markets are evolving and converging with AI and genAI
• Understand how to derive real business value from applying these perspectives to real-world examples

Speakers:
Charles Betz, Research Director, Forrester

Like the internet and mobile, AI will radically change how consumers interact with businesses. As AI matures, we will see the rise of AI assistants that orchestrate consumer requests on their behalf — bypassing your website and mobile app entirely. This means that within a decade, having an API to deliver your products and services will be as important as web and mobile are today. Yet the current way of doing APIs has gaps for supporting this change. In this session you will:

• Learn how AI will change the way consumers interact with businesses and how APIs will address those changing consumer behaviors.
• Understand how APIs will need to change to support AI-driven commerce, including gaps in current API standards.
• How you must prepare your API strategy and investments for this future.

Speakers:
David Mooter, Principal Analyst, Forrester

It is no longer enough to focus on great digital experiences for your customers alone. New empowered employees demand that their own day-to-day digital experiences also be optimized so they can effectively do their work. This session highlights the innovators that are breaking ground on this movement while showing you how to get started. In this session you will:

• Learn why it is paramount to prioritize the employee digital experience
• Get inspired by your peers on how they got funding and tackled these challenges
• Help you identify how best to get started

Speakers:
Andrew Hewitt, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Dr. Brian Gardner, Chief Information Officer, City of Dallas

Choosing the ideal cloud data platform to modernize your data architecture is overwhelming. Join us for an insightful panel discussion to delve into the world of lakehouses, translytical, graph, vector, multimodel platforms, as well as architectures such as data fabric, data mesh, and global distributed data platforms. In this session you will:

• Hear candid experiences, including best practices and challenges
• Learn how to choose the optimal cloud data platform to align with business need

Speakers:
Noel Yuhanna, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Peter Faseun, Principal Enterprise Architect, Humana
Chuck DeVries, SVP and Technology Officer, Vizient
Greg Bowles, Senior IT Manager, UFCU

Long-term, sustainable success with AI in an organization needs a strategy. Over the past two years, organizations have scrambled to get their genAI ducks in a row — encountering and overcoming challenges new and old. Join this session to learn from our analysts and a practitioner about:

• Success stories in developing and executing an AI strategy
• What steps you can take at your organization to begin or iterate on your AI strategy

Speakers:
Rowan Curran, Senior Analyst, Forrester

In an era where information technology (IT) is pivotal to organizational success and innovation, adopting an effective IT governance model becomes crucial. This presentation introduces and explores four distinct styles of high-performance IT governance: Enabling, Amplifying, Co-creating, and Transforming. Each style is characterized by its unique approach to leveraging IT resources, capabilities, and alignments with organizational objectives to foster growth, efficiency, and competitive advantage. In this session you will:

• Understand the new framework to assess their current IT governance approach, identify potential areas for improvement, and strategically navigate through the complexities of technology and performance.
• Learn real-world examples and case studies that illustrate how organizations can select and adapt these styles to their specific context, thereby achieving high-performance IT governance that aligns with and supports their strategic objectives.

Speakers:
Christopher Gilchrist, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Leaders turn to SaaS for packaged solutions to their most pressing business needs, but customizations and integrations can dampen the cost benefit equation. The difference between a generic solution your business experts need to work around and a strategic business platform that delivers competitive advantage can lie in your ability to extend SaaS capabilities to fit your business and tech stack like a glove. In this session you will:

• Learn how cloud-native development maturity opens opportunities to extend and customize SaaS applications
• Understand the critical design patterns and development approaches to extending and customizing SaaS with cloud native

Speakers:
Devin Dickerson, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Trust is one of the most valuable assets you can have in your business. Outages, breaches, data leaks, and other technology incidents erode the trust your customers, partners, and employees put into the systems that power your business. Technology resilience depends on preventing and responding to these crises, but building trust requires more than just returning systems to operation. It means upleveling your communication, practicing your response to crisis, and protecting data even when it is lost. In this session you will:

• Learn how to establish foundational principles for modern technology resilience
• Understand how you can help your organization embrace new tactics and techniques to bolster resilience

Speakers:
Brent Ellis, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Data governance not only safeguards data, but also provides a strategic business direction in the modern data ecosystem, ensuring trust, compliance, risk management, and effective decision-making. But it is challenging to maintain the governance policies, processes, and standards in an ever-evolved data ecosystem. Data observability offers a proactive approach to governance by offering real-time insights into the data integrity, pipelines, transformations, usage, and lineage. In this session, you will learn how data observability:

• Helps in navigating regulatory complexities
• Offers root-cause analysis and remediation recommendations
• Mitigates data privacy and security risks

Speakers:
Jayesh Chaurasia, Analyst, Forrester

Like all Amazing Races, the sprint toward genAI adoption is highly competitive, filled with challenges, and offers big rewards. To get across the finish line, organizations must understand their readiness, prepare with purpose, and follow the rules of the game. In this session you will:

