About the keynote

See how organizations can combine AI with opportunity analysis, business model design, customer discovery, customer validation, and rapid experimentation to make smarter product decisions and reduce innovation risk

AI can generate ideas in seconds, but it cannot tell you which ones are actually worth building.

The organizations that will outperform in the AI era will not simply create more products faster. They will make better product decisions by combining customer evidence, rapid experimentation, and AI-powered insight.

In this keynote, Dr. James V. Green, Managing Director of Learning and Development at the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech), explores how today’s innovators reduce uncertainty before making major investments. Drawing on decades of work in evidence-based innovation and his experience leading student ventures and university innovation teams at Mtech, he demonstrates how organizations can combine AI with opportunity analysis, business model design, customer discovery, customer validation, and rapid experimentation to make smarter product decisions and reduce innovation risk.

Rather than replacing critical thinking, AI can accelerate discovery by helping teams generate hypotheses, uncover customer insights, design better experiments, and make more informed product decisions. Dr. Green also shares where AI falls short, the mistakes organizations commonly make, and the lessons that have reshaped his own approach to innovation.

Attendees will leave with a practical framework for using AI to strengthen, not replace, human judgment, enabling them to build products with greater confidence, speed, and evidence.

What you will take away

• A practical framework for reducing product uncertainty by combining opportunity analysis, customer discovery, validation, business model design, and rapid experimentation.
• A clearer understanding of where AI adds real value—generating hypotheses, surfacing customer insight, and designing better experiments—and where human judgment still matters most.
• A better way to make product investment decisions using evidence to determine what to build, what to test, what to change, and what to stop before committing significant time and resources.

About Dr. James V. Green

Dr. James V. Green is a Clinical Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation at the University of Maryland, Managing Director of Learning and Development at the Maryland Technology Enterprise Institute (Mtech), and Director of the University’s Master’s in Product Management. Over the past two decades, he has built nationally recognized programs in product management, entrepreneurship, and innovation that serve thousands of learners on campus each year and more than one million learners worldwide through Coursera and edX. Dr. Green has taught and mentored entrepreneurs who have launched more than 100 startups, collectively raising over $1 billion in venture capital and achieving more than $10 billion in combined valuations, including Squarespace, FiscalNote, and beehiiv. His research and teaching focus on helping organizations build better products through customer discovery, experimentation, evidence-based decision-making, and the strategic use of AI to accelerate innovation.