Date
Thursday, April 16, 2026
Location
Time
9 AM - 7 PM CDT

Turning Complexity into Clarity

This year, enterprises are moving beyond experimentation with AI. Results now matter. At ABBYY Ascend Nashville, discover how purpose-built Document AI turns business-critical documents into trusted, actionable data — powering intelligent automation, informed decision-making, and next-generation AI use cases. Experience it through an immersive, in-person event designed to turn complexity into clarity. Connect with peers, spark innovation, and gain a solid foundation to lead your organization into the future of enterprise AI.

Why You Should Attend?

Agenda

Registration and breakfast

08:30 - 09:10 AM

Welcome

Ulf Persson, Chief Executive Officer

09:10 – 09:30 AM

Keynote: Intelligence That Works — Document AI in the Era of Agentic Automation

Enterprises are moving beyond generic AI toward solutions that deliver reliable, measurable results—especially in the document-heavy workflows that power their business. In this keynote, we introduce how ABBYY’s purpose-built Document AI models and domain-specific VLMs enable agents to read, interpret, and act on business-critical documents with accuracy and confidence. We will share the latest market trends, customer outcomes, and the rapidly growing need for standards-based, trustworthy extraction as the foundation for safe and scalable agentic automation. Attendees will see how high-quality document intelligence is transforming workflows across finance, operations, compliance, and customer experience, and why “intelligence that works” begins with getting your documents right.

Bruce Orcutt, Chief Marketing Officer

09:30 – 9:50 AM

Elite AI: The Journey to Operationalize Hybrid Intelligence

The question today is how to move AI beyond experimentation and embed it deeply across your entire organization. That means building an AI hybrid workforce, architecting a blended technology stack, and making a deliberate choice: do you want to be average, good, great, or elite in the outcomes you deliver?
Scott Klososky brings a unique vantage point to this conversation. Through his firm's hands-on work with organizations striving for elite-level AI adoption, he's seen what separates those who dabble from those who transform. A self-described optimist on the future of synthetic and machine intelligence, his session is equal parts strategic framework and inspiration, helping to define what's ahead and what's possible.

Scott Klososky, Technology Speaker, Author, Consultant, Founder, Future Point of View

9:50 – 10:50 AM

Award Ceremony: Customer of the Year & MVP Awards

Following the case study, we will present two major awards. First, the Enterprise AI Impact Award, recognizing the organizations that have most successfully transformed document complexity into clarity, setting a new industry standard. Then, we’ll celebrate our ecosystem partners with the Partner Impact Awards, honoring the partners who drive customer success and enhance the value of ABBYY solutions.

Alicja Wolanczyk, Senior Director, Global Partnerships and Alliances
Neil Murphy, Chief Revenue Officer

10:50 - 11:15 AM

Break

11:15-11:45

Business Track 1: The Hybrid Approach: Making GenAI Production-Ready

Generic LLMs promise flexibility but often fail on accuracy, predictability, and cost control in document-heavy workflows. In this session, we demonstrate how ABBYY’s hybrid approach—combining purpose-built Document AI with our GenAI portfolio —delivers fast wins and production-grade performance. Learn how zero-shot extraction, auto-labelling, improved user experience, and domain-specific optimization unlock measurable impact across finance, compliance, operations, and customer onboarding.

Diana Higginbotham, Head of Pre and Post Sales
Jon Knisley, Product Marketing Manager, Process AI

11:45 - 12:30 PM

Technical Track 1: Making LLM Document Extraction Work in Production

Go inside ABBYY’s Purpose-Built AI architecture and see how we combine domain-trained document models with foundational LLMs to minimize hallucinations, control token usage, and maximize extraction accuracy. This hands-on session walks through practical implementation patterns that make GenAI usable in real-world document workflows.

Brian Leblond, Director of Pre-Sales

11:45 - 12:30 PM

Lunch

12:30 – 01:45 PM

Ascend Central Expo

01:00 - 01:45 PM

Business Track 2: Setting the Standard for Safe, Scalable AI

AI adoption without standards increases enterprise risk. In this session, learn how ABBYY is shaping the standard to define how LLMs extract, structure, and validate business-critical documents. Discover how standardized document intelligence reduces compliance risk, ensures consistency across systems, and enables scalable AI governance.

Jon Knisley, Product Marketing Manager, Process AI
Andrew Pery, Digital transformation expert and AI Ethics Evangelist

01:45 – 02:30 PM

Technical Track 2: Standardizing Document Structures for Enterprise AI

Today’s document data formats are fragmented—XML, JSON, hOCR, ALTO—creating integration complexity. This session introduces a new standard for document extraction co-created by ABBYY. Learn how it unifies document structure representation, simplifies downstream integrations, and provides a stable backbone for enterprise-grade AI systems.

