Track 5: Technology

InDesign is full of small tools and shortcuts that can make a big difference in how quickly and efficiently you work. This practical, fast-paced session will highlight useful features for working with layouts, images, text, spacing, alignment, and repetitive tasks, all with real-world A/E/C marketing and proposal applications in mind. Attendees will leave with simple techniques they can start using immediately to work faster and create more polished documents.

• Discover practical InDesign tools and shortcuts that can save time in everyday production.
• Learn faster ways to manage layouts, images, text, and repeated design elements
• Apply simple workflow improvements that help create cleaner, more consistent documents.

Organizations are investing heavily in AI to improve productivity, efficiency, and business performance. Yet many of the barriers that slow results have little to do with technology. Communication breakdowns, unclear accountability, decision bottlenecks, and cross-functional misalignment continue to undermine execution—even in organizations with sophisticated tools.

In this interactive session, Heather Polivka explores why AI alone cannot solve execution challenges and how it often amplifies the strengths and weaknesses already present within teams. Drawing on neuroscience, organizational performance research, and real-world examples, participants will explore the uniquely human capabilities that drive performance in an AI-enabled workplace.

Attendees will leave with practical strategies for leveraging AI to strengthen communication, decision-making, adaptability, and execution while building the human capabilities that will create competitive advantage in the future.

• Explain why AI adoption alone does not improve organizational execution and performance.
• Identify the human capabilities that become increasingly important in an AI-enabled workplace.
• Recognize how AI can amplify both strengths and friction within teams and organizations.
• Apply practical strategies for using AI to strengthen communication, decision-making, adaptability, and execution.

Heather Polivka is a founder, operator, and speaker who helps organizations close the gap between strategy and results. As Founder & CEO of Awesome People Leaders, she focuses on the human factors that drive business performance, including decision-making, communication, leadership, and execution.

Prior to founding Awesome People Leaders, Heather spent more than 20 years in leadership roles at Target Corporation and UnitedHealth Group, where she helped navigate growth, organizational change, and large-scale transformation initiatives. Today, her work centers on helping organizations identify and reduce the friction that slows execution and limits performance.

Known for her practical, engaging, and highly interactive presentations, Heather blends neuroscience, real-world operating experience, and actionable insights to help leaders improve organizational effectiveness and business outcomes.

Is your brand guide actually being followed by your team, or by AI? Most brand guidelines were built for print designers, not for large language models, proposal automation like Shred or Kantiv, or Claude Design. If a PDF can't be parsed by a machine, neither your people nor your AI tools will stay on-brand.

David Lecours, brand consultant exclusively for A/E/C firms, breaks down what a modern, machine-readable brand guide actually requires: what content to include, how to structure it, and the format decisions that separate a guide that gets used from one that gets ignored. Using real A/E/C firm brand guides as case studies, David will weigh the pros and cons of PDFs versus living, online brand guides.

You'll leave with a framework for auditing your own guide against what today's AI tools need to generate accurate, on-brand output from the start.

• Evaluate the pros and cons of PDF vs. online guides. They can then select a format to revise their band guidelines.
• Identify what content to include in their brand guide. They can audit their current brand guide to determine holes to fill in a revised version.
• Create a new, machine-readable brand guide. This will inspire humans and AI to generate accurate, on-brand output from the start.
• Construct a plan for firm-wide adoption of your brand guide. This will help their firm stay on-brand.

This two-part workshop is half dream, half nightmare. In part one, seasoned proposal designer Becky Ellison from Middle of Six will walk you through a fun, practical discussion on visual storytelling in proposal design. Learn how to find themes to make your firm stand out and set up a template that will give you options and flexibility while saving time–everything you need to create the proposal of your dreams. But as we all know, the reality of A/E/C marketing means if something can go wrong, it will. The second half of the session covers what to do when faced with a challenge–or even a crisis. Strengthen your inner MacGyver with some of the best time-saving, space-saving, and day-saving hacks you’ll ever learn, from someone who has been there and done that over 16 years of A/E/C marketing–without ever missing a deadline.

• Identify and employ techniques to inject creativity and visual storytelling into their proposals, even when faced with limitations
• Be able to set up an InDesign proposal template with automation and modular components to provide flexibility and options while saving time
• Apply unconventional techniques to problem-solve common A/E/C proposal submission obstacles
• Adapt proposal layouts to creatively overcome limitations like minimal imagery, dense content, and restrictions, including formatting A3 responses