BrainTrust Partners Is the Title Sponsor of Waco's First AI Conference

CEO, Tim Hayden, will share with Waco business owners how to look at current operations and identify use cases before they buy anything else. Tim will also walk through how many companies are going about AI that is secure, private, and controlled.

"You have intelligence sitting somewhere within the pipes of your business," Hayden said. "That's your brand. It is your brand DNA that can shape AI in your brand voice."

Hayden started BrainTrust in 2016 to help companies structure and make sense of their data for personalization and improved analytics.

"Today, ten years later in 2026, that's the one thing that most companies haven't fully done," he said. Data resolved, unified, structured and labeled has AI work stronger for your brand. Skip it, and Tim says it's going to cost you much more in budget and accuracy to use any AI.

He also thinks a lot of businesses are paying for the wrong AI.

"There's no reason why you have to look at ChatGPT or Claude to run everything," Hayden said. His point is that open-weight models can be trained on a company's own data, run privately, and cost a fraction of an enterprise subscription for AI models trained on everybody else's business.

Hayden takes the main stage at 9:50 a.m, with his talk, "Your Data, Your AI, and Your Future."

"I'm excited to join the event, hear other viewpoints, and meet folks who are on their AI journeys, actually experimenting and building," he said.

Bryan Eisenberg opens. Dr. Hope Koch closes.

Bryan Eisenberg starts the day at 8:20 a.m.

He helped coin the term conversion rate optimization thirty years ago, and he's a Wall Street Journal and New York Times bestselling author. His keynote is called "Before the Algorithm, There Was Your Story. That Hasn't Changed."

From his session description: "People don't buy rates. They buy stories they can see themselves in."

Dr. Hope Koch closes the day at 4:05 p.m.

She holds the Godfrey Sullivan Endowed Chair of Information Systems and Business Analytics at Baylor University's Hankamer School of Business. The Lieutenant Governor of Texas appointed her to the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council this year.

Her closing session is called HOPE, for Human Opportunity and a Period of Exponential Change. She shows people with no technical background how to turn what they already know about their own business into working tools.

23 speakers, four tracks, bring a laptop

Between the two keynotes the summit runs a main stage plus four concurrent tracks: Build, Get Found, Sound Like You, and AI Safety.

A few of the sessions:

• Joseph Scaramucci, Director of Law Enforcement Training and Operations at Skull Games Solutions: "AI, Crime & Community: What You Need to Know."
• Dariia Isyk of AdmitAI: "Beating Admission Inflation: How We Built an AI Mentor for Every Student."
• Dr. Mito Diaz-Espinoza, President and CEO of the Cen-Tex Hispanic Chamber of Commerce: "From the Pen to the Prompt: Making AI Work for You."
• Sara Lohse of Branded Media: "Unpromptable: Using Your Story to Stand Out and Connect."
• Russ Henneberry of theCLICK.ai: "Build Your AI Marketing Operating System."
• Tommy Landry, President of Return On Now: "The Signals That Shape What AI Says About You."
• Chrissy McDannell of The AI Implementation Club: "Build an AI Assistant." You build one during the hour.
• Jackye Clayton, founder of PeoplePuzzles: "From Pizza Prompt to Practical AI."
• Kennisha Thornton of Create & Blossom: "The Human Story in an AI World."
• Mike Hamilton, founder of Rogue Media Network and the summit's co-organizer: "None of this works! Oh...Wait..."

Several sessions are hands-on workshops. Bring a laptop and you go home with something that runs.

Why the name has a multiplication sign in it

"Most people think AI is the great equalizer," said Fernando Labastida, founder of the Viral Genius Institute and co-organizer of the summit. "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."

"Dr. Koch is telling people that AI plus humans is better than AI alone, and two humans alone," Labastida said. "That's the whole summit in one sentence."

Event details: YOU × AI Summit - Saturday, September 12, 2026 - 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. CT - Performing Arts & Community Center, 924 Austin Avenue, Suite 150, Waco, TX 76701. Tickets are $99. Teams of 10 or more pay $69 a seat through September 10. Session recordings are a $99 add-on. Register at youxai.live.

About BrainTrust Partners: BrainTrust Partners helps brands grow revenue with first-party data, machine learning and applied artificial intelligence. Tim Hayden founded the firm in Austin in 2016. He wrote "The Mobile Commerce Revolution" (Pearson, 2014) and has led transformation work with Ford Motor Company, Dell Technologies, Bacardi USA, McDonald's, Shell Oil, Hilton Worldwide and Walmart. More at braintrustpartners.ai.

About the YOU × AI Summit: Waco's first AI conference, produced by the Viral Genius Institute (Austin) and Rogue Media Network (Waco), presented by BrainTrust Partners. Its premise: the most powerful thing you can bring to the age of artificial intelligence is the full force of being human.

Media contact: Fernando Labastida - Email Contact - +1 512-945-9273