Dayton AI Day 2026 · Technology First · August 26, Dayton, OH.
AI graduated from a thing you ask to a thing that acts, and the gap between what it can actually do and what most people think it can do has never been wider. This talk climbs that gap one rung at a time: from the chatbox, to answers grounded in your own data, to agents that take real actions, to autonomous work that hands you a finished artifact.
Then it turns. None of those rungs hold if your data is wrong. AI doesn't catch a bad number. It returns the wrong one faster, with a cheerful "here's that data you asked for." The unglamorous layer of transformation, data-quality testing, and orchestration is the ninety percent that decides whether the visible ten percent is worth a dollar. The honest version of the pitch, in a room full of vendors, is that the most expensive AI on the shelf is often the wrong answer to a problem that lives upstream.
The demos run on Snowflake Cortex, but none of it is tied to Snowflake: this is what agentic AI on your own data looks like right now, everywhere. Cortex is the example, never the subject.