AI is everywhere right now. Every conference, every LinkedIn post, every vendor pitch. Most of it is noise. So when an event like the Iowa AI Summit cuts through that noise and puts practitioners on stage instead of salespeople, it’s worth paying attention to.
The 2026 Iowa Artificial Intelligence Summit is hosted by CIRAS (Center for Industrial Research and Service) at Iowa State University. It brings together 36 speakers from companies like Pella Corporation, Wellmark Blue Cross & Blue Shield, Principal, Rockwell Automation, and Danfoss for a single day of sessions focused on what AI actually looks like inside real businesses.
Not what it could look like. Not what a vendor demo pretends it looks like. What it looks like when someone has to make it work on Monday morning.
Running Robots will be there. Not just attending, but speaking, facilitating, and doing live demos on stage. Here’s what you should know.
What the Iowa AI Summit Actually Is
This is the third year CIRAS has run this event, and it has grown every year. The inaugural summit in 2024 drew more than 130 attendees. The 2025 event expanded the format. The 2026 summit is the biggest yet: 33 sessions across five tracks, all packed into one day at the Scheman Building in Ames on May 6.
The five tracks cover ground that matters to Iowa businesses regardless of size or industry: Business Systems & Data, Marketing & Sales, Production & Operations, Leadership & Workforce, and an AI Demo track featuring live tool walkthroughs you can actually replicate.
What sets this summit apart from the national AI conference circuit is the lineup. These aren’t keynote speakers flown in from San Francisco to talk about frontier models. These are people running AI inside Iowa companies right now.
At Pella. At Wellmark. At Principal Financial. At small manufacturers and marketing agencies across the state. The problems they’re solving are the same problems the audience faces. That’s the point.
The keynote comes from Jacey Heuer, Head of AI & Data Science at Pella Corporation. His session, “When the Smartest in the Room is No Longer Human,” tackles what happens when intelligence becomes a commodity and execution becomes the differentiator. Pella is one of the strongest AI adoption stories in the state, and Jacey is the person driving it.
Why We’re on Stage
Our founder, Adam Engel, is a returning speaker at the Iowa AI Summit. He presented at the 2025 event on ERP and CRM pipeline automation. This year he’s back with a session that builds on everything our team has learned since.
Adam isn’t a theorist. Running Robots is a digital marketing agency in Iowa City that serves over 150 organizations, and we use AI every single day. Not as an experiment. As core infrastructure.
When Adam talks about AI on stage, he’s pulling from work we shipped last week. Not from a research paper. Not from a slide deck someone else built.
His 2026 session is in the AI Demo track, which means it’s not a lecture. It’s a live demonstration. Adam will be showing real workflows, real tools, and real results from the work we do with clients across manufacturing, professional services, and eCommerce. If you’ve been wondering what it actually looks like when a business stops talking about AI and starts running on it, this is the session.
The core idea behind what Adam will present is one that most businesses haven’t internalized yet: the technology itself is only a fraction of the value. The real gains come from rethinking how work gets done in the first place. That message lands differently when it comes from someone doing it inside a real agency with real clients and real deadlines, not from a consultant selling a framework.
Meegan Campbell Is Co-Presenting
Adam won’t be alone on stage. Our Digital Marketing Account Manager, Meegan Campbell, is co-presenting the session. Meegan brings the implementation side of the Running Robots story. She’s the one using AI tools inside client accounts every day, building the workflows that connect strategy to execution.
Her background in operations management and client services gives her a different lens than most AI speakers. Meegan isn’t talking about AI in the abstract. She’s talking about what happens when you embed it into the actual day-to-day of managing campaigns, writing content, and keeping clients moving forward.
If you manage people, processes, or client relationships, her perspective will land closer to home than most of what you’ll hear that day.
Adam and Meegan are also both facilitating the Marketing & Sales track discussion. It’s an open, attendee-driven session where the conversation is shaped by the people in the room, not a predetermined script. If you have questions about how AI fits into your marketing or sales operation, that’s your chance to ask the people who are doing it.
