Illinois AI Forge
The Illinois AI Forge
An executive AI Intensive from The College of Grainger Engineering and Gies College of Business
Your competitors are making AI decisions right now. Are yours the right ones?
November 12-13, 2026 | Chicago | $3,500
(Illinois alumni: reach out for exclusive discount pricing.)
A 1.5 day, hands-on executive intensive in Chicago for senior leaders who need to make high-stakes Artificial Intelligence decisions they didn't train for. Built by world-class faculty from Illinois' top-ranked Siebel School of Computing and Data Science and Gies College of Business, every session is demo-driven, workshop-driven or discussion-driven. No passive presentations. You leave with tools you can use Monday morning.
Program Details
- Pick apart vendor tall tales. Evaluate AI proposals with the rigor of a researcher, not the optimism of a sales deck
- A threat checklist for your CISO. Live red-team demonstrations distilled into an actionable security playbook.
- A Business Coherence Scorecard. Score your own AI initiative on fit, cost, trust, governance and team readiness—stress-tested by your peers in the room.
- A hands-on prototyping session. Build a working AI prototype in 90 minutes, no prior coding required.
- A 90-day action plan. Leave with a concrete road map: what to pilot, who to hire, what to stop and how to measure success.
Our Audience and What to Expect
The AI Forge is built for senior leaders at financial services, healthcare, manufacturing, consumer packaged goods, logistics, insurance, and professional services who controls budgets and need to make AI decisions they did not train for. If you run a P&L and your board is asking about AI strategy, this program is for you.
This is not a lecture series. Every sessions is built around live demonstrations, hands-on exercises and facilitated peer discussion. Faculty from the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science—active researchers at the frontier of AI development—deliver the technical depth. Faculty from the Gies College of Business translate that depth into organizational decision frameworks. The combination gives you something no business school or conference can: research-calibrated foresight paired with practical business application.
You will learn what large language models actually do and where they fail, which AI capabilities will mature over the next 12-18 months, how agentic AI systems are reshaping organizational workflows, what the real attack surface looks like for enterprise AI deployments and how to evaluate whether a proposed AI initiative is worth the investment. The program emphasizes enduring principles and decision frameworks over specific tools—your takeaways stay relevant as the technology evolves.
Participants leave with a shared technical vocabulary for engaging engineers and vendors, research-grounded frameworks for evaluating AI investments, and individually authored deliverables—including a Business Coherence Scorecard and a 90-day action plan—ready for Monday morning.
Dates: Thursday, August 20 - Friday, August 21, 2026
Format: 1.5 days (Thursday afternoon and evening + Friday full day)
Location: Siebel School of Computing and Data Science, Chicago Office
Discovery Partners Institute
200 S Wacker Dr, 4th Floor
Chicago, IL 60606
Cohort size: 30-40 participants
Tuition: $3,500 per participant. Includes all workshop materials, hands-on sessions with faculty, meals (Thursday dinner, Friday breakfast and lunch), and post-event resources. Illinois alumni: contact us for exclusive discount pricing.
Who should attend: VP-level and above leaders with budget authority at established enterprises. The ideal participant runs a P&L and needs to make AI decisions with confidence.
Day 1—Thursday, August 20
| Time | Session |
| 2:00 pm | Registration and welcome |
| 2:30 pm | Heng Ji: "What LLMs Actually Do (and Don't)—Mechanical clarity on how large language models work, where they fall, and which vendor claims hold up. Closes with a table exercise: evaluate a fictional vendor pitch for real claims vs. BS |
| 4:00 pm | Break |
| 4:15 pm | Vishal Sachdev: "What It Actually Costs to Ship AI" — Introduces the Business Coherence Scorecard, a portable framework covering Problem Fit, Cost Reality, Trust and Blast Radius, Build vs. Buy, Governance, and Team Readiness. Each executive scores a real initiative from their own company while peers stress-test the weakest dimension. |
| 5:45 pm | Reception |
| 6:30 pm | Dinner session — Ranjitha Kumar: "Your Product Process Is Already Obsolete" — A conversational dinner talk (no slides, wine in hand) arguing that AI-assisted rapid prototyping has collapsed the traditional product development lifecycle. Sets up the Day 2 hands-on workshop. |
Day 2—Friday, August 21
| 8:00 am | Breakfast |
| 8:30 am | Hands-on prototyping workshop (Ranjitha Kumar + PhD facilitators) — Build a working AI prototype in 90 minutes using a browser-based platform. No coding experience required. Teams tackle real business problems drawn from participant industries. |
| 10:00 am | Break |
| 10:15 am | Gang Wang: "The Attack Surface You Don't Know You Have" — Live red-team demonstration of prompt injection, data exfiltration, and jailbreaking against a sample enterprise deployment. Tables work through a structured threat checklist you can hand to your CISO on Monday. |
| 11:45 am | Lunch |
| 1:00 pm | Jerry Talton: "Your 90-Day Plan" — A structured working session where every executive drafts a concrete action plan: what to pilot, who to hire or upskill, what to stop doing, and how to measure success. Grounded in Jerry's operational experience as CTO at Carta and engineering leader at Slack. |
| 2:30 pm | Closing remarks and next steps |
| 3:00 pm | End of program |
Faculty
Heng is a computer science professor whose research interests include Natural Language Processing and its connections with Data Mining, as well as Social Science and Vision. She is an Amazon Scholar and founding director of Amazon-Illinois Center on AI for Interactive Conversational Experiences (AICE). Her research has been widely supported by U.S. Government agencies (DARPA, NSF, DoE, ARL, IARPA, AFRL, DHS) and industry (Amazon, Google, Bosch, IBM, Disney).
Ranjitha is an associate professor of computer science and the director of the Innovation Leadership and Engineering Entrepreneurship program at the Grainger College of Engineering. Since 2019, she has been the Chief Scientist at UserTesting--the market leader in experience research and insights--guiding the company's AI product strategy through its IPO and acquisition by Thoma Bravo. She was previously the co-founder of Apropose, which built big-data products for UX design.
Vishal is a Clinical Professor at the Gies College of Business, University of Illinois, where he teaches courses on AI strategy, digital transformation, and technology management. His research and teaching focus on helping organizations evaluate and deploy AI initiatives — bridging the gap between technical capability and business value. He brings extensive experience working with enterprise leaders on AI adoption, governance, and investment decisions.
Jerry is a research assistant professor in the Siebel School of Computing and Data Science where he works on problems at the intersection of Machine Learning & Human-Computer Interaction. He was formerly the Chief Technology Officer at Carta (an $8bn FinTech company), the first Engineering Manager for Machine Learning at Slack, and the founder & CEO of a data startup backed by A16z and NEA.
Gang is an associate professor of computer science with affiliate faculty appointments in both the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) and the Informatics Program of the School of Information Sciences. His research interests include security and privacy, systems and networking, and data mining. His awards include NSF CAREER Award (2018), Amazon Research Award (2021), and Google Faculty Research Award (2017).
Questions? Please contact Professor Hari Sundaram (hs1@illinois.edu).