Ignite Tracks
Ignite Tracks are like mini-courses you can take during the conference, designed to help you develop specific skills and materials. Each Track has 3 sessions which are carefully designed to build on each other.
Track #1
Beyond the Basics: The Next Two Levels of AI Adoption
Casablanca AB
Your team has mastered AI as a tool — summarizing, analyzing, drafting. This session maps the next two stages of maturity: AI as a connected collaborator that acts across systems, and AI as a delegated operator that runs multi-step processes with human oversight. Executives leave with a shared vocabulary, a maturity framework, and 2-3 concrete pilot ideas for their own teams.
Led by Nolwenn Godard & Michelle Riconscente
-
AI as a smart assistant — you ask, it answers. Single-turn tasks: summarize this, analyze that spreadsheet, combine these docs.
-
AI as a connected collaborator. It pulls from multiple tools/data sources, holds context across a workflow, and offers judgment — not just synthesis but recommendations, scenario comparisons, first-draft strategy.
-
AI as an operator. Autonomous or semi-autonomous agents execute multi-step business processes end-to-end (research → draft → route for approval → act), with humans setting guardrails and reviewing checkpoints rather than doing each step.
As Margaret Atwood says, “A word after a word after a word is power.” In these sessions we’ll share a practitioner’s view of how to make the adventure of writing build upon itself to make something powerful.
Led by Delida Costin, Ashley McLain, & Michelle Newcome
-
Writing is power, but even more than that it’s a form of deep thinking. As E.M. Forster said in his 1927 book, “Aspects of the Novel” “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Writing has the power to not only convey ideas, it can also shape our reality and help us discover bigger truths about our why. In this session, you will explore how to find your own adventure by identifying why you write and where you want to be heard.
-
In HiPower we talk a lot about impact and platform, but the adventure can be deeper than that. Writing can be a fundamental activity to both support your platform and build impact, but it’s also a deeply felt human need to find self-expression. In this session you’ll learn about different altitudes of effort and editing as well as real-life examples and lessons learned from inception to publication and promotion.
“Writing is easy. All you have to do is sit down at the typewriter, cut open a vein, and bleed.”
― Red Smith, To Absent Friends
-
The putting together of word after word is solitary, but the creation of writing is best done in community. Flannery O’Conner, a famously reclusive writer, said “The isolated imagination is easily corrupted by theory, but the writer inside her (sic) community seldom has such a problem.” In this session, we’ll learn how to build community and manage collaboration to make sure your writing isn’t so lonely.
HiPower members arrive at social impact from different starting points — some are looking to add impact work alongside a full-time job, others are approaching their next chapter and want it to be defined by service. Some have already found their cause; others don't yet know where to start. This track will help you translate your desire for social impact into a concrete, personal plan of action — whatever stage of the journey you happen to be on.
Led by Mona Sabet & Vicki Johnson
-
You’ll identify your current stage as an Explorer, a Designer or an Accelerator. To jump-start our creative juices, we brainstorm a menu of causes spanning political/civic issues, health, community and economic needs, and other popular impact areas that might be of interest to our Explorers. We also share what work that our Designers and Accelerators are already doing and that they want to continue building upon. We’ll discuss the landscape of organizational vehicles that can be used to drive social impact. Attendees will take the first step in their impact journey and share where they want to take things next.
-
This is the design phase of the track where participants
Explorers spend the working time researching organizations aligned with the interest areas they narrowed down in Session 1 and using a decision framework to help them move forward.
Designers and Accelerators will work on a concept plan based on a theory of change model.
We’ll make time to briefly share what we’re working on so the room can learn from one another's approaches, ask questions, and make connections across cause areas.
-
We’ll start with a review of how your facilitators developed their impact journey, and invite others to share.
In small circles, participants briefly share challenges, roadblock, and questions about their plans, and the group offers advice, connections, or encouragement. A short whole-room harvest surfaces the most useful advice for everyone's benefit.
We’ll close with brainstorming ideas on how to keep the discussions going, including the possibility of profiling the community's social impact work on the HiPower website.