NIGP Forum will start on August 25th, which is a breath away, and today I'd like to make the case for both of my speaking sessions during Forum. So first I have a demo hall session, which means it's in the Expo on Monday, august 26th, at 12.30, and I'm calling this session Elevation Remodeling Gen AI as a Staff Empowerment Platform, and if that's not the exact title on the board, it'll be the Civic Initiatives slot at 1230. So what am I talking about there? Well, it's possible that you heard me speak about Gen AI Over the last year and a half. I had a speech on Tool in the Toolkit, which was introducing people to Gen AI and making the case for individuals to build their personal skill sets.

In this speech I'm going to do two things. I'm going to talk about what I think has changed since I was giving that speech and also demo the platform that we've been building out for our internal use and that we intend to begin rolling out to interested clients For as much attention as we spend on the technology side of this building out the practical use cases, the training, the staff skill up, understanding, the handoffs that can happen between staff and these tools, almost as a collaborative agent, and then staff confidence in use of the tools is as or more important in the use of this technology. I'll bring up a compelling Harvard Business Review article on designing for dialogue, which has a lot of sympathetic thoughts to this hypothesis. I'll show two or three examples of people who I think are acting in the way that I'm describing as where we should go, and then I'm going to demo the new tools that we've been building out on procurementagentai, which is still behind wraps but is intended to directly engage and train staff on the use of these tools, with the focus not on hiding them behind some of our standard platforms, but rather reveal the beams and girders and focus on teaching staff how to actually build and use the tools. So I'm excited about it. It's going to be a rapid fire half hour technology. God's willing, we will have live demos. We'll have backup videos as well, and I will record that session and talk about it more the week after forum, because I think it's very important and I'm very proud of what we put together.

So, like I said, that is on Monday, august 26th, at 1230. And then Wednesday, august 28th, at 1230. And then Wednesday, august 28th, at 145. I'll be speaking on leveraging LinkedIn for excellence in public procurements with Jennifer Salintik, john Flynn, stephen Nelson and Alina Croy. It's a revisit and an update from the presentation we gave last year, which was very highly rated and lots of great feedback and lots of people again learning how to use tools. So both why do social media at all, why LinkedIn is the preferred choice for the national commercially available programs, how to use it successfully, what use even means, and what's updated and new for 2024, because a lot changed in the last year or so. So it's important to make sure people know what the tools are. And again, that is Wednesday at 1 45 pm in the breakout session. So, in addition to those two speeches, of course, we'll be at the socials, we will be in the expo hall in booth 1335 and we'll have ice cream. So plan to find us or send me a note and we will find some time.