James Villarrubia most recently served as NASA’s Head of Digital Innovation & AI within CAS, their Convergent Aeronautics Solutions Project, a moonshot factory built for prototyping high-risk, high-reward technologies that address global scale challenges. As part of his role, he spearheaded the development of MADi, one of NASA’s first enterprise-scale Gen AI platforms, enabling advanced analysis and a Gen AI pipeline built for automated scenario planning. In this keynote session, James will share how you can enable AI as a partner and a catalyst for innovation across diverse teams and disciplines. Helping you overcome the challenges of complex environments to foster true collaboration and accelerate discovery.

• Positioning AI as a collaborative partner to support innovation - Address the complexities of accommodating varying AI needs and requirements among different teams to enable flexible yet standardizable solutions.
• Developing and deploying scalable, user-friendly platforms for research and exploration, leveraging modular AI infrastructure.
• Supporting customizable solutions through plugins, datasets, and prompt engineering tools to broaden AI accessibility and empower a wider range of users.
• Simplifying integration, maximizing platform accessibility, and boosting collaboration—drawing inspiration from NASA’s Modular AI for Design and Investigation (MADi) initiative.