BrainTrust Partners has stepped up as the founding title sponsor of the YOU × AI Summit, Waco's first artificial intelligence conference, scheduled for Saturday, September 12, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Performing Arts & Community Center in downtown Waco. The event aims to equip local business owners with practical AI strategies, highlighting the critical role of proprietary data in leveraging AI effectively.
Tim Hayden, CEO of BrainTrust Partners, will deliver a keynote titled "Your Data, Your AI, and Your Future" at 9:50 a.m. He plans to guide Waco entrepreneurs on how to evaluate their current operations and identify use cases before investing in new technology. Hayden emphasizes that many companies have untapped intelligence within their own systems, referring to it as "brand DNA" that can shape AI to reflect a company's unique voice.
Hayden founded BrainTrust in 2016 to help businesses organize and interpret their data for improved personalization and analytics. A decade later, he notes that most companies still haven't fully unified, structured, and labeled their data, which he argues is essential for AI to work effectively. Skipping this foundational step, he warns, will lead to higher costs and reduced accuracy when adopting AI solutions.
He also challenges the prevailing notion that businesses must rely on generic AI models like ChatGPT or Claude for all tasks. "There's no reason why you have to look at ChatGPT or Claude to run everything," Hayden said. He advocates for open-weight models that can be trained on a company's own data, run privately, and cost significantly less than enterprise subscriptions for models trained on other businesses' information.
The summit will open with a keynote by Bryan Eisenberg at 8:20 a.m. Eisenberg, a pioneer in conversion rate optimization and a bestselling author, will discuss the enduring power of storytelling in his session "Before the Algorithm, There Was Your Story. That Hasn't Changed." He contends that "people don't buy rates. They buy stories they can see themselves in."
Closing the day at 4:05 p.m., Dr. Hope Koch, who holds the Godfrey Sullivan Endowed Chair at Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business and serves on the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council, will present "HOPE: Human Opportunity and a Period of Exponential Change." Her session aims to help non-technical attendees turn their existing business knowledge into practical AI tools.
Between these keynotes, the summit will feature 23 speakers across four concurrent tracks: Build, Get Found, Sound Like You, and AI Safety. Sessions include hands-on workshops where participants can build an AI assistant or develop an AI marketing system. Notable speakers include Joseph Scaramucci on AI and crime, Dariia Isyk on AI in education, and Russ Henneberry on AI marketing.
The conference's name, YOU × AI, reflects its core philosophy that AI is a multiplier, not an equalizer. "Most people think AI is the great equalizer," said Fernando Labastida, co-organizer and founder of the Viral Genius Institute. "It's a multiplier, and multipliers widen gaps. A business with nothing to say brings a 1, and AI takes it to 2. The competitor with a real point of view brings a 10, and the same AI takes them to 20. Same tools. Bigger gap."
Tickets are $99, with a discounted rate of $69 per person for teams of 10 or more until September 10. Session recordings can be purchased for an additional $99. Registration is available at youxai.live.