Sessions Worth Your Time
We’re not the only reason to show up. The full schedule is stacked. Here are a few sessions across different tracks that caught our attention:
“Shadow AI: When Everyone Becomes a Data Leak Waiting to Happen” with Aaron Warner (CEO, ProCircular) and Doug Jacobson (Professor, Iowa State). If you think your team isn’t already using AI tools without telling IT, you’re wrong. This session covers the security reality most companies are ignoring.
“AI Search Optimization Explained: Leveraging the Shift in Search Visibility” with Neal Rabogliatti (President, Digital Marketing Strategies). Traditional SEO rankings don’t drive traffic the way they used to. Neal breaks down what’s actually changing in how AI retrieves and surfaces content, and what businesses need to do about it. If your SEO strategy hasn’t accounted for AI Overviews and answer engines, this one matters.
“M365 Copilot Rollout: Driving Adoption and Impact at Pella” with Curtis Winegar (Senior Data Analytics Strategist, Pella Corporation). Over 95% monthly adoption. Top 10% among Microsoft’s Copilot customers. Pella’s rollout is a case study in what happens when you put people first and technology second.
“Using Lean Thinking to Unlock Real ROI in AI” with Brandon Carlson (President, Lean TECHniques). Headlines say 95% of AI projects fail to deliver meaningful ROI. Brandon applies lean methodology to AI project planning, which is a smarter framework than most companies are using.
“The Strategic Stack: Overcoming AI Slop” with Shawn FitzGerald (Founder, Level Up Media Interactive). AI-generated marketing content is flooding every channel, and most of it is forgettable. This session tackles how to use AI without producing generic output that hurts your brand more than it helps.
That’s five out of thirty-three. There are sessions on computer vision in manufacturing, natural language search at Wellmark, enterprise RAG chatbots on Azure, AI governance, change management, and more. Five tracks run simultaneously all day, so the hardest part is choosing which room to walk into.
Oh Yeah, We Built the Summit Website
Here’s a detail most attendees won’t know: the conference website itself, cirasai.com, was designed and developed by Running Robots.
The site isn’t just a schedule page. It’s built as an AI-powered companion for the entire event. Attendees can browse the full agenda, research speakers, explore sessions by track, and access a toolkit of 20 pre-built AI prompts designed to help them plan their day, take better notes, and build action plans after the event.
It goes deeper than that. The site supports the Model Context Protocol (MCP), which is an open standard that lets AI assistants like Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot pull session data, speaker bios, and prompt libraries directly. Attendees can connect their AI tool of choice to the conference data and use it to plan their schedule, prepare questions, and build follow-up plans. It’s the kind of feature most conference websites don’t have, and we baked it in from the start.
We built the site using AI throughout the process, from content generation to development workflows. It’s a working example of the same principles Adam and Meegan will be demonstrating on stage: AI as a collaborator embedded in real project work, not a separate tool you open in another tab when you need a paragraph rewritten.
What You’ll Walk Away With
The Iowa AI Summit isn’t a watch-and-forget event. CIRAS has designed the day to produce outcomes, not just impressions.
Every session is built around practical application. The AI Demo track puts tools in front of you. The facilitated discussions let you ask questions and share what’s working (or not) at your company. The networking lunch assigns tables by topic so you’re sitting with people who care about the same problems you do.
There’s also a full AI Toolkit on the conference website with 20 ready-to-use prompts covering schedule planning, networking, note-taking, and follow-up. You can use them before, during, and after the event to turn a day of sessions into an actual action plan for your organization.
The content and strategy work we’re bringing to the stage reflects the same philosophy: practical over theoretical, specific over general, show-don’t-tell over slide-deck-and-promise. That’s how we work with our clients, and it’s how we show up at events like this.
If you’re a business owner, operations leader, marketing manager, or IT decision-maker in Iowa, this is the most concentrated dose of real-world AI knowledge you’ll find in the state this year.
Get the Details and Save Your Spot
Everything you need is at cirasai.com: the full agenda, speaker bios, session descriptions, and registration. Registration closes April 30, so don’t sit on it.
And if you walk away from the summit thinking about how AI could work harder inside your own business, whether that’s your website, your marketing, or your internal operations, Running Robots is right here in Iowa City. We’d be happy to talk.
