UEN 2026 Tech Summit Tackles the AI Juggernaut and Has Fun Along the Way

The annual Tech Summit featured several sessions on AI and addressed a wide range of topics of interest to IT professionals in the education sector.

At this year’s UEN Tech Summit, UEN Executive Director Spencer Jenkins asked the audience at the opening presentation, “What is your greatest roadblock to technology innovation?” After the audience responded with answers from “the legislature” to “time,” Jenkins concurred, “It’s rarely the technology that inhibits innovation, it’s people.” He reminded attendees that their efforts are key to making technology available and accessible to students and educators statewide.

This year, UEN offered a behind-the-scenes look into what we do every day by setting up a mobile network operations center (NOC), staffed by members of our technical team. Attendees could see how UEN monitors the network that connects every public school, public university, and a host of libraries in Utah.

The summit attracted 400 attendees and featured 62 presentations from 86 presenters. These presentations ranged from “Click, Agree, Comply: Surviving EdTech Adoption in the Age of H.B. 55” to “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? Server Room to Staff Room” to “In the Trenches: Running Modern K–12 Networks with Limited Resources.” In addition, 19 exhibitors set up booths to provide attendees with access to information and services.

The summit kicked off with the presentation of the Bob Potts Service Award to Byron “B.J.” Peterson from the Central Utah Education Service Center. The opening session continued with presentations from Jenkins, Network Architecture Director Kevin Quire, and board member Rick Gaisford.

Tristan Rhodes gave the keynote address, “Agent Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love AI.” Rhodes, the AI Integration and Automation Engineer at Weber State University, began by discussing the risks associated with AI, explained how AI gets developed, then pivoted to discuss the real actions people can take to prepare for and adapt to these risks.

“If you’re worried about AI, or you want to be prepared for it, my advice is to play with it,” Rhodes said. He demonstrated this principle by taking an image of UEN’s James Hodges and turning it into a video, creating a beefy video game character of Hodges, and then building a simple video game with AI coding tools.

The AI discussion was widespread at the summit, including presentations titled “AI as a Design Variable” and “AI and School Safety,” and even dove into the question of who and how we should manage AI in “The SOUL of AI: A Constitutional Framework for Human-AI Governance.”

During Quire’s State of the Network presentation, an audience member asked him how UEN’s network compared to that of other states. “In Utah, we are at the forefront of connectivity,” said Quire. “To my knowledge, there are no other states that have a UEN that supports all of public ed and all of higher ed.”

Ray Carsey, Senior Manager of Information Systems Engineering at the University of Utah, chimed in to support UEN. “You guys are the envy of other states,” he said, referencing conversations he has had with other network engineers around the country.

The Tech Summit highlights that UEN not only leads in supporting connectivity for schools, libraries, and universities but also offers a forum for conversations that help IT professionals develop and adapt to an ever-changing environment. “When I come here, I always leave with so much knowledge, and I love the collaboration with colleagues,” said Sallie Warneke, Digital Teaching and Learning Supervisor at the Salt Lake City School District.

“UEN is one of our foundational partners,” said Scot McCombs, Director of Information Technology for Canyons School District. “We couldn’t do what we need to do in education without UEN.”

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