CTO Panel - 2026

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6:00 - 9 PM : All Attendees (members and non-members)

Chief Technology Officers - What's Changed in the Last 2-3 Years

Since 2010, we've run high value CTO panels on the emerging practices and technologies having transformative and disruptive impacts. Nothing we've covered compares to the last two to three years. How software gets built has been reworked end to end: the skills teams need, how work is divided between product, design, and engineering, how much gets produced, and where it piles up. And it didn't stay in engineering. People across the company are now building their own applications, and every technology leader is being asked to set direction for tools they didn't choose and work they don't see. Our panelists will talk candidly about both, including what they got wrong. We'll cover:

How We Build Software Has Changed

Product, design, and engineering now overlap far more. That changes how teams coordinate and where the friction shows up.

New knowledge and skills have emerged across product, engineering, and QA. Every leader is working out what to hire for, how to assess it before someone starts, and how to build those skills in the team they already have.

Productivity is up and the volume of work produced has grown. QA hasn't scaled the same way, since not everything can be automated, so for anything that still needs manual testing that's where the work now piles up.

Managing AI Across the Organization

People outside engineering are building applications and automating their own workflows, and they don't think of it as building software. The upside is real; so is the shadow IT that follows, with security vulnerabilities, fragmented data, duplicated systems, and things nobody owns. The question is what guardrails preserve the speed.

The pace of change has made evaluating everything personally unrealistic. Building an organization that experiments with discipline, tells durable change from hype, and is willing to say no is now the actual skill.

Token consumption has become a real line item across dev tooling and product, and most organizations have poor visibility into what they're spending and what they're getting for it.

This will be a fantastic conversation with many practical takeaways.

SPEAKERS:

ASHISH GUPTA | Chief Technology Officer | PopID

Ashish is the CTO of PopID, a biometric technology company using palm and face recognition to power payments and loyalty programs for retailers and enterprises. He leads PopID's technology strategy, from product architecture to scaling infrastructure that handles biometric authentication securely and reliably at high volume. Earlier in his career, Ashish built consumer-facing applications and worked on the marketing strategies that drove their adoption. For the past few years, he has focused on making advanced authentication technology practical, secure, and easy to adopt.

MIKA SARYAN | Chief Technology Officer | Formic Technologies

Mika Saryan is the Chief Technology Officer at Formic Technologies, a technology leader with deep expertise in robotics, manufacturing, IoT, and award-winning consumer products. He has built and led global engineering teams at Formic, Coco, and Happiest Baby, bringing complex hardware and software products from concept to scalable real-world deployment.

TONY KARRER | Founder & CEO | TechEmpower

Tony is the Founder and CEO of TechEmpower, a 20-person software and AI development services company. Tony has worked as a fractional CTO at over 40 different companies, including as the original CTO at eHarmony, helping them get to a $110M financing in their fourth year. Tony has worked on AI solutions for more than two decades across a wide variety of industries and is currently the fractional CTO of AI companies in healthcare, legal, and insurance. Tony is also cofounder of the LA CTO Forum, the largest CTO professional organization in the US.

Upon Arrival:

• Locate our reserved room: DINING ROOM.
• Check-in and grab your name tag.
• Grab food, learn from experts, and connect with peers.

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