Exclusive for Stankevicius: Step into Arlington, Virginia, where innovation and policy meet within the Hyatt Regency Crystal City at Reagan National Airport. Modev’s flagship events, GovAI Summit and AGENTIC 2025,are taking place from October 27 to 29, 2025, bringing together experts in healthcare, finance, retail, manufacturing, hospitality/tourism, entertainment/media, government, educators, inventors, and technology leaders to shape the future of artificial intelligence across public and private sectors.
The GovAI Summit serves as the leading forum for implementing the White House’s 2025 AI Action Plan. It gathers federal decision-makers, policy analysts, and technical experts to examine how AI is transforming public service, from procurement and oversight to infrastructure, education, and workforce training. Discussions emphasize accountability and practical deployment, offering insight into how institutions and agencies adopt AI responsibly and effectively.
Running alongside, AGENTIC 2025 focuses on the practical application of autonomous AI in real-world enterprise settings. Attending are executives, developers, and innovation officers who drive AI adoption in large organizations. The sessions highlight strategies for integrating AI into daily operations, managing risks, and achieving measurable impact across teams and products.
The Modev team on site, including Pete Erickson (CEO and Founder) and Rachel Keller (Marketing Manager), were consistently present, supporting speakers, resolving issues, and showing genuine interest in both attendees and presenters. Jaimey Walking Bear, Head of Events, was not on site but remained exceptionally responsive to my multiple emails leading up to my attendance.
Anticipation and Focus
As I arrived at the GovAI Summit, I sensed a mix of anticipation and focus. The efficiently run Hyatt Regency Crystal City hummed with energy as the GovAI Summit and AGENTIC 2025 got underway in full stride. The atmosphere feels purposeful yet collegial, with conversations flowing across hallways, vendor displays, and breakout rooms. Each discussion circles back to one central theme: how to integrate artificial intelligence into systems that serve people, whether in government, business, or education.
I attend both as participant and observer, surrounded by policymakers, researchers, and technologists who share a common purpose: to explore how AI shapes governance, business, and society. The conversations are lively and grounded, setting the stage for serious reflection on the evolving relationship between human and machine intelligence.
Innovation on Display: The Vendors of GovAI Summit and AGENTIC 2025
The exhibition floor features a diverse range of vendors representing the expanding AI ecosystem. Organizations such as Abnormal AI, ActiveFence, Alvarez & Marsal, Asana, Avenir Technology, Bloomberg Government, Coginiti, Cohesity, Cordoniq, DataCamp, Deepgram, Elastic, ElevenLabs, GDIT, Hupside, Invisible, Maximus, Meibel, Modev, Moveworks, National Association of Voice Actors (NAVA), Omilia, Portal26, Quorum, Rime, SAP, Sema4.ai, Snyk, Sonar, Sonatype, Starburst, Truyo, Vultron, Zenlytic, and Zoom showcase tools for data governance, AI security, workforce training, and communication. The range of applications, from voice synthesis to cybersecurity, underscores the rapid diversification of the AI landscape.
Exploring the Sessions: Where Policy Meets Practice
The sessions highlight both technological capability and human leadership. One standout discussion, AI and People: Building Lasting Transformation, sponsored by Hupside, explored how real progress depends on culture as much as on algorithms. Georgetown Professor and technology expert Justin Fanelli joined Jonathan Aberman, Co-Founder and CEO of Hupside, for a fireside conversation that centers on trust, inclusion, and leadership. Their dialogue emphasized that AI transformation succeeds only when organizations empower people to adapt, collaborate, and build confidence in new systems.
Military innovation took center stage in Digital Twins and Generative AI for Training Platforms, led by Sasi Kasiraju, Operations Chief and Director of Training for the U.S. Army. This session explored how generative AI can autonomously create adaptive training environments. Kasiraju explained how digital twins replicate physical systems to enable immersive simulation, enhancing the precision and efficiency of military education and readiness.
Education entered the conversation through EduFix: AI-Powered Governance for Reviving Public Education and Beyond. Dr. Hemachandran, Director of the AI Research Centre at Woxsen University, discussed how EduFix utilizes machine learning for infrastructure monitoring, budget oversight, and community engagement. He argued that similar models could strengthen U.S. public education, aligning with the White House’s 2025 AI Action Plan to ensure technology remains transparent, equitable, and socially beneficial.
