PDD 2026 SPEAKER
Brent Schipper
"AI as Your Project Partner: Practical Tools for Today's PM"
.png)
About the Speakers
Brent Schipper is a Project and Portfolio Management leader focused on technology transformation, healthcare innovation, and practical AI adoption. As a Digital Services Project Manager at Corewell Health, he leads complex initiatives that connect technology, infrastructure, clinical operations, and enterprise strategy. With more than two decades of experience across project management, information technology, cybersecurity, and executive leadership, Brent focuses on helping organizations improve decision-making, navigate complexity, and turn strategy into execution.
Karen Kotcher, PMP, Prosci Certified Change Practitioner, is a Senior Project Manager with Corewell Health's Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO), where she leads complex healthcare initiatives focused on improving outcomes for patients, clinical teams, and families. With more than 30 years of project management experience, Karen began her Project Management career in the automotive industry in 1994 before transitioning to healthcare in 2009. She joined Corewell Health in 2018 and has since led a variety of projects spanning clinical operations, technology, process improvement, and organizational change. Karen is passionate about ensuring that every project delivers meaningful value to the people it impacts. She is committed to ensuring that change is understood, embraced, and successfully adopted by those it impacts, while keeping patient care at the center of every project. Today, Karen leverages AI to streamline administrative work, enhance collaboration, and create more time to focus on the strategic and human aspects of project leadership.
Session: "AI as Your Project Partner: Practical Tools for Today's PM"
Co-presented with Karen Kotcher, this session focuses on using AI as a practical partner in day-to-day project management rather than as a replacement for professional judgment. Attendees will learn the CRIT method, a repeatable prompting framework built around Context, Relevance, Instructions, and Tone/format, along with a straightforward governance check for deciding what information is appropriate to share with AI and when human review is necessary. Real project management use cases will include creating leadership-ready status updates from scattered information, tailoring communication for different stakeholders, planning, and preparing for difficult conversations. A live demonstration will show the prompting and governance approaches working together, and attendees will leave with resources they can continue using after the session.
Learning Objectives
Attendees will be able to:
- Understand current AI trends relevant to project management.
- Apply a practical framework for writing more effective prompts.
- Use a governance check before sharing information with AI tools.
- Apply AI to common project management use cases.
- Recognize where human review and professional judgment remain necessary.
AI is already becoming part of everyday project work, but the quality of the result depends heavily on how the tool is used. This PDD 2026 session is aimed at project professionals who already have basic familiarity with AI and want a more disciplined approach to prompting, governance, communication, and practical application.
Register for PDD 2026!
