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Most conferences put their biggest name at the start. The C3 Tech Summit puts Sol Rashidi at the end, from 4:30 to 5:30 PM, in a Q&A format. The placement is intentional, and it has to do with what you'll be ready to hear after a full day of breakouts and peer conversations, plus time on the supplier floor.
By 4:30 PM on November 10, you'll have sat with cybersecurity peers, worked through a customer experience challenge, watched the FBI-led threat briefing, and listened to Dr. Paul Isely's economic forecast. Your questions about AI will be sharper than they were over breakfast. That's exactly when Sol's hour starts.
Who is Sol Rashidi?
Sol Rashidi became the world's first Chief AI Officer for enterprise in 2016. She helped define what the role looks like at scale, long before "AI strategy" became a board-deck staple.
Her résumé reads like a tour of how AI actually gets deployed in the Fortune 500: top data and analytics roles at Estée Lauder, Merck, Sony Music, and Royal Caribbean, plus a senior partner role leading Digital and Innovation at Ernst & Young. She also played a part in launching IBM's Watson back in 2011, one of the earliest commercial AI projects to reach enterprise scale.
By her own count, she's led over 200 AI deployments across Fortune 500 companies, deployed AI at scale in 70-plus countries, and generated over $1 billion in enterprise value along the way. She holds 10 patents in data and AI. Forbes recognized her as an "AI Maverick and Visionary of the 21st Century," and her name sits on the Top 100 AI Thought Leaders list. She wrote the bestselling Your AI Survival Guide for executives navigating the messy reality of AI at work, and today she runs Executive AI while serving as Chief Strategy Officer for Cybersecurity at Cyera.
If you want the public-facing version, her site lives at solrashidi.com.
What makes her keynote different at the C3 Tech Summit?
A lot of AI keynotes you've sat through fall into one of two buckets: vendor-adjacent hype, or academic theory that doesn't survive contact with your IT budget. Sol's work sits somewhere else. She has done the actual deployments and cleaned up the failed ones.
C3 framed her hour around what's working in enterprise AI right now and what looks credible for the next 18 months. The C3 standard on content over sales pitch is non-negotiable, and Sol's reputation aligns with that. Expect an honest read from someone who's deployed AI across eight industries and watched what survives the first year and a half in production.
Why a fireside chat format for the close?
The Sol Rashidi session runs as a fireside chat rather than a traditional lecture. That choice is intentional. By 4:30 PM, most senior leaders are ready for the kind of session that answers the question that's been sitting in the back of their heads all day. This format makes room for exactly that.
Bring the question. The room is small enough that good ones get heard, and Sol is direct enough to actually answer them. If you've been carrying a specific concern about AI governance, talent strategy, vendor selection, or executive expectations, this is the moment to put it on the table.
What questions actually land in a session like this?
A few that have surfaced in similar rooms:
- "How do you build an AI roadmap when leadership wants results in two quarters and your data isn't ready?"
- "Where is the right reporting line for an AI function? CIO? CDO? Standalone?"
- "How do we evaluate AI vendor claims when the demo environment isn't representative of our data?"
- "Where have you seen AI deployments quietly fail, and what was the missing signal you wish you'd caught?"
- "What should a board be asking that they aren't asking yet?"
While these exact questions may not come up on November 10, the format invites them. The audience in the room shapes the hour and the questions C3 Technology Advisor Matthew Toth asks.
Year 9 context: how the closing keynote fits the bigger shift
For the ninth annual C3 Tech Summit, AI sits at the center of the keynote programming because boards and CEOs are asking every director-level leader about it. Sol Rashidi closes the day because she has the operating background to answer those questions without spin. The four talk tracks across Customer Experience, Cybersecurity, IT, and Executive Leadership now live in a dedicated event app, with AI threaded through the day before Sol's hour pulls the conversation together.
Other speakers on the agenda include Robert J. Darling, returning by popular demand with his sought-after account of leadership inside the White House bunker on September 11, 2001. Dr. Paul Isely enters his third year of economic forecasting at the event. Matthew Toth opens the day with the framing that anchors the agenda. C3 is still finalizing the full agenda in the weeks ahead, with additional sessions to come as the date approaches.
The closing reception runs from 5:30 to 6:30 PM, which gives you a full hour to process what you heard with the peers who heard it alongside you.
Reserve your spot before the room fills
Registration for the 2026 C3 Tech Summit is open at c3techadvisors.com/summit. The event is free to attend, contingent on approval by the C3 team.
If you've been on the fence, picture the version of yourself walking out of that closing keynote with an answer to the question you've been sitting on for a quarter. That's worth a day on the calendar.
