Webinar: Beyond the AI Pilot: Three Trends R&D Leaders Must Know to Prepare for 2026
- Event Type
- Webinar
- Location
- Online
- Date/Time
Innovation, Artificial Intellegence, R&D, Trends
R&D organizations are at different stages of their AI journey, some have moved past initial experimentation and are running focused pilots, while others are still exploring what’s possible with these new tools. Regardless of where you are today, the critical question remains the same:
How do you prepare your innovation teams for what’s coming in 2026? This session explores three interconnected trends that will define how leading R&D organizations operate in 2026.
Sean Ammirati
CEO & Co-Founder
Growth Signals
Sean Ammirati is the CEO & Co-Founder of Growth Signals, an early-stage startup building an AI-Informed Enterprise Strategy Platform to accelerate front-end innovation for companies. The platform uses generative AI to drive collaboration, refine ideas with new evidence and fast-track the path from discovery to development, turning innovation into revenue-generating ventures. In addition to his role at Growth Signals, Sean serves as a Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. He is also the Co-Founder of the Carnegie Mellon Corporate Startup Lab (CSL), a Swartz Center initiative that has conducted research and developed tools to help companies better adapt and integrate entrepreneurial best practices into their own innovation processes. Beyond academia and startups, Sean is a Partner at Birchmere Ventures, where he focuses on SaaS and AI investments. His investments include: NoWait (acquired by Yelp), umano (acquired by Dropbox), Altru (acquired by ICIMS), JazzHR (acquired by Jobvite), Healthie, Crystal, LegalSifter and The Zebra. Sean completed his first book The Science of Growth in April of 2016, which was released by St Martin's Press and was subsequently translated and published in Korean and Mandarin.

