
PHORUM 2022: BEYOND AUTOMATION
At Phorum 2022, thought leaders and practitioners will be tackling some of the biggest questions facing enterprises in the age after ”automation." How will the workplace and talent model evolve in a virtual, low-contact future? How do we unlock the best of machines and humans to reimagine our operating model? How can we democratize tools and technologies like automation and AI to drive an inclusive culture? How will customer expectations change in an on-demand, hyper-automated society?
NAVIGATION
Philadelphia’s premier enterprise technology conference, purposely designed for CIOs, CTOs, and other business and technology executives focused on how enterprises can maximize the business value of specific technologies and innovation.
Industry thought leaders as well as hands-on practitioners will provide engaging content through keynotes, panels, and interactive discussions to help businesses and technology executives understand how technology can be pragmatically applied to transform the enterprise and achieve strategic business goals.
In addition, the conference will also feature the popular “Phorum Demo World” where conference attendees experience, first-hand, some of the most innovative technologies being developed in and around the Philadelphia region. We’ll also feature the Showcase Exhibition for cutting-edge technology companies to meet and demo their product with key enterprise decision makers.
Each year top executives from around the country gather at Phorum in a highly entertaining and collegial atmosphere.
Wednesday, April 27, 2022
8:00 AM – Registration and Continental Breakfast
9:00 AM to 4:00 PM – Conference, Showcase, and Demo World
4:00 PM – Networking Reception
Penn State Great Valley Conference Center
PACT’s highest priority at any and all in-person events is the health and safety of our attendees. As a result, we will at a minimum, strictly adhere to current CDC, local and venue guidelines when planning and executing in-person events. For the immediate future, PACT will require proof of vaccination for all attendees of in-person events. PACT event staff has been certified in Pandemic Onsite Protocol.

Agenda
PHORUM Working Agenda – BEYOND AUTOMATION
Wednesday, April 27, 2022 – all listed times are ET
- Speakers and times are still a work in progress!
8:00 AM Registration opens & Continental Breakfast
Sponsored by: Comcast Business
8:30 AM Demo World Pitches & Judges Q&A sessions
Sponsored by: Bentley Systems & Osage Venture Partners
10:00 AM Conference Kick-off – PSGV Chancellor, Jim Nemes and Dean Miller, PACT
10:05 AM Emerging Technology Trends
Today’s technology scene may be a once-in-a-generation, post-pandemic unleashing of collaborative energy – meeting enormous opportunities of pent-up customer demand, and accelerated “anything-from-anywhere” expectations. At the same time, though, there are headline stories of scams and hype (yes, NFTs, we’re looking at you) that may be signaling a hazardous “silly season”: it’s possible that any post-lockdown novelty can find someone who’s ready to fund it. This year’s Phorum, as always, seeks to offer bold but not reckless navigational advice, and Peter Coffee of Salesforce returns for another of his introductory sessions.
Peter Coffee, Salesforce
Sponsored by: AMETEK
10:20 AM Automation Heralds a New Era of Productivity
Automation is helping doctors provide better care to patients. It is finding people jobs. It is helping governments provide better services to citizens. UiPath is the leading voice in the automation first age – defining how a robot for every person means that every employee in an organization is directly or indirectly benefiting from the use of software robots. These employees get the ability to focus on more valuable work—which creates happier workers, better products, and a competitive edge in the market. Despite these incredible capabilities, today’s robots are still young and have much to learn. As they mature, they will evolve and become smarter and more capable of helping people.
In this fireside chat moderated by Rajendra Prasad of Accenture, UiPath Chief Corporate Development Officer Vijay Khanna will share his perspective on how automation is unlocking human potential and democratizing the benefits of the productivity boom around the world and share what he believes is the next major step forward in emulating human work through automation.
Presentation by Vijay Khanna, UiPath followed by Discussion and Q&A with Rajendra Prasad, Accenture
Sponsored by: Vanguard
11:00 AM AM Break
11:15 AM Topic – Technologies
Conversation – Disrupters – Inventors; creating the technologies
New computing paradigms, networking and machine learning models are driving technology breakthroughs at a rapid pace. From digital finance, to reusable rockets, to robotics, the metaverse, and to protein folding. At the same time many companies and public institutions are struggling with organizing data, or keeping up with security patches, applied to 30 year old systems. How do we take the world as we find it, and bridge to this next generation of technology in a way that people value? How do we accelerate the creation of massive new markets using capabilities that used to be too costly, or too inaccessible, so that they become everyday expectations? In this fireside chat we will discuss a five to ten year view over the horizon of the most disruptive technologies and how companies are using these technologies today to create the markets of the future.
