---
title: ABBYY Ascend 2026 · Nashville
description: 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.
image: https://digital.abbyy.com/hubfs/images/lp/Ascend%20Event%20Series%202026/Sharing/DSD-1633-ascend-2026-banner-1200x628-nashville.jpg
---
[](https://www.abbyy.com)
ABBYY Event
# Turning Complexity into Clarity
Ascend Nashville brought together enterprise leaders, customers, partners, and ABBYY experts for a day of discussions around trusted AI, intelligent document processing, automation, fraud prevention, and AI-ready data strategies.
Across keynote sessions, customer discussions, workshops, and networking moments, attendees explored how organizations are scaling AI and automation in enterprise environments.
### Ascend Nashville 2026 Content Hub
[Visit Content Hub](https://digital.abbyy.com/ascend-2026-nashville-content-hub?hsLang=en)
## ABBYY Ascend Nashville sets the stage for our global event series
As the first in-person Ascend, Nashville showcased the transformative power of ABBYY’s [Document AI solutions](https://www.abbyy.com/ai-document-processing/) while celebrating the vibrant community of partners, customers, and developers driving the future of intelligent automation. Through a mix of strategic perspectives and real-world examples, attendees gained a clearer picture of what it means to operationalize AI today, and what it will take to stay ahead of the curve tomorrow.
[Read the blog](https://www.abbyy.com/blog/ascend-2026-nashville-brussels-highlights/)
### Agenda
### Registration and breakfast
08:10 – 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
### 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**
**### 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
### Don't Automate Fraud: Document Integrity Best Practices for Intelligent Document Workflows
As document automation scales, so does the risk of scaling fraud alongside it. This hands-on session explores how generative AI and mass data leaks have fundamentally shifted the threat landscape — and why document integrity checks are now an essential layer in any IDP stack.
Joe Lemonnier (Head of Product Marketing and Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI) will demo how the ABBYY and Resistant AI integration detects fraudulent bank statements, tax documents, business certificates, and medical claims — and share practical steps to protect your workflows today.
**Joe Lemonnier, Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI**
02:30 – 03:00 PM
### State of Document fraud 2026: What 170M+ Documents Reveal About Professional vs. Amateur Attacks
Analysis of over 170 million documents across 135 countries reveals a critical blind spot in most fraud strategies: the gap between crude forgeries and industrial-scale professional attacks. While basic edits get caught, sophisticated fraud uses coordinated networks, metadata scrubbing, format hopping, and generative AI to slip through traditional controls — and that's where the real financial exposure lives.
Attendees will leave knowing how to distinguish professional from amateur fraud in their own data, understand which document types and tactics their sector faces, recognize coordinated campaign patterns at scale, and design controls that go beyond surface-level checks to address the attacks that actually cost money.
**Joe Lemonnier, Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI**
03:30 – 03:50 PM
### Award Ceremony: Hackathon
A high-energy closing session highlighting the future of automation, featuring live demos from ABBYY Ascend Hackathon Excellence Award that showcase innovative Document AI solutions built by the developer community.
**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, allowing attendees to connect with experts and peers.
**Partner & ABBYY Booths**
04:20 – 07:00 PM
### Partner Session: Automating the Non-Automatable: Human-in-the-Loop
ABBYY Platform enhanced with LLMs, Agentic AI, Big Data, and Public/Private Datasets
**Ilya Evdokimov, Chief Technology Officer, WiseTREND**
04:30 – 05:00 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**
05:00 – 05:45 PM******
****### Meet Our Speakers
#### Ulf Persson
Chief Executive Officer
#### Bruce Orcutt
Chief Marketing Officer
#### Neil Murphy
Chief Revenue Officer
#### Scott Klososky
Technology Speaker, Author, Consultant, Founder, Future Point of View
#### David Brakoniecki
COO / Chief Delivery Officer, BP3
#### Ilya Evdokimov
Chief Technology Officer, WiseTREND
#### Joe Lemonnier
Head of Product Marketing & Threat Intelligence, Resistant AI
#### David Weis
Senior Technical Partner Manager, Camunda
#### Alicja Wolanczyk
Senior Director, Global Partnerships and Alliances
#### Dallas James
Product Manager
#### Jonathan Knisley
Product Marketing Manager, Process AI
#### Andrew Pery
Digital transformation expert and AI Ethics Evangelist
#### Diana Higginbotham
Head of Pre and Post Sales
#### Brian Leblond
Director of Pre-Sales
#### Matt Netkow
Senior Product Manager, Workflow & Orchestration
#### Brook Meier
Director, Product Management
### Platinum Sponsor
### 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
### Camunda
Camunda enables organizations to orchestrate processes across people, systems, and devices to continuously overcome complexity and increase efficiency.
### Parascript
AI-powered SDKs for accurate check recognition, handwriting capture, and fraud detection—integrating seamlessly for faster processing and stronger protection without disrupting operations.
### Reveille Software
Reveille ensures automation is always working by delivering Service Level Assurance for the document-centric processes that power modern enterprises.
### Wisetrend
WiseTREND empowers businesses with AI-driven Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solutions that extract valuable information from unstructured data and automate document-heavy workflows.
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