TechEx North America will take place on May 18–19, 2026, at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, bringing together seven co-located enterprise technology events under one roof to tackle the real questions enterprise leaders are asking right now.

This leading enterprise technology showcase will help CIOs, CTOs, IT Directors, enterprise architects, and IT leaders understand what’s changing, what matters and what to prioritise within the technology ecosystem.

TechEx North America Conference Agenda

TechEx North America will deliver a comprehensive agenda, with two days of technical discussion and industry collaboration across AI and Big Data, Cyber Security and Cloud, IoT, Digital Transformation, Intelligent Automation, Edge Computing, and Data Center.

View the agenda-at-a-glance, featuring all of the co-located stages from across TechEx:

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Commenting on the agenda, Michael Hughes, Head of Conference at TechEx Events, said:

“This year’s TechEx North America agenda reflects the conversations enterprise leaders urgently need to have. I am particularly excited about our new Physical AI track, which addresses the pivotal moment where AI moves beyond models and dashboards into operational environments”

The new Physical AI track explores how AI integrates with robotics, edge devices, digital twins, industrial systems, and autonomous infrastructure. As AI moves beyond models and dashboards into operational environments, the challenge shifts from experimentation to orchestration.

Industry Leading Speakers

The conference program features C-suite and senior executives sharing proven approaches to delivering measurable impact in a digital-first world.

Secure your place today & hear from:

• Franziska Bell, Chief Data, AI and Analytics Officer, Ford Motor Company
• Kevin Shin, CISO, Samsung
• Tina Tsou, Director of Global Tech Operations, TikTok
• Mohit Goenka, Director of Engineering, Yahoo
• Ricardo Lafosse, CISO, The Kraft Heinz Company
• Peter Zhou, Director of AI & Data Science, Walgreens
• Anthony Puleo, Director, Data Science & AI, AstraZeneca
• Denny Scheider, Head of Global Strategy, Cure
• Naresh Dulam, Senior VP of Software Engineering, JP Morgan
• Sean Farney, Vice President, Data Center Strategy, JLL
• Andy Dickey, Head of Americas & Asia – Pacific – HP Construction Services, BP
• Abraham Jun Zou, Vice President & Sr. Principal Engineer, Mastercard
• Claire Inan, P.E, Water Program Manager, Meta
• Will Hankla CSCP, Vice President of Transformation, The Hershey Company
• Tony Ambrozie, Chief Digital & Technology Officer, CVS Health
• Kevin Clark, VP, Head of Industrial Strategy, Siemens
• Shilen Jhaveri, Program Manager – AI & Infrastructure, Google

Technology Providers and Infrastructure Solutions on the Expo Floor

Alongside the conference program, the exhibition floor will feature 250+ companies developing technologies used across the enterprise technology spectrum.

Participating organizations include IBM, HP, Deloitte, SS&C Blue Prism, Quality Professionals, Lenovo, SAP, Mindsdb, Rhino Federated Computing, Red Hat and more.

New for 2026: Meetup Program and Learning Hub

The 2026 event will introduce additional networking and learning formats alongside the core conference program.

The Meetup Program will offer structured peer-to-peer discussions focused on topics including AI, IoT, Cybersecurity, Data Center, Digital Transformation, and more.

The Learning Hub will host expert-led workshops and masterclasses covering technical and operational topics relevant to technology professionals.

What makes this event different

• 7 co-located expos under one roof
• Enterprise-first content
• Strategic + technical tracks
• Cross-industry networking
• Free passes available + Gold upgrade for full access

The strength of TechEx lies in the depth of its program and the calibre of its audience. CIOs sit alongside Chief Architects. Heads of Data collaborate with Infrastructure Leads. Strategy conversations connect directly to engineering realities.

If you’re responsible for enterprise technology strategy, architecture, security, or operational delivery – this is where those conversations are happening.

Secure your pass today: https://techexevent.com/register-now/

About TechEx Events

TechEx Events produces global technology conferences and exhibitions covering artificial intelligence, big data, cybersecurity, IoT, digital transformation, and data center infrastructure. Events take place across North America and Europe, bringing together enterprise technology leaders, solution providers, and industry experts.

