Hope Koch compares the world today with the chaos that was taking place in the 1960s.
“We were experiencing civil rights, women’s rights, Mexican farmworker rights, but actually, out of that came a lot of people having rights,” she said. “The internet was born out of that. We were able to put a man on the moon. We were going to a different level in the ‘60s, and then we got to enjoy that growth for some 50 years.”
In her keynote address at the upcoming You x AI summit, Koch said she’ll be “drawing a parallel that we’re also right now in this liminal space where we’re going to a different place. And it’s really up to us to be involved and to use these tools and make the decisions where the place we go to is a better place than where we are.”
You x AI is “a one-day working event bringing the agentic AI movement to Central Texas,” according to promotional materials. It’s being produced by Waco’s Rogue Media Network and Strike Marketing Institute, an Austin company founded by Fernando Labastida, who will be one of the summit’s featured speakers.
Rogue Media hosted Labastida for some meetings, “and he just kind of hit it off with us and he was interested in doing a live summit,” said Mike Hamilton, Rogue’s co-founder and chief creative officer. “He started talking to me about it, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s something that’s never been done in Waco necessarily. We’ve not done anything big on AI yet.’”
Koch said that one goal of the summit is to get “Waco businesses and nonprofits thinking about how they can use AI to expand and amplify what it is that they are already good at.”
Koch was an early adopter of artificial intelligence and ChatGPT, jumping on board in November 2022 and adding it to her class curriculum beginning in January 2023.
“The focus of my class, our core project, was around AI innovation,” said Koch, who is the Godfrey Sullivan Professor of Information Systems and Business Analytics in the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University. “If you teach information systems in the business school, you are always learning whatever the new thing is the weekend before you’re teaching. The fundamentals are still there, but we are going to learn these new things because the core of what we do is making sure students know the new technology so they can get good jobs.”
Koch is one of more than 20 professionals who will be speaking at the summit, which will run from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, September 12, at the Performing Arts Community Center at 924 Austin Avenue in downtown Waco.
Hamilton said organizers are expecting between 200 and 250 attendees at the summit, “and if we get an overflow, we’ll open up the back door [of Rogue Media] that feeds right into the PACC and use our offices and studios as overflow, which would be cool.”
Hamilton also said that with the PACC’s two stages, “there will be something going on all the time, either a workshop or two speeches or two work-along sessions.”
Koch said that there will be hands-on activities that attendees can take part in on their laptops. They’ll use their “domain knowledge” — what they already know and are good at — “then build your agent that can help you to do what it is that is your expertise, that you know how to do,” she said.
For example, if a real estate investor wants to buy properties that fit a specific profile — corner lot, facing foreclosure, brick exterior — “I could teach her how to build an AI agent that would go around and look at HUD properties, properties with tax liens that are being foreclosed on, and it would search that every day and give her a report ranking those properties based on her domain knowledge and her expertise on the kind of things that she thinks is a good investment,” Koch said.
Attendees don’t need to have a working knowledge of AI, Koch said.
“They should just want to learn and just be kind of interested in technology and in its potential,” she said.
Hamilton said that AI newbies are absolutely welcome.
“I think that if anybody is misunderstanding of it, or doesn’t trust it, or has just heard the horror stories, that they could certainly come in and have their mind changed just simply based on the small differences it could make in their life or business,” he said.
Planned topics at the summit are wide-ranging: a local physician who is using data from numerous previous studies to analyze how compounds react together in cancer treatment; how AI is changing the publishing industry; a pizza chef who is using AI to help her recreate a specific crust; how a busy family can utilize an agent to help organize everyone’s schedule.
Two Baylor students — Dariia Isyk, from Kyrgyzstan and Shakhlo Juraboeva, from Uzbekistan — will lead a session in which they talk about AdmitAI, an app they created that helps international students wend their way through the application process of American universities.
“In the world of AI, I think we can learn anything from zero, or create anything we want from zero, because everything is easy, the only thing we need is an idea,” Juraboeva said on Labastida’s blog, b2bevents.live.
“I think that’s a very practical thing to talk about,” Hamilton said. “Plus, it’s great to see our students here in town developing things like that.”
Hamilton will speak about how Rogue Media uses AI in its operations. Rogue has moved five times since its founding in 2019, “and we have hours and hours and hours — hundreds of hours of video and audio from the last six years. And we don’t necessarily know where everything’s at because we moved five times,” he said.
“So one of the things that AI and I are working on is scanning every one of the files that we own so that we know where they are, when they were recorded, what state they’re in. And then I’m going to go back on the second layer, which starts next week, and it will go through overnight when nobody’s here and transcribe each one of those files. Then we’ll build a searchable database.”
Other speakers include Nicholi Martinez, director of operations and engagement at Startup Waco; Sam Harper, publisher of Waco Buzz; April Leman, director of marketing and communications at Waco Family Medicine; Katie Selman-Green, manager of workplace culture and community at Muck Rack; and many more. A full list can be found at youxai.live.
Tickets to the summit are $99 and also available through that site. Lunch and an after-party are included.
“I learn a lot of my new stuff by attending the South by Southwest conference in Austin, and my entry in the door there is $2,500,” Koch said. “There’s no food. It’s just to go to the sessions. I think it’s actually wonderful that at the You x AI conference, you’re going to get some really good hands-on [learning] and then also some good ideas about how you can use this technology in business. It’s a great deal for the community.”
Hamilton said he wants attendees to come away with something practical.
“I hope they walk away with something that works,” he said. “I want them to be able to actually sit down and make a thing while they’re there, whatever that thing is, whether it’s an agent or whether they make their first pass at cleaning up their email box or whatever it is. I just want them to understand how simple it is to do this.”
