June 11 -12, 2026
Boston, Massachusetts

Dr. Stefanie Chiras
Senior Vice President, AI Innovation Hub, Red Hat
Stefanie Chiras is Senior Vice President, AI Innovation Hub at Red Hat and holds responsibility for driving Red Hat’s engagement strategy with the rapidly expanding global network of AI innovation hubs. She leads Red Hat’s involvement in an AI Accelerator called The Open Accelerator, a significant collaboration with IBM and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. As part of this initiative, Stefanie defines Red Hat’s approach to building bridges between academia, startups, investors, and innovators to help foster a vibrant community of AI pioneers.
Prior to this, she was Senior Vice President of Partner Ecosystem Success at Red Hat, leading Red Hat’s global partner ecosystem engagement. Playing a critical role in increasing the understanding of the value of Red Hat’s product portfolio within the ecosystem, defining the strategy for partnering with Red Hat for customer success.
The New Time Paradigm: Bridging the AI Gap from Rapid Prototype to Enterprise Reality
In the Age of AI, traditional development timelines have collapsed. The democratization of technology creation has placed unprecedented creative power directly into the hands of subject matter experts. Today, compelling prototypes and high-fidelity demonstrations can be willed into existence at breakneck speeds. Yet, this acceleration reveals a critical paradox: while the distance from zero to a working prototype has shrunk to days or even less, the journey from prototype to secure, scalable, enterprise-grade deployment remains deeply complex. Closing this gap between rapid innovation and enterprise execution is our greatest opportunity.
Just as AI tools synthesize diverse inputs to unlock breakthroughs, solving this enterprise gap requires a human equivalent: radical collaboration across disciplines. We must bridge the chasm between everyday tech users and core tech creators and foster a deep exchange of knowledge and expertise between agile startup innovators and strategic enterprise architects. The ultimate bottleneck to AI impact is no longer accessible technology; it is human silos. This keynote will dissect this new reality and introduce The Open Accelerator, a new initiative designed to bridge this gap. We will explore how maximizing AI’s potential is fundamentally about re-engineering our collaborative ecosystems. The future of AI depends just as much on connecting people as it does on connecting data.
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