Adobe has agreed to pay the US government $75 million to settle its lawsuit over the company’s allegedly harmful approach to subscriptions. The suit started in 2024, when the US Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission filed a joint complaint alleging the company deliberately made it difficult to cancel subscriptions and obscured the frequently expensive “early termination fee” customers have to pay to get out of annual subscriptions that are paid monthly.

“While we disagree with the government’s claims and deny any wrongdoing, we are pleased to resolve this matter,” Adobe writes. “We have agreed to provide $75 million worth of free services to customers that qualify. We will proactively reach out to the affected customers once the appropriate filings with the Court are made and accepted. Additionally, we have agreed to a $75 million payment to the Department of Justice.”

Adobe’s statement also notes that it’s made the process of both signing up for and canceling subscriptions “more streamlined and transparent.” A major sticking point of the original complaint is that canceling an “annual plan, paid monthly” subscription before completing the first year of service required customers to pay an early termination fee to make up for the value Adobe lost initially offering its software at a discount. Adobe currently allows plans to be refunded if they’re canceled within 14 days after signing up, but canceling an “annual plan, paid monthly” subscription after those first 14 days requires paying a hefty fee (as outlined in the company’s detailed support page).

A court will have to approve Adobe’s proposed settlement before the lawsuit can be totally resolved, but the timing is at least a little ironic. Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO for the last 18 years and the executive who oversaw the company’s transition from traditional software business to software-as-a-service business, recently announced plans to retire.

How to Make a Killing was one of my most anticipated new movies of 2026. Unfortunately I was left feeling underwhelmed by A24’s latest venture, which doesn’t stand up against a catalog of greats.

Remakes are risky enough as it is, but Kind Hearts and Coronets is an especially tough act to follow. The iconic 40s movie brought something new to the table, with Alec Guinness especially stealing the show as he played eight members of the same wealthy family.

Meta AI should soon be better at surfacing international news content thanks to a set of new deals with publishers. The company announced new agreements with international outlets and offered additional details on its recent deal with News Corp.

The latest deals bring French newspaper Le Figaro, Spanish media company Prisa and German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung into the fold. Together, along with News Corp, which runs a number of outlets in the UK, these sources should give Meta AI better access to timely info about world events. Meta didn’t disclose terms of the deals — The Wall Street Journal previously reported the News Corp arrangement was worth up to $50 million a year — but it said that it intends to link out to the relevant news sources.

“These integrations will also facilitate easier access to information by linking out to articles, allowing you to visit these partners’ websites for more details while providing value to partners, enabling them to reach new audiences,” Meta wrote in an update. The company has a long and sometimes fraught history with publishers as its priorities have shifted over the years. In the past, Meta has struck deals to pay publishers to produce live video and “instant articles” only to change course as news content has become less of a priority for Facebook.

Now, with Meta struggling to compete with its AI rivals, it seems the social media company is once again interested in news content. As the company notes in its blog post, Meta AI isn’t always great at surfacing accurate and timely info. I noted this in 2024 when the company’s assistant was repeatedly unable to accurately answer seemingly simple questions like ” who is the Speaker of the House of Representatives.”

By striking a bunch of deals with publishers, the company should be better equipped to handle these kinds of queries (and hopefully more complex ones). How much benefit publishers will see from these arrangements, however, is an open question. While Meta says it will link out to the relevant news sources, there are lots of outside data points that raise serious questions about the effect AI search tools are having on web traffic.

Ford does sell an electric pickup, but not very many of them. We can’t say for sure, but it’s possible that if the F150 Lightning had the classic cool of [ScottenMotors] 1977 F150 SuperCab conversion they’d have better numbers.

On Reddit, [Scotten] shares the takeaways from his conversion effort, which involved a custom Tesla-cell battery pack and a new rear axle assembly to house the Tesla SDU (Small Drive Unit). A Large Drive Unit (LDU) would probably fit, but the SDU already puts out 264 HP, which compares rather favourably to the 156 HP this truck’s malaise-era V8 put out stock. The old F-bodies were great trucks in a lot of respects, but even an die-hard ICE enthusiast is probably not going to be sad to see that motor go.

