Enabling Everyone to be Builders with AI - Max Reele, Austen Bruhn

Max Reele, VP of Delivery at Rise8, and Austen Bruhn of Coder share how Rise8 designed and executed Ship Summit — a three-day hands-on AI enablement event in Park City, Utah, that brought together over 200 employees, partners, and customers to ship real software using AI tools. The event resulted in more than 3,000 pushes to production and 102 million Claude tokens consumed, turning non-builders like HR leaders and executive assistants into active contributors. Austen Bruhn details the Coder-powered infrastructure that spun up 198 consistent cloud workspaces in under 30 seconds, enabling participants across all skill levels to focus on building rather than environment setup. In this talk, you'll learn how to design a large-scale AI enablement event from infrastructure to facilitation, why tolerating noisy experimentation is essential during AI adoption, and how a creative token-usage incentive structure can drive organic pairing between senior and junior practitioners. PRESENTED BY Max Reele — VP of Delivery, Rise8 Austen Bruhn — Staff Solutions Engineer, Coder CHAPTERS 0:00 Introduction & Speaker Context 1:29 Why Rise8 Built Ship Summit 3:44 Event Structure & Cohorts 6:51 Infrastructure with Coder 10:42 Incident Response & Outcomes 13:02 Enabling Non-Technical Builders 17:39 Org Optimism & FOMO 21:44 Token Usage Call to Action LINKS 🎥 Watch in the IT Revolution Video Library: https://videos.itrevolution.com/watch... ABOUT THE EVENT Enterprise AI Summit: Spring 2026 April 9-10, 2026 ABOUT IT REVOLUTION IT Revolution helps technology leaders succeed through books, research, and events. Subscribe for talks from the best technology leaders in the world. → https://itrevolution.com #AIEnablement #DeveloperExperience #PlatformEngineering