Prepare to laugh and learn as a decade of Wynn Solutions research reveals what makes owners and managers of top-performing businesses so effective—and it’s not what you’d expect! If you enter this keynote session expecting to learn all about best practices and superior strategy, you’d better read the title again. Standout success in a challenging economy often comes from personal advantage, whether it’s perceived value, personality, leadership style, communication skills, abundant resources, or access to privileged information. This entertaining session takes a realistic look at the influence you’ll need to make sure your knowledge and hard work deliver the results you want.

Intelligent speech and language systems are here. It’s taken years for disparate technologies—speech recognition, synthesis, biometrics, language understanding, artificial intelligence—to develop along their separate evolutionary paths. Now the basic technologies are at your disposal, and you are empowered to succeed. But it takes more than vision and a few software tools to exploit the new voice interface. In this media-rich multimodal presentation, Bruce Balentine explores design issues for present and future products. How will our lives be changed by speech and voice? What are the emerging paradigms for natural language understanding, super-natural language, and small-footprint micro-voice appliances? What can we expect in the next 5 years? And what should you consider doing about it?

Computers are becoming smarter, faster, and more ubiquitous. How will humans and computers connect to achieve more than either can currently do by themselves? How will the roles of humans and computers change as computers evolve within the next 5 years. How will our society and culture change? What are the economic risks caused by automation moving faster than people’s ability to adapt to the change? What can you do to prepare for these dramatic changes?