Choosing to put the integrated drive unit in the rear axle complicates the build compared to other conversions that re-use the

stock transmission and differential, but saves you all the losses associated with that frankly unnecessary powertrain hardware.  The takeaway there is to figure out all the mechanical work on the chassis, because the EV stuff is actually the easy part. [Scotten] had the wheels turning a full year before he got the brakes figured out, because even if they’re just the rears and even if there’s regen– you want all the breaks to work on your test drive.

With the 100kW power pack, he’s getting about 220 miles of range. From the pictures, it looks like he’s filled up most of the hood space with that battery, but we can’t help but wonder if there’s room under the bed where the gas tank(s) lived to squeeze in more cells for those of us who need to go further.

Sadly the design isn’t open source, but [ScottenMotors] is apparently doing conversions on commission and open to selling kits; you can check that out on their website. In that, he’s following in the series-hybrid footsteps of Edison Motors.

While we respect the hustle to design an all-new rear end in this hack, you don’t even have to pull the internal combustion engine if you want to play on easy mode. You don’t need to be a nanoscience professor like [ScottenMotors] to pull off an electric truck, for the record– [Mr.G]’s high school class did a great job on a kei truck.

Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip!

OpenAI plans to add its Sora video generation model directly into ChatGPT, The Information reports . The standalone Sora app was seen as a smash hit when it launched alongside Sora 2 in September 2025, but interest in the video generation app has fallen in the time since as users ran into limits on the amount and kinds of videos they could create.

Adding Sora to the ChatGPT could give the model a second life, and ideally grow the ChatGPT app’s weekly active users from the 900 million OpenAI reported in February, to a billion or more. According to The Information, the standalone Sora app will stick around after the model is integrated, even though the app has fallen out of the App Store’s top 100 free apps and only a small number of users reportedly share their videos publicly in the app.

It’s hard to pin down an exact number for what generating a video costs OpenAI, but the company charges API customers $0.10 per second for a 720p video, and in 2025, it was willing to give away 30 free video generations per account per a day in the Sora app. When you consider the even larger audience that could use the model in the ChatGPT app, things could get expensive fast. That could be one reason The Information reports OpenAI has projected it could spend over $225 billion on inference — the cost of running the company’s models — between 2026 and 2030.

The company has attempted to monetize the Sora app by having users pay for credits to generate new videos, and could deploy something similar once the model comes to ChatGPT. Maybe giving customers the ability to generate videos with Disney characters could even get people to pay for more videos once they run out of free generations. Whether or not adding Sora to ChatGPT moves the needle for OpenAI, though, the company will likely be spending even more money than it was before.

And then there were two: Of the original 11 co-founders who kickstarted xAI with Elon Musk three years ago, only two remain as the deep learning lab continues a personnel overhaul to compete with Anthropic and OpenAI. That rebuilding, insists Musk, is by design.

“xAI was not built right first time around, so is being rebuilt from the foundations up,” Musk said Thursday on his social media platform, X. By most measures, it isn’t going all that smoothly.

The most immediate pressure is competitive. This week, xAI co-founders Zihang Dai and Guodong Zhang left the outfit after Musk complained that the company’s AI coding tools were not effectively competing with Claude Code or Codex, rival programming assistants made by Anthropic and OpenAI, respectively. Musk said the company held an all-hands meeting on Wednesday that focused on how to catch up, which he predicted would be possible by the middle of this year.

Coding tools matter so much because they’re where the money is. While an early-year surge of users was powered by xAI’s lax regulation of Grok’s ability to produce sexual and even abusive imagery, coding tools are seen as the key revenue-generating tech for AI labs. That makes xAI’s current lag in this area more than a perception issue; it’s a business problem.

The personnel overhaul extends well beyond this week. A month ago, 11 senior engineers at xAI, including two co-founders, left the company following changes Musk described as a reorganization to suit a larger business. That effort was apparently insufficient: The Financial Times reported that SpaceX and Tesla executives have parachuted into the company to evaluate employees and fire those who don’t make the grade.

The two remaining co-founders, Manuel Kroiss and Ross Nordeen, along with Musk, have their work cut out for them.

Musk is now casting a wider net for talent. On Thursday, he said on X that he and another colleage, Baris Akis, are currently reviewing rejected employment applications in the company, with an eye toward reaching out to promising candidates who should have had a chance to interview. “My apologies,” Musk added, addressing the pile of strangers he’d ghosted.