Phil Moyer, Google
Allen Born, Fairmount Partners
Sponsored by: SAP
11:45 AM Topic – Products & Services
Discussion with IT / Tech Leaders – Innovators & developers; scaling and creating use cases around the technology
To be a maker of products, or to be a provider of services, used to be a choice – and within those separate spheres were other, also either/or choices. Manufacturing meant pursuing either the efficiencies of mass production, or greater profit margins at smaller scale in the luxury sector. Services were either “the easy 10% for the 90%” at minimal cost, or a concierge experience for the 1% – at a price to match. All of those either/ors are now converging to “and.” A “product” is now accompanied by after-sale, value-adding services, personalized with the aid (increasingly) of embedded machine intelligence. Customization of products at time of sale, and configurability during use, are enabled by flexible manufacturing and soft user interfaces. Today’s mass market has the “mass customization” that Alvin Toffler anticipated forty years ago, enabled by “acts of technology”—as discussed earlier today—that have applied new knowledge to what are often long-standing desires.
What this requires, though, is a change of viewpoint, from the supply-side “What can we make?” and “What can we do?” of a previous age to the demand-side “What would they love?” and “How would they want to use this?” of now. The use case, and its enablement at scale, are now the territories for differentiation. How can we draw that map and navigate that journey?
Pritesh Davda, L’Oréal
Bharti Rai, Novartis
Tom Whalon, SEI
Moderator – Scott Snyder, Phd, EVERSANA
Sponsored by: Anexinet
12:30 PM Networking Lunch – Demos & Showcase
Sponsored by: Comcast Business
12:30 PM Technology Executives Roundtable – exclusive session by invitation only
Topic: ROI in AI: Measure Value to Deliver Value
Discussion on the importance and approach to measure and analyze value created by AI use cases:
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- Broader data management
- Data life cycle – data collection (privacy), cleaning (integrity), lineage, storage, analytics and insights and AI
- Use of graph technologies
- Procedures, tools
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Jad Abou-Maarouf, Fulton Bank
Murugan Anandarajan, PhD, LeBow School of Business, Drexel University
Ben Williams, Exyn Technologies
Neerav Vyas, Capgemini
Moderator – Allan Frank, Think New Visions
Sponsored by: Boomi
1:30PM Topic – Team
Discussion with HR / Talent – Deployers; implementing the technologies
Going into the pandemic, “human resources” was a procurement function: it went shopping for people, and tried to pay the lowest possible price for adequately skilled but essentially interchangeable employees. No more: the prospective employee is now a customer, not a supplier, purchasing a basket of compensation and benefits – while paying for it with, literally, the best years of people’s lives. Employers who think they’re still dictating the terms are seeing their best people disengage, or even depart entirely. The era of remote work sees some people working more than one job; it is seeing top talent readily recruited away, by competitors who are more prepared to offer flexible work arrangements rather than demanding an across-the-board “back to the office.”
Attracting new talent, when the usual supply pipeline of high school and college graduates is running less freely than before; retaining experienced workers, when their pandemic lockdown has accelerated their savings and perhaps stimulated thinking about an earlier retirement; preventing burnout of the people in the middle, who are under pressure to make up the shortfall while working under conditions that turn “working from home” into “living at work”: all of these are intensifications of what have always been among the greatest challenges for technology companies. What does it take to construct the workplace, to define and build the culture, and to grow and satisfy the team – in a time of accelerating change of what’s being made, and how it’s being sold, across every industry and institution?
Julia Alexander, ExecOnline
Mick Collins, SAP SuccessFactors
John Heyliger, Lockheed Martin
Moderator – Christina Cary, Heidrick & Struggles
Sponsored by: Cigniti Technologies
2:15 PM Rajendra Prasad, Accenture, Author of The Automation Advantage
In this ever growing competitive world, while cost savings and efficiency have been the main benefits of automation in previous years, the rapid emergence of AI and machine-learning technologies are allowing companies to use intelligent automation to gain a competitive advantage. Automation, data and AI have the power to drive innovation through faster speed to market, improved product quality, higher productivity, and an elevated customer and employee experience. By building an “automation-first” culture, automation can create enhanced collaboration between people and machines, improve decision-making and free up resources and capacity. The pandemic has also put security and systems resilience as a top priority of business leaders, with automation able to predict and auto-resolve these challenges. Rajendra Prasad (RP), global automation lead at Accenture and co-author of “The Automation Advantage” will talk about how to use a holistic approach of process, technology and talent to drive automation and answer the question he gets asked most: “How do I scale and sustain automation across the enterprise?”. He’ll also discuss what is on the horizon and the top trends driving the future of automation.
