AGILE Connect 2026: A Conference for Anyone Navigating What Comes Next

TechRochester Board Member and AGILE Connect Lead, Leigh Smith shares why this year’s AGILE Connect is about much more than Agile frameworks, and why leaders, technologists, innovators, and anyone navigating rapid change should consider joining the conversation.

The world of work is moving quickly. Artificial intelligence is changing what’s possible almost by the week. Business plans that once looked six or twelve months ahead can be disrupted almost overnight. Teams are being asked to deliver faster, learn faster, and adapt faster, without losing sight of the people doing the work.

For Leigh Smith, TechRochester Board Member and the leader behind AGILE Connect, that makes the ideas at the heart of agility more relevant than ever. But if the word “Agile” makes you immediately think of Scrum boards, software development, and highly technical conversations, Smith wants you to reconsider.

Ahead of AGILE Connect 2026, I sat down with Leigh to talk about what the conference has become, who should attend, what attendees can expect to explore this year, and why she wants people to leave with more than a notebook full of ideas.

For someone who has never attended, what exactly is AGILE Connect?

Leigh Smith: AGILE Connect started because a few like-minded people recognized that Rochester didn't really have something bringing this community together. We have an incredible tech community here, but there aren't always enough opportunities to bring people together around the ideas, challenges, and changes we're all experiencing.

The conference has evolved quite a bit since it started. Earlier on, it was much more focused on Agile-specific frameworks: Scrum, Kanban, different practices, and how practitioners could apply them. But the industry has changed, and I think the conference needed to change with it. Today, we are much less interested in being prescriptive about a particular framework and much more interested in the bigger question: How do we navigate a world that is moving this quickly?

At its core, agility is about delivering value while maintaining things like psychological safety, sustainable pace, simplicity, continuous improvement, and the ability to respond to change. Those principles haven't become less important. If anything, they've become more important. AGILE Connect is becoming a place where people who are excited, curious, uncertain, or even anxious about what's happening can come together and explore what navigating this next era can look like.

So, do you need to work in an Agile role, or even in technology, to benefit from the conference?

Leigh: I really don't think you do. One of the misconceptions about Agile is that people equate it with frameworks. They hear Agile and immediately think Scrum, Kanban, Extreme Programming, or software development. Take all of those words away for a minute.

Do you want to deliver something valuable to the people who matter to your organization as efficiently as possible? Do you want to make sure what you're creating actually meets your customer's needs? Do you want to be able to adjust when those needs change? Do you want motivated teams, sustainable ways of working, continuous improvement, and the ability to learn from what's working and what isn't? None of those things are exclusive to software.

You can apply these ideas to HR. You can apply them to marketing, operations, leadership, strategic planning, product development—really almost anything. And today, almost every company is a technology company to some degree. Organizations need to understand what's happening with technology and AI because it's going to affect how all of us work. The ability to pivot and adjust is becoming critical in virtually every industry.

Why does that ability to adapt feel particularly important right now?

Leigh: The window we're working within keeps getting smaller. Maybe ten years ago, you could create a six-month plan, commit to a body of work, and while things would change, there was a reasonable expectation that much of the plan would still hold. Today, you can make a plan and something can change tomorrow.

AI is accelerating that even further. You might build an AI agent today that does something incredibly useful, and four weeks from now, somebody may have built a better version. We can look at that and say, I just spent all this time building something and now it's obsolete. Or we can say, Great. We built the first version, somebody iterated on it and made it better, and now we can use that.

What do you hope people walk away from AGILE Connect with?

Leigh: Connection, energy, and inspiration. The conferences I've loved the most are the ones where I've walked away energized. I heard something that made me think differently. I met someone who gave me another perspective. I couldn't wait to take an idea back to my organization and try it. That's what I want AGILE Connect to create.

A lot of the people speaking in our breakout sessions aren't professional conference speakers traveling from event to event giving the same presentation. These are people doing the work and sharing what they're learning. That creates an opportunity to engage with people who are wrestling with similar challenges, bounce ideas off each other, and learn together.

Business can feel very competitive. I want this to feel different. I want it to feel like a community. Maybe you hear something and think, I could try that at my company. Or, I've never thought about our process that way. Or even, That just gave me an entirely different idea. I want people to look around and think, There are all these interesting people around me who care about the same things I care about. Some of them think like I do, some think completely differently and I can learn from all of them.

What are some of the big ideas attendees will explore this year?

Leigh: A lot of this year's conversations come back to leading through change, resilience, AI, agility, and what it means to deliver real value in a rapidly changing environment.

Tricia Broderick's keynote, “Building Resilience,” is one I'm particularly excited about. She'll explore resilience as our ability to meet and recover from adversity and setbacks—something that's incredibly important when you're navigating uncertainty. What I love about that topic is that it's not about looking at everything changing around us and thinking, This is terrifying. It's about asking how we build the resilience and mindset that allow us to face those changes and come through them stronger.

We'll also explore questions about how organizations identify the problems that are actually preventing progress. Sometimes we assume the answer is better estimation, better refinement, different meetings, or another process change. But what if those aren't actually the problem? How do we get underneath the symptoms and diagnose the real root cause?

Another major conversation is about moving away from methodology for methodology's sake. For a long time, our industry could become very focused on following the process and checking the boxes. Increasingly, the question is becoming: What actually matters to the customer?

That's a shift I think you'll see throughout the conference—away from purely prescriptive models and toward the human element, business value, adaptability, and what people actually need. And all of that is happening against the backdrop of AI and an incredibly fast-changing technology landscape.

What would you say to someone looking at the agenda and wondering, “Is this really for me?”

Leigh: I'd almost tell them to take the word Agile out of it and think about the things you value. Do you care about leadership? Do you care about building better teams? Do you want to respond to change more effectively? Do you want to create things people actually need instead of spending months building something only to discover it missed the mark?

Then there's something here for you.

There will certainly be people deeply involved in Agile and technology at AGILE Connect, but the conversations we're having are increasingly bigger than that. They're conversations about leadership, people, change, business, technology, and the future of work.

Finish this sentence: You should come to AGILE Connect if...

Leigh: You're excited about where the industry is going. You're uncertain about where it's going. You're scared about where it's going. Any of those.

There's a lot of anxiety right now—about AI, about careers, about how quickly technology is changing and what all of that means for the future. I want people to broaden the way they're thinking about these changes. This isn't only about technology or software. The ability to adapt, learn, deliver value, and navigate uncertainty is becoming critical to our everyday lives and careers.

So whether you're excited, uncertain, scared, or some combination of all three, come.

AGILE Connect 2026 brings Rochester's technology, Agile, business, and leadership communities together to explore how people and organizations can thrive amid rapid change. Join TechRochester for a day of ideas, conversation, connection, and a different kind of conference experience.