For the sake of comparison, LinkedIn reports that xAI has just over 5,000 employees, compared to more than 7,500 at OpenAI and more than 4,700 at Anthropic.

On the hiring front, there’s at least one encouraging sign. Andrew Milich and Jason Ginsberg are joining xAI from the AI coding tool company Cursor, where the two held joint responsibility for product engineering. Unlike xAI, Cursor depends on frontier labs for access to the AI models it runs on. Their decision to join xAI may signal the importance of direct access to LLM and computing resources to run them — and suggest that xAI’s core asset, its own frontier model, is still an attractive draw.

Either way, the pressure to show results is as much external as it is internal. Now that xAI is part of SpaceX, and with a public offering of SpaceX shares anticipated, the cash-burning unit is under pressure to demonstrate real uptake on Grok, its LLM. (A stumbling AI division is not the story Musk needs investors to be reading.)

Longer term, Musk is betting on something bigger than coding tools. xAI’s Macrohard project — Musk is convinced the name is “a funny reference to Microsoft” — aims to create an AI agent capable of doing anything a white-collar worker can do on a computer. Toby Pohlen, chosen to lead the project in February, left within weeks, and this week, Business Insider reported that Macrohard was on pause.

Musk’s response has been to draft another of his companies into the project. He revealed for the first time that Macrohard is a joint effort with Tesla, which is also developing a complementary agent dubbed “Digital Optimus” — a reference to Tesla’s Optimus humanoid robot. In Musk’s description, the xAI language model would direct the Tesla agent as it performs tasks.

It’s ambitious; it’s also not unique. Instead, the vision is not far off from what Perplexity — an AI-powered search engine — is doing with its new “Everything is Computer” offering, which aims to offer enterprise users a dedicated “digital proxy” that can orchestrate their digital tasks. It also echoes what entrepreneur Peter Steinberger is now working on at OpenAI, after creating OpenClaw’s popular personal agents.

The ReSHAPE platform, using AI, enables professionals to retrain, upskill and ‘future-proof’ their careers.

The Technological University of Shannon (TUS) in Athlone has launched the Regional Skills Horizon and Pathways to Employment (ReSHAPE) platform, which is an AI-powered digital platform developed to support professionals based in Ireland’s midlands region, supporting economic development in regions such as Laois, Offaly, Longford and Westmeath. 

ReSHAPE is a collaboration between Munster Technological University (MTU), TUS and the University of Limerick (UL) and is part of a strategic initiative aiming to deliver education, training and skills development opportunities.

Users of the platform will be able to undertake a skills audit, identify transferable skills and access funded training opportunities. Employers can use the platform to identify organisational skills gaps and create workforce development strategies. Reportedly, the programme is designed to support thousands of learners across the midlands. 

Commenting on the launch, Prof Vincent Cunnane, the president of TUS, said: “The platform represents a transformative opportunity for workers and employers across the region. ReSHAPE provides a powerful new tool to help individuals understand their capabilities and connect with education pathways that support sustainable careers in a rapidly evolving economy. 

“The midlands is entering a new phase of economic transformation and ensuring people have access to the right skills at the right time is critical.”

Prof Maggie Cusack, the president of MTU added: “The collaboration between universities and industry partners was key to ensuring the platform delivers meaningful impact. ReSHAPE brings together education providers, industry and communities to ensure skills development is aligned with real workforce needs. 

“By combining data-driven insights with accessible training pathways, the platform will help thousands of people across the midlands build the skills needed for the jobs of the future. ReSHAPE is also demonstrating that collaboration across higher education, industry and government can support better, evidence-based skills planning at a national level.”

Also in the midlands, Danish drug-maker Novo Nordisk recently announced a €432m investment at its Athlone-based plant to advance its manufacturing capacity for GLP-1 drugs. The Minister for Enterprise, Tourism and Employment Peter Burke, TD called the news, “a vote of confidence in Athlone, the midlands and the skilled workforce we have worked hard to develop”.

He said: “It will help drive innovation, create highly skilled jobs and further strengthen Ireland’s pharmaceutical ecosystem.” 

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