I have spent enough years trading ideas with Eric Kavanagh on DM Radio and Inside Analysis to know when he is building something for the long haul. The inaugural Agentic Road Show lands in Pittsburgh on October 22, 2026, at the University of Pittsburgh’s Hub for AI and Data Science Leadership (HAIL), and I am genuinely excited to watch this community take root and grow.
This is not a trade-show floor with badge scanners and booth bingo. The series is framed as a national seminar for people who make consequential AI decisions, with Pittsburgh as the first stop and more cities listed as coming soon. The Bloor Group, Tiny Tech Guides, and ThirdNature are behind it, which is the same radio-and-research muscle that has powered DM Radio since 2008. That pedigree matters when you want candor in the room, not a polished vendor script.
A Full Day Split Between State of Art and State of Practice
You can take a half-day intensive or stay for the full eight-hour deep dive. Morning sessions lean research and hard questions. Afternoon sessions lean deployments, governance, and outcomes you can take back to a real org chart.
The published agenda opens with Philip Koopman, Professor Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon, on edge cases for autonomous vehicle safety and what those unsolved problems say about AI decision-making when the stakes are physical. Lou Simon of Uptima follows with a sharp question about how far CEOs will hand real decision rights to AI systems that already sit inside the enterprise.
Kavanagh’s own keynote, “Generation Skeptical,” sits right in the middle of that morning. Gen Zs cool reception to the AI boom is not a side note for him. It is the workforce question every hiring manager is already feeling, and it is the kind of conversation DM Radio has always been willing to have without the cheerleading.
Andy Hannah (University of Pittsburgh and Bluestreet Data) sprints on why poorly vetted third-party data poisons AI pipelines, and Brad Cline of PTC brings an industrial PLM angle on embedding AI across engineering, manufacturing, and service. The morning is not “what is an agent.” It is “what breaks when you trust one.”
Governance, Medicine, and Six Laws Before the Case Studies
After lunch, Morgan Templar of First Data Partners chairs a panel on knowing your AI is governed when that governance is operational and cultural, not just a PDF of policies. That same pressure shows up in how enterprises wire agents to tools, which is why we have been writing about securing MCP for enterprise adoption. Dr. Hooman Rashidi then brings clinical and research reality from Pitt, UPMC, and CPACE, which is the kind of frontline medicine talk that keeps agentic hype honest.
Former Space Force CDO Dr. Mark Brady closes the keynote block with his six laws for safe AI, a call for industry-wide standards around autonomous systems. The day then shifts into case-in-point sessions from organizations past the pilot stage, covering architecture, change management, and measurable outcomes, before a closing panel on what leaders should do in the next twelve months.
That arc matches what I have always liked about Kavanagh’s shows. Start with the uncomfortable questions, put named practitioners on the record, and leave the room with a next move instead of a slogan.
Why This Community Matters to Me
Agentic AI is no longer a lab demo. Teams are wiring agents into real workflows, and the failure modes are getting expensive. A road show that puts safety, governance, workforce skepticism, and production case studies in one ballroom is the kind of gathering our industry actually needs, especially when it lives next to HAIL’s academic and cross-sector convening power rather than a Vegas expo hall. For a parallel read on typed decision models in the hot path, see our recent piece on TypeSafe’s Jev System One model.
I am rooting for this series because communities like this only work when they keep growing past the first city. Pittsburgh is the opening chapter. Chicago, Austin, Boston, and San Francisco are already marked as coming soon on the event site. If the radio swagger and practitioner honesty travel with it, this becomes a durable room for people who build and govern agentic systems, not a one-off conference flyer.
Our team at TechForward will be watching how this community forms, and I am personally excited to see Kavanagh, HAIL, and the DM Radio and Inside Analysis orbit pull more operators into the conversation.
If you are deciding whether to go, start with the Agentic Road Show agenda, then grab a seat through agenticroadshow.com. Keep an ear on DM Radio on Thursdays for the same candor that built this room in the first place.