• Learn the impact of AI regulations
• Understand the benefits of AI governance
• Learn the role of risk appetite and ERM maturity

Speakers:
Alla Valente, Senior Analyst, Forrester

Welcome to the 15th annual Forrester Enterprise Architecture Award, the only international award program dedicated to recognizing excellence in enterprise architecture. This award will be presented on stage to the winner who has demonstrated thought leadership and excellence in enterprise architecture and generously shared their experiences for industry benefit. Attendees will:

• Hear a brief overview of the Forrester Enterprise Architecture Award and the key trends it has illuminated
• Listen to an in-depth fireside chat with the winner who will discuss how their approach to enterprise architecture has led to superior business outcomes for their organization

Speakers:
Charles Betz, Research Director, Forrester
Manoj Mathew, Head of Enterprise Architecture, Scotiabank

Enterprise applications are at the core of any organization’s operations and significantly impacts its market competitiveness and how it serves its clients. Current market dynamics show that most of these organizations are undergoing some form of operational transformation and application modernization effort to level up to the current state of enterprise software. There is heavy activity in the services provider space with thousands of enterprise application implementations and modernization projects. AI and automation are changing the nature of how these programs are delivered and are being used to compress the application modernization and transformation timeline. In this session you will:

• Know where AI and automation can be leveraged during enterprise application delivery.
• How AI and automation are used by services providers in this current market.
• In this talent-constrained market, look at the role of AI and automation to bolster and prepare new talent pools faster to respond to the high-volume modernization programs globally.
• Prepare for the right AI and automation investments for your organization’s enterprise applications delivery team.

Speakers:
Akshara Naik Lopez, Senior Analyst, Forrester

The future world includes smart, connected experiences in every industry and across every major business function. Powering these experiences requires technology investments. Some are flashy new emerging technologies. Some are foundational investments that help power these experiences where you need them. This session explores the smart world across major industries and tech functions through real-world stories while discussing the major technologies needed to power these realities. In this session you will:

• Explore smart scenarios of the modern and future world
• Highlight the emerging technology required to enable these realities
• Dig into the foundational tech needed to power this inspiring stories

Speakers:
Tracy Woo, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Building a successful enterprise data organization requires organizing bodies (humans) and bots into six functions: designers, makers, communicators, regulators, operators, and iterators. From developing data solutions to ensuring data governance and driving innovation, this session will explore the essential elements of a modern data and AI team. In this session you will:

• Learn how the six key functions cover the data and AI capabilities you need
• Know how every organization can arrange the six functions to best suit its needs

Speakers:
Kim Herrington, Senior Analyst, Forrester

AI isn’t coming for our jobs, but it is changing the way we work. To gain the most value from AI, leaders must prepare their workforce with the knowledge and skills they need to use this technology. In this panel discussion, we’ll tackle the impacts AI is having on tech talent — from sourcing in-demand skills, to preparing a workforce to integrate AI into their jobs, to managing AI-related burnout. In this session you will:

• Learn how leaders are preparing their workforces to work with AI
• To lead, find and build talent pipelines for hard-to-find AI-related skills

Speakers:
Fiona Mark, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The dynamic and rapidly evolving landscape of information technology (IT) presents both challenges and opportunities for organizations aiming to achieve and sustain high-performance levels. This presentation delves into the strategic investments necessary for unlocking high-performance IT value, offering a comprehensive analysis of how organizations can leverage IT to drive significant improvements in performance, innovation, and competitive advantage. In this session you will:

• Understand the new investment thesis for organizations making strategic IT investments that unlock high-performance value through a synthesis of current research, case studies, and expert insights.
• Hear forward guidance on the future of IT investment strategies in light of emerging technologies and shifting business landscapes, offering guidance for organizations to stay ahead in a digitally driven world.

Speakers:
Carlos Casanova, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Christopher Gilchrist, Principal Analyst, Forrester

To pivot to an intelligent enterprise, project-level change management is important, but it is not enough. Rather than driving adoption and product metrics, leaders must define and drive enterprise-wide outcomes that align to revenue and profitability goals. They must manage change with empathy, honesty, and agency to impact lasting culture change. They must evolve their workforce to be change-confident and open to continuous learning. We focus on CRM as an example to highlight workforce and culture changes needed to evolve to an intelligent enterprise. In this session you will:

• Learn how to pivot to a change-confident culture
• Know how to deploy and measure the success of foundational technologies that comprise the intelligent enterprise, and continuously adjust
• Recognize the common traps you must navigate through to be successful

