Leading with AI 2026 | Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard

While AI represents the most powerful wave of innovation in a generation, public sentiment toward it is increasingly polarized and weary. Many workers feel that AI is being done to them, not for them. The dominant feeling across much of the American workforce is disenchantment, the sense that they played by the rules, but the system changed.

With this in mind, Leading With AI 2026’s Virtual Conference is centered around taking back control. This is a moment, not just a meeting, where we as humanity decide the direction of AI rather than having AI happen to us without our ability to steer its direction.

The AI revolution has been led by executives and technologists, but lived by workers. This is a call to rebalance the conversation, to bring AI down to earth: to the factory floor, the classroom, the cubicle, the small business, and the kitchen table.