Leaders in the Loop -- Episode 10 -- ILA 2026 AI & Leadership Virtual Summit Preview | Leading With AI Across Sectors

Dan and Gaurav are joined by Dr. Mary Tabata and Dr. Kevin Bottomley to preview the International Leadership Association’s 2026 AI & Leadership Virtual Summit, The Integration Frontier: Leading With AI Across Sectors. The summit takes place live on May 6–7, 2026, with on-demand access available afterward.

Mary Tabata serves as associate faculty at American Public University System and Eastern University. Kevin Bottomley is an assistant professor of Global Leadership at Indiana Tech. In this conversation, they discuss how the summit came together, why cross-sector dialogue matters right now, and what leaders can expect from this year’s program.

Episode Overview

This episode introduces the purpose and structure of the ILA 2026 AI & Leadership Virtual Summit and explains why its cross-sector focus matters. The conversation highlights how AI is reshaping leadership practice in education, business, healthcare, and organizational development, while also raising questions about ethics, governance, literacy, and implementation. The summit is designed as a space for leaders, educators, researchers, and practitioners to explore those questions together. The official event page describes the summit as ILA’s second virtual AI summit and emphasizes themes such as ethical and responsible AI, AI literacy, innovation, productivity, leadership development, and reskilling.

Event details and registration

Topics Covered

• Preview of the ILA 2026 AI & Leadership Virtual Summit
• The summit theme: The Integration Frontier: Leading With AI Across Sectors
• The growth of the International Leadership Association’s AI and Emerging Technologies member community
• Early leadership and teaching use cases for ChatGPT and Claude
• Hallucinations, verification, and responsible use
• AI literacy and implementation frameworks
• Leadership challenges in business, education, and healthcare
• Human-centered leadership in AI-enabled systems

Key Takeaways

• The ILA 2026 AI & Leadership Virtual Summit is designed to connect leaders across sectors around shared AI adoption challenges.
• AI implementation is not only technical; it also requires leadership in governance, culture, and change.
• Early experiences with generative AI revealed both practical value and clear limitations, especially around fabricated references and unreliable links.
• AI literacy needs to be developed with role, context, and sector in mind.
• Cross-sector dialogue can help leaders identify common patterns in AI adoption.
• Human judgment remains essential in high-stakes environments such as education and healthcare.
• The summit emphasizes ethical, inclusive, responsible, and impactful AI leadership.

Examples & References Discussed

Mary and Kevin describe their early experiments with generative AI in professional and academic settings. Those experiences included testing classroom assignments, reviewing AI-generated papers, and encountering hallucinated citations and broken links. These examples helped shape their approach to responsible AI use and to the kinds of summit sessions they believe leaders need now.

The episode also traces the development of the AI and Emerging Technologies member community within the International Leadership Association. That work grew out of earlier conference conversations and collaborations around AI, ethics, education, and leadership.

The summit program brings together voices from multiple sectors and includes sessions focused on leadership development, implementation, governance, AI literacy, and organizational practice. The event page also lists Ganna Pogrebna of Queen’s University Belfast as the closing keynote speaker.

Mary highlights Pogrebna’s work at Queen’s University Belfast and the broader mix of speakers contributing to the summit. The conversation makes clear that one of the event’s central goals is to help attendees think more clearly about how leadership and AI intersect in real organizational settings.

Resources & Mentions

• ILA 2026 AI & Leadership Virtual Summit
• International Leadership Association
• ChatGPT
• Claude
• Chris Wildermuth
• Ganna Pogrebna
• Queen’s University Belfast

Stay curious. Stay human.