Presentation by Rajendra Prasad, Accenture followed by Discussion and Q&A with John Guillaume, Comcast Business
Sponsored by: Fairmount Partners
3:00 PM PM Break
3:15PM Topic – Profitability, efficiencies, scale through IT Automation
In this fireside chat moderated by Greg Tinker of Anexinet, Automation Anywhere’s Global Head Private Equity, Tamas Hevizi, will focus on how to realize business outcomes through automation, and share his perspective on how automation requires an organization to identify specific, measurable, and result-oriented goals as well as the GAP between the existing and desired end state and how the decisions around automating an existing process vs building a new process will yield a successful automation journey.
Tamas Hevizi, Automation Anywhere
Greg Tinker, Anexinet
Sponsored by: Ametek
3:45 PM Wrap Up & Demo World Best in Show
Putting It All Together – Connected Themes
What makes it Phorum is the from-all-angles view that considers the technology, the business environment, and the social and cultural expectations that intersect to drive and shape life-changing innovations. We bring it all together in this concluding summary and what-comes-next analysis from Phorum regular Peter Coffee, former Technology Editor of eWEEK and VP for Strategic Research at Salesforce.
Peter Coffee, Salesforce
Sponsored by: Bentley Systems & Osage Venture Partners
4:00 PM Networking Reception
Sponsored by: Fox Rothschild
SPEAKERS
Sponsors
Presented By
Hosted By

Platinum Sponsors
Gold Sponsors
Silver Sponsors
Phorum Showcase
ADVISORY BOARD
Sushma Akunuru
VP, Business Applications Development
Independence Blue Cross
Allen Born
Director
Fairmount Partners
Srinath Chigullapalli
Senior Program Manager
Vanguard
Tony Cleveland
Senior Director, Strategic Technology Advancement
Bentley Systems
Peter Coffee
VP, Strategic Research
Salesforce
Jim Dever
Market President
Bank of America
Sean Dowling
Partner
Osage Venture Partners
John Gallagher
Enterprise Sales Manager
Comcast Business
Janet Harrison
Corporate IT Director
Ametek
Kevin Jurrens
Director of Operations
Broadpath
Terrence Kerwin
Partner
Fox Rothschild LLP
Vijay Kumar
Dean
University of Pennsylvania
Nate Lentz
Managing Partner
Osage Venture Partners
Suzanne Lentz
CMO
Anexinet
Dean E. Miller
Managing Director, PCOM Primary Care Innovation Fund
President & CEO, PACT
Michael O’Donnell
Sr. Marketing Specialist
Comcast
Debbie O’Brien
Market Executive
Bank of America
Travis Pierce
Co-Founder – Product & Venture Investments
Vanguard
Chris Port
COO
Boomi
Aimee Senour
Business Development Director
Cigniti
Sanjay Sharma
CTO
SEI Investments
Scott Snyder, PhD
Chief Digital Officer, EVERSANA
Senior Fellow, The Wharton School
Russ Starke
CEO
Think Company
Dianne Strunk
Vice President
PACT
Chris Wilhelm
VP, Business Consulting – North America
EPAM
Demo World
The Phorum Demo World will feature the region’s hottest early-stage companies that are providing cutting-edge innovation that goes Beyond Automation. Demo World was created to allow startups to connect with C-level enterprise decision makers attending Phorum. In addition to showcasing their technology in the Pit, each Demo World participant will present their company to a panel of judges and the Phorum audience. One will be names “Best in Show” and will receive the 11th annual Phorum Phorward Award. Since our inaugural event, past participants have gone on to raise more than $350M in capital, with three of the ten successfully completing exits to strategic acquirers.
DEMO WORLD FINALISTS
Agora World, Philadelphia, PA
Arke Aeronautics, King of Prussia, PA
Cliquify, Bethesda, MD
Dina, Chicago, IL
EmpathED, New Hope, PA
FLX Solutions, Bethlehem, PA
InnoVision Medical Technologies, Baltimore, MD
Journal My Health, Philadelphia, PA
Nerdwise, Philadelphia, PA
NuMantra Technologies Inc., East Norriton, PA
United Effects, Philadelphia, PA
Past Winners
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2021 — Sweft
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2020 — boodleAI
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2019 — Crossbeam
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2018 — Slyce
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2017 — 51 Maps
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2016 — RedOwl
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2015 — Tesorio
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2014 — SocialLadder
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2013 — PeopleLinx
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2012 — Cloudamize