Speakers:
Kate Leggett, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Cloud has driven IT transformation fast and far — so much so that older IT operating models are strained or simply obsolete in speed and scale. Thinking about operating models and operations is essential for setting the right direction for a high-performing cloud practice. We applied Forrester’s Operating Model Framework to cloud to create Forrester’s Cloud Operating Model Framework, which acts as a blueprint for any organization. This session will go step-by-step through this framework with great client examples and best practices along the way. In this session you will:

• Learn how to approach each layer of your cloud operating model
• Listen to stories from your peers on how they’ve approached each element

Speakers:
Lee Sustar, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Tracy Woo, Principal Analyst, Forrester

The overall health of an organization is contingent upon the efficacy of its decisions. Unfortunately, despite increased investment in data and analytics, many companies still rely on gut feeling when making critical business decisions. Companies need a disciplined approach to the process of decision-making, one that recognizes that not all decisions are created equal. In this session you will:

• Explore the different dimensions of data-driven decisions
• Learn optimal approaches for different decision environments

Speakers:
Brandon Purcell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Aldila Yunus, Researcher, Forrester

Successful, industry-leading AI programs have one thing in common — they have the right mix of AI models, platforms, and infrastructure to keep AI teams working, not waiting. Establishing this right mix is not easy, especially because the AI markets move so fast. In this session you will:

• Hear the three key ingredients for successfully developing and deploying AI solutions: AI foundation models for language, AI/ML platforms, and AI infrastructure solutions.
• Decide what is the right mix of AI technologies for your enterprise.

Speakers:
Mike Gualtieri, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Delivering value at scale requires the right level of governance and oversight. It also requires that governance and oversight can adapt to changing business needs. Strategic Value Offices (SVOs) are becoming an essential part of establishing and adapting planning and delivery practices, metrics, and tooling to support consistent outcomes. To do this, SVOs align with the archetypes of high-performance IT organizations in terms of emphasis, practices, and collaboration. In this session, you will learn:

• Value delivery requires end to end planning
• Value delivery requires enterprise visibility and practical governance
• Organizations benefit from a Strategic Value Office

Speakers:
Margo Visitacion, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

To be great, businesses must harmonize their value-generating investments. Great tech and poor strategy won’t work. Neither will the reverse. To overcome the challenge of aligning your internal capabilities requires a bird’s-eye view of how they fit together. This becomes even more crucial as you grow. Join this session to learn how to holistically invest in the capabilities that drive customer outcomes — by spotting and eliminating bottlenecks across your organization. You’ll learn how connect customer journey maps, value stream and capability maps to your roadmap. In this session you will:

• Learn how all these parts relate to one another.
• Understand who drives the alignment of all the parts.
• Know the insights you can reveal through planning and inspection of the entire chain.

Speakers:
Joe Cicman, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Christopher Condo, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Broadcom’s acquisition of VMware has technology leaders across the globe rethinking their tech stack. Existing clients fear price hikes, disruptions in ecosystem partnerships, and lack of innovation investment — some of which has already transpired. What complicates matters is that it isn’t a simple product migration; packaging and other dynamics make these decisions highly complex. This session will walk through the key decisions and dynamics at hand while taking you through a migration checklist. In this session you will:

• Learn about the key dynamics at play as you consider your options
• Listen to real examples of organizations and the approaches they are taking
• Walk through our VMware migration checklist

Speakers:
Naveen Chhabra, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Even with the most intuitive “user friendly” enterprise BI platforms, business users struggle to adopt. As AI and GenAI bring significant improvements to BI platforms such as automating code generation, conversational user interface, and turning business users into citizen data scientists, adoption continues to be low. In this session you will:

• Learn four benefits and improvements AI can bring to enterprise BI platforms and applications
• Hear cautions and recommendations to technology and data leaders planning to deploy AI-infused BI platforms and applications

Speakers:
Boris Evelson, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Aaron Katz, VP, Research Director, Forrester

Firms are primarily adopting AI, especially generative AI, in five ways: 1) directly by users, 2) embedded as features in existing products and services, 3) a net new acquisition, 4) training your own models, and 5) building applications to integrate with existing models. Each of these pathways presents new and different challenges for companies. In this session you will:

• Understand the risks each scenario introduces and their associated attack surfaces
• Learn how to model various use cases, policy and governance concerns, and what’s different about securing generative AI versus legacy architectures

Speakers:
Jeff Pollard, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Technology organizations have been using following the lead of high-profile tech providers and applying product management practices to technology delivery. However, the path to customer-led, insights-driven delivery is littered with over-zealous governance, siloed product lines, and unclear value measurement. This session will reflect on the lessons learned on how to effectively leverage product management and continuous delivery practices to deliver business value. During this session, attendees will:

• Learn how technology leaders are applying product management best practices
• Learn some of the typical challenges or mistakes that organizations encounter, and how to avoid them

Speakers:
Fiona Mark, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Executive leaders are still grappling with their fright-and-flight response to what it means to have AI-powered enterprise software in their technology landscape. While governmental regulations are starting to provide guardrails, not all the risks gaps are closed, making leaders vulnerable to the threat of being made an example of. We will share approaches that leading software companies and IT service providers are using to mitigate distrust so organizations can work toward investing in enterprise applications and partners that are beneficial, trustworthy, and bring value to the business. In this session you will:

• Hear key grounding rule approaches for AI-powered systems
• Know the core application governance questions to ask vendors and partners
• Prepare for the right AI and automation investments for your organization’s enterprise applications delivery team.

