Events & Webinars

New York is a tech town. It’s been a tech town since way back. But it’s not like anywhere else. The confluence of industries that define the business life of New York make it a vibrant, jostling, unhinged place to work in tech, but that’s also what makes the tech that comes out of New York so creative, adaptive, and real.

Aboard co-founders Paul Ford and Rich Ziade met with @EveryInc founder Dan Shipper to talk about what makes New York such a unique place to work on tech, where AI is taking the city’s tech scene, and how it’s revolutionizing how people can create, build, and adapt faster, and more creatively, than ever. Every and Aboard are two tech teams leading New York through the AI transition, and this talk gets at why that’s so important, and where it’s all heading.

Everyone claims ROI. Very few have credible proof at scale. This roundtable cuts through the vaporware to answer the question keeping healthcare leaders up at night: when does AI actually move the needle on quality, cost, or access?

Healthcare AI is drowning in inflated promises. Boards want measurable impact. VCs are demanding proof. And frontline teams need solutions that don’t create new problems while solving old ones. This conversation brought together people who’ve been in the room when AI projects succeed – and when they spectacularly fail.

Panelists:
Chethan Sarabu, Director of Clinical Innovation, Health Tech Hub, Cornell Tech
Kamal Menghrajani, Former Assistant Director for Cancer Innovation & Public Health, The White House
Erynn Petersen, CEO & Co-founder, Emme
Moderated by Paul Ford, Co-founder, Aboard

When AI first emerged, many said it would be best at assembling, cleaning, and even creating code. Yet that promise has been slow to materialize, plagued by LLMs going rogue, deleting users’ data, and spending hours or days debugging their own work. As we head into 2026 the power of LLMs to assist in and even autonomously create code and even fully-built apps is finally being realized—sometimes!

Join Aboard’s co-founders Paul Ford and Rich Ziade, as well as Aboard’s VP of engineering, Kevin Barrett, as they review the state of vibe coding today, from the major platforms to spec-based tools, IDEs, and everything in between. They’ll take a look at the key players in the field and analyze what works best, what’s got work to be done, and where this is taking the world of software development.

Moderated by Paul Ford, this conversation brought together David Berkowitz and Michelle Harmon-Madsen to unpack the biggest lessons in advertising technology from 2025 and offer an unfiltered look at the trends shaping 2026 — from agentic workflows and vibe coding to creative automation, AI-native media planning, and the evolving measurement landscape.

David Berkowitz is the founder of High Caliber AI and AI Marketers Guild and the author of The Non-Obvious Guide to Using AI for Marketing (Ideapress, 2025). A longtime marketing strategist, he has led marketing and innovation for companies including Mediaocean, 360i, and MRY, and contributed 600+ columns to outlets like Advertising Age and MediaPost

Michelle Harmon-Madsen is a marketing executive and strategic advisor to Revere AI, which helps brands measure their presence in large language models, and Cache AI, an athlete valuation intelligence engine. Over a 25+ year career, she has held senior roles at AccuWeather, FreshDirect, MediaVest, and SponsorUnited, and led branded partnerships for American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance.

The LIFE New York Committee hosted a discussion featuring Lebanese Tech Founders sharing their journeys and lessons on building and scaling successful ventures. The conversation covered early traction, achieving product market fit, fundraising, hiring and scaling strategies. Sponsored by OnRamp Academy a collaboration between LIFE, Speedlane and Forward MENA.

Moderator: Osman Ghandour, Founder, Soal Labs
Panelists: Elizabeth Nammour: Co-Founder & CEO, Teleskope; Rabih Ramadi: Co-Founder & CEO, Avantos.ai; Richard Ziade: CEO, Aboard

Join Aboard founders Paul Ford and Rich Ziade to see what to expect from AI in the coming year—and how your business can stay ahead.

We work with AI every day in our business, and want to share everything we’ve learned with leaders to help you be more successful. Ford and Ziade will look at the next four quarters of AI platform updates, tool improvements, business strategy shifts, how AI may impact hiring (and firing), and more.

AI can be powerful—but it’s unpredictable. It babbles! It hallucinates! It makes up facts. But there are ways to tame it, and Aboard’s teams have worked to bring order, discipline, and reliability when using AI to build software. The Aboard platform allows anyone to build quality, professional-grade business apps in unbelievably short amounts of time. And we want to prove that to the world.

Technologist, journalist, and co-founder Paul Ford, along with seasoned NYC tech entrepreneur and co-founder Rich Ziade will discuss how Aboard approached building software using AI, how to get the coding agents on rails—and how the combination of AI’s coding acumen and the expertise of veteran programmers, combined, are the future of software.