Planning an annual conference requires association leaders to break down a large project into small, manageable steps, checking each task off the list as they complete it. But what happens when something unexpected derails those carefully curated plans, forcing an unexpected pivot?Meredith Ellison, executive director of the $7 million-revenue Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) and her team lived through that. What could have been panic-inducing instead yielded some of the best outcomes an association could hope for.The Washington-based association for AI researchers booked its 2026 annual conference at the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu… Read More