Speakers:
Linda Ivy-Rosser, VP, Research Director, Forrester
Jeff Pollard, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Many companies are eager to transform processes with AI but struggle due to inexperience. This leads to wasted resources, resistance to future initiatives, and subpar results. We’ve got the antidote! Join this session to learn the secrets of successful AI process transformation. We’ve interviewed project leaders to bring you real-world stories with actionable insights. In this session you will:

• Learn five proven lessons to leverage AI for impactful process transformation.
• Discover the sweet spot for AWAs (Autonomous Workplace Assistants), learning the when and how to deploy these digital co-workers for maximum benefit.
• Dig into Forrester’s AI process toolkit and discover how companies leverage DPA, RPA, and automation fabric orchestration to build winning AI-powered processes.

Speakers:
Craig Le Clair, Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Organizations are relying more on data and AI to make business decisions, run operations, drive innovation, and gain a competitive edge. However, the accuracy and success of these endeavors depends heavily on the quality of data. The integrity and reliability of data is essential for accurate analysis and actionable insights and is paramount for enabling trust and maximizing the potential of AI. In this session you will learn:

• The significance of data quality in building trust in data and AI
• Best practices for ensuring data quality
• How to leverage AI to enhance data quality

Speakers:
Jayesh Chaurasia, Analyst, Forrester

In many companies, AI suffers from a trust gap that stymies adoption of the technology and limits its impact. One way to bridge this gap is with XAI — explainable AI. But explainability can take many forms, and different use cases require different techniques. Additionally, explainability is in the eye of the beholder — a highly technical explanation will not suffice for your average business stakeholder. In this session you will:

• Learn how to build stakeholder trust with explainable AI
• Understand different approaches to explainability and how to select the right one for your use case

Speakers:
Brandon Purcell, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Forrester’s high-performance IT framework uses strategic business outcomes to assist the IT organization in changing its capabilities, structure, governance, and leadership to be high performing. In this session you will:

• Understand how business strategies drive demand for the tech organization’s products and services
• Learn how to demonstrate this impact based on four styles of IT strategy
• Identify the dimensions of IT operating model changes for each of these styles

Speakers:
Gordon Barnett, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Bobby Cameron, VP, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Generative AI is revolutionizing how the software services industry operates, with many vendors touting lower-cost delivery models, faster time to market, and greater innovation; all being powered by their investments in open-source genAI capabilities. While clients will welcome these benefits, in this new era of ChatGPT and CoPilots, how can they be certain they are getting what they pay for? This presentation will discuss principles and practices for establishing trust with your services provider in the new era of genAI software creation. In this session you will:

• Hear how services providers are exploiting AI to accelerate delivery and grow profits
• Understand these new operating models to get the most value

Speakers:
Christopher Condo, Principal Analyst, Forrester
Bill Martorelli, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Platforms are at the core of an organization’s high-performance strategy, but is your organization getting the most out of its investments? As organizations pivot toward product-centricity, internal technical teams must be prepared to deliver platforms and outcomes aligned with business demands. Traditional reporting structures, project mentality, and functional silos all impede velocity and agility. In this session you will:

• Understand the rising importance of platform teams, the product-centric promise of greater team autonomy, and the challenges of moving from project to product.
• The keys to success for transforming operational teams into value delivery teams supporting high-performance IT.

Speakers:
Julie Mohr, Principal Analyst, Forrester

Discover the power of synthetic data in revolutionizing analytics. This session explores how realistic synthetic data generation through generative AI (GANs and VAEs) can unlock new insights while ensuring privacy and data security. Explore innovative use cases across industries that leverage synthetic data to overcome data scarcity challenges. In this session you will:

• Learn the benefits and limitations of synthetic data
• Hear popular and emerging use cases of synthetic data
• Understand considerations before introducing synthetic data to your analytics

Speakers:
Zeid Khater, Analyst, Forrester

Generative AI has brought very powerful AI models into the limelight. But with great power comes great responsibility. To turn this power into economic advantage, enterprises must align and customize these models to their business objectives, corporate requirements, and employee and customer needs — this is no easy task! Attend this session to learn:

• Pros and cons of different approaches to aligning models to behavior, such as prompt engineering, fine-tuning, and retrieval augmented generation
• Emerging practices for model alignment and orchestration during application development and post-release

Speakers:
Rowan Curran, Senior Analyst, Forrester