Moving beyond the hype towards real AI outcomes.
Limited availability. Reserve your seat below!
Event Details
8th Light welcomes you to an elevated private dining experience at Henrietta located inside the Chicago JW Marriott on 151 W. Adams. Henrietta is a Tuscan-inspired, contemporary restaurant with Italian roots and a European soul, located on the 2nd floor of the hotel.
- Recommended arrival — 6:15p
- Opening remarks — 6:45p
- Dinner, drinks and discussion — 7:15p
- Event conclusion — 9:15p
This is a small-group, focused conversation on what we've all learned so far on the journey with agentic AI. We will discuss the hard lessons learned, the value that's been unlocked, and what comes next.
Most organizations aren’t short on AI ideas, that's for sure. But many organizations fall short on AI that holds up in production, under load, inside the workflows that matter. That's what we will discuss at this private dinner with your fellow executive peers.
Meet Your Hosts
Jason Cummings Jason Cummings is the CEO of Empowerment Strategies, an AI and Strategy Consulting firm that helps leadership teams align emerging technology with their core business missions. Guided by a vision of putting technology to work for enterprises, he focuses on guiding leaders through technology decisions to ensure investments deliver clear, measurable outcomes.
Drawing on over 15 years of experience across the manufacturing, higher education, and financial services sectors, Jason advises leaders on innovation and transformation by establishing trusted, collaborative partnerships. In his previous roles across Big Tech and Big Four consulting, he led the AI and cloud strategy, advocating for adoption across universities, K-12, and municipal agencies. He values the expertise that already exists within organizations and enjoys working alongside leaders to translate emerging concepts into practical, applicable, value-driving use cases.
As an Executive Advisor, Jason partners closely with executives to facilitate stakeholder clarity, define shared success metrics, and translate high-level technology strategy into structured, actionable paths forward.
Travis Frisinger serves as Head of Agentic AI at 8th Light, where he leads engineering and strategy for building production-grade AI systems. He focuses on designing adaptive architectures that help organizations integrate AI into real-world workflows, improving decision-making, reliability, and operational clarity.
Travis brings a deep background in distributed systems and large-scale software delivery, with experience across logistics, telecommunications, and data-intensive platforms. His work spans LLMOps, context-aware retrieval, and agentic workflow design, with a strong emphasis on moving teams beyond experimentation toward secure, maintainable systems in production.
At 8th Light, Travis partners closely with engineers, product leaders, and executives to align technical direction with business priorities. He is known for developing frameworks and platforms that reduce complexity, improve developer effectiveness, and bring coherence to fast-evolving systems.
Travis also contributes to 8th Light’s thought leadership around AI adoption, writing and speaking on topics such as context engineering, the AI Decision Loop, and human–AI collaboration. His work focuses on making AI systems understandable, observable, and usable in real production environments.