Matt Netkow, Senior Product Manager, Workflow & Orchestration

01:45 – 02:30 PM

Business Track 3: From AI Experiments to Enterprise-Grade (Agentic) Automation

Agentic automation promises transformation — but without governance, trusted data, and orchestration, it remains a pilot. In this session, we'll show how enterprises move from isolated GenAI use cases to fully orchestrated, business-critical workflows. You’ll learn how: Trusted document intelligence provides decision-ready data for agents. An orchestration layer governs how agents act across systems. Enterprises maintain transparency, compliance, and human oversight. Business leaders measure and scale ROI across claims, onboarding, KYC, finance, and logistics. This session is for business leaders who want to operationalize AI safely — not just experiment with it.

Brook Meier, Director, Product Management
David Brakoniecki, COO / Chief Delivery Officer, BP3
David Weis, Senior Technical Partner Manager, Camunda

02:30 – 03:15 PM

Technical Track 3: FineReader Engine in Containers: Built for Scale

See how to operationalize ABBYY’s Document AI platform at scale using containerized deployments such as Docker. ABBYY engineers will walk through workflow orchestration—from ingestion and extraction to routing and task completion—showing how to build a scalable, high-availability architecture that supports intelligent agents and enterprise automation systems.

Dallas James, Product Manager

02:30 – 03:15 PM

Break

03:15 - 03:30 PM

Partner Session: Resistant AI

Joe Lemonnier, Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI

03:30 – 03:50 PM

Award Ceremony: Hackathon

Matt Netkow, Senior Product Manager, Workflow & Orchestration
Neil Murphy, Chief Revenue Officer

03:50 – 04:10 PM

Closing Remarks

Ulf Persson, Chief Executive Officer

04:10 - 04:20 PM

Ascend Central Reception

The event transitions into a networking reception at Ascend Central, where attendees can connect with experts and peers. During the Reception, on their booth ABBYY partner Resistant AI will host a dedicated session, offering presentation and live insights into their solutions.

Joe Lemonnier, Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI

04:20 - 07:00 PM

Meet Our Speakers

ulf-persson_white-background

Ulf Persson

Chief Executive Officer

Bruce-Orcutt_white-background

Bruce Orcutt

Chief Marketing Officer

Neil Murphy

Neil Murphy

Chief Revenue Officer

Alicja-Wolanczyk_white-background-min

Alicja Wolanczyk

Senior Director, Global Partnerships and Alliances

Dallas-James

Dallas James

Product Manager

Jonathan-Knisley

Jonathan Knisley

Product Marketing Manager, Process AI

Andrew Pery

Andrew Pery

Digital transformation expert and AI Ethics Evangelist

Diana Higginbotham

Diana Higginbotham

Head of Pre and Post Sales

Brian Leblond

Brian Leblond

Director of Pre-Sales

Matt-Netkow-1

Matt Netkow

Senior Product Manager, Workflow & Orchestration

Brook-Meier

Brook Meier

Director, Product Management

Joe_Lemonnier

Joe Lemonnier

Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI

David Brakoniecki

David Brakoniecki

COO / Chief Delivery Officer, BP3

David Weis

David Weis

Senior Technical Partner Manager, Camunda

If you are an ABBYY partner or know a partner who may be interested, please do not register on this page. Please contact us / your ABBYY Partner Account Manager for more information.

Platinum Sponsor

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Resistant AI

Cutting-edge AI to outsmart criminals. Delivering proven and trustworthy results that protect organizations from fraud and financial crime.

We build AI to catch criminal AI — because that’s who we’ve always been. Rooted in cybersecurity, we’ve spent our careers studying adversaries, reverse-engineering threats, and designing systems that adapt faster than the fraud. Now we apply that same discipline to the hardest problem in financial crime: prevention at scale.

Sponsors

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Camunda

Camunda enables organizations to orchestrate processes across people, systems, and devices to continuously overcome complexity and increase efficiency.

 

Parascript

Parascript

AI-powered SDKs for accurate check recognition, handwriting capture, and fraud detection—integrating seamlessly for faster processing and stronger protection without disrupting operations.

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Reveille Software

Reveille ensures automation is always working by delivering Service Level Assurance for the document-centric processes that power modern enterprises. 

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Wisetrend

WiseTREND empowers businesses with AI-driven Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solutions that extract valuable information from unstructured data and automate document-heavy workflows.   

 

Register your interest