Something shifted at VLF2026.
The 2026 WLDA Visionary Leaders Forum (VLF), held April 8–10 at L’Auberge Del Mar in Del Mar, California, brought together senior executives, data and AI leaders, and enterprise decision-makers for three days of honest, unfiltered dialogue. But this wasn’t another AI conference. There were no vendor pitches. No surface-level trend reports.
It was a room full of leaders who are actually doing the work, and who came ready to have the conversations that don’t always happen back at headquarters.
DAY 1 · WEDNESDAY, APRIL 8 | Context, Trust & Narrative Power
The Forum opened with “The Leadership Inflection Point,” featuring Asha Saxena and Dara Meath, SVP and CTO of Build-A-Bear Workshop. The message was direct: AI transformation is no longer just a technology initiative. It’s a leadership challenge. The question isn’t whether to adopt AI. It’s whether your organization is truly ready to lead with it.
Rashida Jones, CEO of Piers Morgan Uncensored and former President of MSNBC, brought a different kind of urgency to the room with “Leadership in the Era of Synthetic Reality.” In a world where synthetic content can reshape perception in real time, trust and discernment aren’t soft skills. They’re executive responsibilities.
The day wrapped with a welcome reception, executive dinner, and the kind of late-evening lounge conversations that set the tone for everything that followed.
Featured Sessions
DAY 2 · THURSDAY, APRIL 9 | The AI-Native Enterprise
Day 2 went deep on the enterprise reality of AI. And it didn’t pull punches.
Danielle Crop of WNS, a Capgemini Company, opened with “The Rise of Agentic Enterprises,” laying out a clear-eyed view: the rules of software no longer apply when AI agents are executing real work inside your business. The next three years won’t just bring new tools. They’ll demand a new infrastructure mindset entirely.
The session that generated the most conversation was the CEO/CIO Executive Panel, “Are We Truly AI-Ready?” featuring Kelly Huang of Elucid, Ariane Schiereck of Hollister Incorporated, and Tameika Hollis of The Aerospace Corporation, moderated by Asha Saxena. Panelists didn’t talk about AI capabilities. They talked about the harder stuff: who owns decisions when AI acts, what governance looks like when it’s built into the architecture, and which parts of the business need to evolve first.
The takeaway that stayed with the room: being AI-ready isn’t about having the right tools. It’s about having the right leadership structures in place before the stakes get too high.
Dara Meath followed with a grounded look at scaling AI adoption across the enterprise, not just among technical teams, but organization-wide. And Sarah Deane of MEvolution led the Human Excellence Workshop, a timely reminder that the AI-native enterprise still runs on people. Adaptability, resilience, and the ability to lead through ambiguity aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re what makes transformation stick.
The day also included a private networking lunch, a Build-A-Bear Egg Hunt, the White Horizon Executive Dinner, and an evening at L’Auberge’s Living Room Lounge. All of it reinforced what makes WLDA different: the relationships built here are as valuable as the sessions.
Featured Sessions
DAY 3 · FRIDAY, APRIL 10 | From Insight to Direction
The final day was about moving from “we know what’s coming” to “here’s what we’re going to do about it.”
Jennifer Colapietro of PwC led “Designing 2030 Now,” pushing leaders to think past the next quarter and toward the enterprise architecture the decade ahead will actually require. Charlene Li of Quantum Networks Group followed with “Leading Through AI Disruption,” reframing disruption not as something to survive, but as the environment leaders must now learn to operate in permanently.
The Forum closed with the Visioning & Strategic Foresight Lab: each leader working through their own 12-month AI mandate. Not as a workshop exercise, but as a real operating agenda to take back to their organizations.
Featured Sessions
The Community Made It
VLF2026 attendees didn’t just leave with insights. They left with gift bags hand-curated by the Forum’s sponsors: Build-A-Bear Workshop, ThoughtSpot, L’Oréal, WNS, PwC, Estée Lauder, and arachne. Every detail was intentional, because that’s how this community shows up for each other.
But the real value was in the exchange. In the hallway conversations, the dinner table debates, and the moments where leaders from different industries compared notes on what’s actually working, and what isn’t. The questions that don’t get asked in a board meeting? They got asked here.
That’s what WLDA is built for.
The Bottom Line
Every executive at VLF 2026 already knew that AI is moving fast. That wasn’t the revelation.
The sharper insight was this: the organizations that will lead the next phase of AI aren’t necessarily the ones with the most advanced tools. They’re the ones building the clearest structures for accountability, governance, and human capability, and making those decisions now, before the pressure to act becomes too loud to think clearly.
AI doesn’t replace leadership. It raises the bar for it.
