2026 Indiana IT Symposium Reflections

Last week, I attended the 2026 Indiana IT Symposium in Indianapolis. For me, it was an engaging and fast-paced event filled with great networking and information exchange. The topic of the day was AI, along with leadership and cybersecurity. There were a lot of interesting points raised and I wanted to share some of the insights I took away from the Symposium.

• AI does not replace people, it replaces tasks. AI agents can automate tasks, enabling people to focus on more strategic and intellectual work. AI supplements and transforms the work, but cannot build relationships or apply people's experiences: this is an opportunity for a shift in mindset for IT work - from information finding to key strategic thinking.
• Discernment is key. Let AI be a starting point, an assistant that we can feed ideas into and iterate with. However, just as we wouldn't over rely on a GPS to the point of following it off a cliff, we shouldn't let AI do all the thinking for us. Treat the AI’s output as suggestions and options that we can then evaluate and decide among. Know how to distinguish between signal and noise. Critical thinking, creativity, judgment - these are all still the realm of the human, which AI cannot imitate (yet). AI can solve problems while humans do more strategic tasks.
• Only providing the AI tools without intentionally developing AI talent is a missed opportunity. Having AI innovation become part of company IP and SOP, where people share best use cases and document them in a central knowledge base, is valuable so that everyone isn't just constantly reinventing the wheel. Sharing knowledge benefits everyone and strengthens the organization as a whole.
• Sometimes, the most important leadership qualities are judgment, courage, and knowing when to listen. What happens when reality no longer reflects the plan, and the road ahead doesn’t look very much like what we imagined or prepared for? In his opening keynote, author and IT executive Jeff Ton called this an “uncharted moment.” There might be signs - namely, “quiet signals” that don’t necessarily show up in dashboards or official reports but indicate risk. They might come in the form of small discrepancies in team members’ perception of the timeline (a key date in one area may have slipped a little, but surely the time can be made up in another area) or their confidence when comparing their observations to what the plan outlined, subtle warnings before a plan truly falls apart. When that happens, no one person alone will have all the answers. The strategy here lies in gathering data from the people closest to the work, who are often best suited to read the terrain, and building a new map forward together. This is especially relevant as AI shakes up our industry.
• Humans remain the most vulnerable link in cybersecurity. AI generates new risk dimensions, and even the best next-generation firewalls and zero-trust architecture won’t help if a critical human is compromised. In her closing keynote, former intelligence officer Shawnee Delaney explained that we all carry risk. As such, we should always remain aware of potential manipulation. Instead of the “trust but verify” paradigm, follow the “verify, then trust” principle.

In the age of AI, adaptability is paramount. For me, two main questions remain after the Symposium. One, with AI taking over many of the tasks (i.e., coding, fixing bugs) that entry-level professionals in our field would’ve traditionally used to learn and develop, how can we now help them gain the experience needed to inform the kind of strategic thinking that is ever more important as the software engineering role transforms? Two, what new roles will emerge in the AI era, given how rapidly things are changing? As was discussed during the Symposium’s “Future-Proofing IT” panel, the demand for AI prompt engineers rapidly rose and then fell as AI models improved. AI champions are important today but are likely to be less so as AI adoption increases. Will software engineers shift to become more of technical product managers? Will we start to see AI agent managers, whose direct reports are AI agents, as one panelist speculated?