About 300 people attended the 2026 Innovate Tech Conference at UCLA on Friday to learn about how entrepreneurs can use autonomous artificial intelligence.
The conference featured speakers with experience using agentic AI, including Mihir Vaidya, the chief strategy officer of Electronic Arts, and Gene Alston, an Ancestry.com board member. Agentic AI is an autonomous system that can accomplish goals with minimal supervision, according to IBM.
The UCLA Anderson School of Management’s Easton Technology Management Center and Technology Business Association hosted the event.
“It’s for the young entrepreneurs, or the ones who basically have the entrepreneurial mindset,” said Raman Vedula, a student coordinator. “The whole thing is to make sure to build the confidence and insert positive energy among students.”
The event concluded with an Innovator Spotlight conversation between two alumni Adam Cheyer, a co-founder of Siri, and moderator Prema Sampath, the former director of product management for Meta. The conference ended in a luncheon, during which students at the School of Management, alumni and other attendees had the chance to network with industry leaders.
Planning for the conference began in November, said Vedula, a graduate student in business administration.
Vedula, who is an Easton Technology fellow at the School of Management, added that Agentic AI is becoming an increasingly important part of the business world – a reason why he chose it as the conference’s theme.
“We are moving from generative AI models that started off in early 2020 to Agentic AI, because we are automating everything,” he said. “Humans can focus more on productivity and creativity.”
Vedula said he selected speakers from industries that AI agents play a key role in. He added that he hopes attendees implement ideas presented at the conference to their careers.
Cephas Sund, a UCLA alumnus, said the Innovate Conference encouraged him to implement vibe coding – in which developers rely on AI to generate code for a project – to grow his businesses.
The conference, Sund said, had a mix of speakers that focused both on AI as a concept as well as its practical applications in business.
“This conference had a really good mix of important aspects for future technology, because some conferences just dwell very much on the high-level type of thought leadership and then don’t really get into the more nitty-gritty applications and usage,” Sun said. “This was a really good balance.”
Alfie Twum-Ampofo, a graduate student in business administration, said he found a talk on how to ask AI better questions by Yvonne Wassenaar – the former CEO of Puppet – useful.
FanNa Fan, a graduate student in business administration, said her biggest takeaway is that AI is going to become more integrated into people’s jobs – and therefore, it is important to learn how to use it.
Learning to use AI through conferences like these, Twum-Ampofo added, has the potential to help people like him – who do not have any background in technology – break into the field.
“I don’t have any tech background, I don’t create apps, I don’t do any coding,” he said. “I know that you can use AI to help you do that, I think it is a big game changer for everyday people.”
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