BrainTrust Partners Sponsors Waco’s First AI Conference to Help Businesses Leverage Their Data

BrainTrust Partners, an Austin-based firm that helps brands navigate the AI era, has signed on as the Founding Title Sponsor of the YOU × AI Summit, Waco’s first artificial intelligence conference. Scheduled for Saturday, September 12, from 8:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. at the Performing Arts & Community Center in downtown Waco, the summit will bring together 23 speakers across four tracks to explore how businesses can harness AI effectively.

Tim Hayden, CEO of BrainTrust Partners, will share insights on how companies can identify AI use cases before making further investments. He emphasizes that many organizations already possess valuable data that can be leveraged to create AI systems that reflect their brand’s identity. “You have intelligence sitting somewhere within the pipes of your business,” Hayden said. “That's your brand. It is your brand DNA that can shape AI in your brand voice.”

Hayden founded BrainTrust in 2016 to help companies structure and make sense of their data for personalization and improved analytics. A decade later, he notes that most companies still haven’t fully unified and labeled their data, which he says is critical for AI to work effectively. “Skip it, and Tim says it's going to cost you much more in budget and accuracy to use any AI.” He also cautions against relying solely on public AI models like ChatGPT or Claude, pointing out that open-weight models can be trained on a company’s own data, run privately, and cost a fraction of enterprise subscriptions.

Hayden’s talk, titled “Your Data, Your AI, and Your Future,” is scheduled for 9:50 a.m. He expressed excitement about participating: “I'm excited to join the event, hear other viewpoints, and meet folks who are on their AI journeys, actually experimenting and building.”

The summit opens with Bryan Eisenberg, who coined the term conversion rate optimization and is a bestselling author. His keynote, “Before the Algorithm, There Was Your Story. That Hasn't Changed,” begins at 8:20 a.m. He argues that “people don't buy rates. They buy stories they can see themselves in.”

Dr. Hope Koch will close the day at 4:05 p.m. with a session titled “HOPE” (Human Opportunity and a Period of Exponential Change). As the Godfrey Sullivan Endowed Chair at Baylor University’s Hankamer School of Business and a member of the Texas Artificial Intelligence Council, she will guide non-technical attendees on turning their business knowledge into practical AI tools.

Between the keynotes, attendees can choose from tracks like Build, Get Found, Sound Like You, and AI Safety. Sessions include “AI, Crime & Community” by Joseph Scaramucci, “Beating Admission Inflation” by Dariia Isyk, and “From the Pen to the Prompt” by Dr. Mito Diaz-Espinoza. Several hands-on workshops encourage participants to bring laptops to build working AI solutions.

Fernando Labastida, co-organizer and founder of the Viral Genius Institute, explains the summit’s name: “Most people think AI is the great equalizer. It's a multiplier, and multipliers widen gaps. A business with nothing to say brings a 1, and AI takes it to 2. The competitor with a real point of view brings a 10, and the same AI takes them to 20. Same tools. Bigger gap.” He adds, “Dr. Koch is telling people that AI plus humans is better than AI alone, and two humans alone. That's the whole summit in one sentence.”

The YOU × AI Summit is produced by the Viral Genius Institute and Rogue Media Network, with BrainTrust Partners as presenting sponsor. Tickets are $99, with discounts for teams of 10 or more. For more information, visit youxai.live. Details about BrainTrust Partners can be found at braintrustpartners.ai.