Local government innovation received attention in Beyond the Metropolis: Implementing AI Governance in Smaller Municipal Governments, presented by Anthony D’Orazio, CIO of the Borough of State College, Pennsylvania. He outlined how small municipalities face distinctive challenges in adopting AI due to limited data resources and technical expertise. The discussion emphasized the importance of scalable governance frameworks that allow smaller administrations to benefit from automation without compromising accountability or privacy.
The session “Future-Ready Government: How ChatGPT Builds AI Muscle Now,” led by Felipe Millon, Head of Government GTM at OpenAI, drew significant attention and personally resonated with me. Millon demonstrated how government teams can experiment with frontier AI systems to build operational readiness. He showcased the practical applications of ChatGPT in drafting communications, analyzing data, and enhancing service delivery, illustrating how current tools can prepare agencies for the next wave of intelligent systems. However, the emotional heart of his presentation lay in his story of his wife’s diagnosis with bilateral breast cancer and their decision to use AI and ChatGPT’s Deep Researcher for complementary treatment research.
In my session, Autonomous AI in U.S. Schools: Practical Realities, Policy Tensions, and Institutional Readiness, I drew on John Wyndham’s “The Kraken Wakes” as an allegory for systemic adaptation to new intelligence.
Day three opened on a reflective note with S.A.G.E. Intelligence: Why Women Are the Midwives of AI’s Future, a compelling presentation by Susan Sly. Introducing her S.A.G.E. framework (See, Adapt, Guide, Evolve), Sly reframed AI as a technology inherently shaped by empathy and collaboration. She calls for women to lead in shaping ethical, creative, and sustainable AI systems. Drawing on her experience as Co-CEO and Co-Founder of a major AI company and now founder of The Pause®, Sly blends narrative and evidence to argue that emotional intelligence is as essential as technical precision in the next phase of AI development.
Another engaging talk, Creativity at the Crossroads: Lessons Learned at the Intersection of AI, Strategic Talent Management, and Advertising, brought Steve Keller, Sonic Strategy Director at Studio Resonate, SiriusXM Media, to the stage. Keller examined how AI reshapes creativity and branding, showing how data and emotion intersect to produce new forms of audience connection. The discussion bridges psychology and marketing, illustrating how creative professionals can retain human insight in a world increasingly defined by automation.
Collectively, during the meet-and-greets and evening networking sessions, the tone is one of cautious optimism. The sessions collectively affirm that the path forward is not purely technological but deeply human, built through collaboration, curiosity, and the shared responsibility to make AI serve the public good.
GovAI Summit and AGENTIC 2025: A Modern Agora?
In reflecting on the GovAI Summit and AGENTIC 2025 through the lens of Nicomachean Ethics, the event can be understood as a collective exercise in practical wisdom (phronēsis). Aristotle distinguishes between technical skill (technē), theoretical knowledge (epistēmē), and practical wisdom, the capacity to deliberate well about what is good and beneficial for human life. The Summit’s emphasis on responsible implementation, ethical governance, and human-centered innovation reflects this Aristotelian pursuit of eudaimonia, or human flourishing, achieved through virtuous action within a community.
The recurring concerns for accountability, inclusivity, and trust suggest that AI governance must not merely aim at efficiency or novelty, but at cultivating moral and civic virtue among its practitioners and institutions. In this sense, the dialogues at Arlington echo Aristotle’s conviction that virtue is formed through habituation within a polis, that ethical intelligence must grow in tandem with technical intelligence. The Summit, therefore, stands as a modern agora where the telos of AI is debated not as an abstract ideal but as a lived practice of balancing innovation with moral discernment.
Dr. Jasmin (Bey) Cowin, a columnist for Stankevicius, employs the ethical framework of Nicomachean Ethics to examine how AI and emerging technologies shape human potential. Her analysis explores the risks and opportunities that arise from tech trends, offering personal perspectives on the interplay between innovation and ethical values. Connect with her on LinkedIn.
