AI Leadership Accelerator
$6,200 $5,580
Early Bird Price: 10% off until Aug 15
Program Snapshot
AI Leadership Accelerator
UC Berkeley Engineering
Professional Education
Credential
Certificate of Completion
Format
In-person executive program
Duration
3 days
Audience
C-suite and senior leaders
Focus
AI strategy, governance, and future implications
Faculty
UC Berkeley AI and technology leaders
Primary Outcome
AI strategy roadmap tied to business priorities, governance, organizational readiness, and measurable impact
What You’ll Actually Do (Day-by-Day Experience)
DAY 1 – VISION
- AI Foundations: What Leaders Need to Know
- Fireside Chat: AI in Practice — From Vision to Reality
- AI Ethics, Governance & Policy
- Cybersecurity in the Age of AI
- AI Research Showcase: From Campus to Impact
- Welcome Reception
DAY 2 – STRATEGY
- The Science of AI Adoption
- From Strategy to Deployment: Operationalizing AI
- Panel: From Priority to Production — Making AI Real
- Generative AI in Action
- Why Most AI Projects Fail
DAY 3 – EXECUTION
- Measuring AI ROI
- Leading in the AI Era
- The AI Stack: A Tool Selection Framework
- Fireside Chat: Where AI Is Going—and What Leaders Should Do Now
- AI Readiness Assessment Workshop
- Strategic Roadmap Development
Who Should Attend
Senior leaders responsible for driving AI strategy
Business and digital transformation leaders
Decision-makers in AI-driven industries
Innovation and operations executives integrating AI
Leaders seeking global perspective and executive networks
What You Get
A personalized AI roadmap for your organization
A framework for deciding where AI can create measurable value in your organization
Guidance on when to build, buy, or partner on AI capabilities
A practical lens for AI governance, data readiness, talent, and culture
Decision-making tools for AI agents, autonomous systems, and human-in-the-loop workflows
Board-ready language for communicating AI strategy, risk, and investment priorities
Turn AI Adoption Into Business Value
Many leaders know their organizations need to move faster on AI. The harder question is where to start, what to prioritize, and how to turn experimentation into measurable business value.
In the AI Leadership Accelerator, participants work through their own strategic context. You will identify where AI can move the needle in your organization, stress-test ideas with Berkeley faculty and senior peers, and leave with a clearer plan for action.
The program also focuses on the conditions that make AI adoption stick: data readiness, governance, talent, culture, and cross-functional alignment. The goal is not AI literacy in the abstract. The goal is helping senior leaders make faster, better-informed decisions about AI and sustained competitive advantage.
Prioritize the Right AI Opportunities
Identify where AI can create real business value, rather than chasing isolated pilots or generic use cases.
Build the Conditions for Scale
Understand the data, governance, talent, and cultural foundations needed for AI initiatives to gain traction.
Lead With Executive Confidence
Learn how to ask sharper questions, evaluate tradeoffs, and guide AI strategy without deferring every decision to technical teams.
Exclusive AI Insights for Senior Leaders
Through a highly interactive, in-person curriculum led by UC Berkeley faculty and leading industry practitioners, you will develop a clear understanding of how artificial intelligence is transforming organizations today and where it is headed next.
This executive AI program focuses on strategic decision-making rather than technical implementation. You will explore how senior leaders should think about AI strategy, organizational readiness, governance, and long-term value creation across functions and industries.
Participants leave with actionable insights, a customized AI strategy roadmap tailored to their organization, and access to a trusted peer network of executives and AI experts. All learning takes place within the innovation-driven ecosystem of UC Berkeley and Silicon Valley.
Pieter Abbeel - AI Pioneer
Professor, Berkeley EECS
Director, Berkeley Robot Learning Lab
Co-Director, BAIR lab
Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, Covariant
Co-Founder, Gradescope
Host, The Robot Brains Podcast
Founding Investment Partner, AIX Ventures
Abbeel's research strives to build ever more intelligent systems, which has his lab push the frontiers of deep reinforcement learning, deep imitation learning, deep unsupervised learning, transfer learning, meta-learning, and learning to learn, as well as study the influence of AI on society. His lab also investigates how AI could advance other science and engineering disciplines. Abbeel has founded three companies: Gradescope (AI to help teachers with grading homework and exams), Covariant (AI for robotic automation of warehouses and factories), and Berkeley Open Arms (low-cost, highly capable 7-dof robot arms), advises many AI and robotics start-ups, and is a frequently sought after speaker worldwide for C-suite sessions on AI future and strategy.
Learn more about Pieter's background undergrad school KU Leuven: here
David Gallacher – Business Strategy Expert
Industry Fellow, UC Berkeley College of Engineering, SCET
David Gallacher was previously T-Mobile's Senior Vice President of Engineering and Operations responsible for the Western United States.
David has led a number of internal business transformation assignments during his 16-year tenure at T-Mobile, including the Reinvent program, a company-wide initiative that streamlined business processes and ideated new products and services that formed the basis for many of the Uncarrier initiatives responsible for the dramatic turn-around in T-Mobile's performance.
Featured Faculty
Ion Stoica
- Director of Sky Computing Lab
- Co-Founder & Executive
Chairman, Databricks - Co-founder of Anyscale
- Co-founder of Conviva Networks
- Professor of Computer Science Division at University of California, Berkeley
FORBES | Aug 2025
"This billionaire professor chose teaching over the boardroom — and it's why the world's most influential AI companies came out of his lab."
Read the full Forbes profile to understand what makes Ion Stoica a rare voice in AI leadership education.
Olaf Groth, PhD
Gregory La Blanc
Alexa Koenig, PhD
Sepehr Khosravi
FORBES
How A Berkeley Professor Built Billion-Dollar Companies In His Lab
BUSINESS CHIEF
Pieter Abbeel to Lead Amazon's Gen AI Strategy
CAPGEMINI
Navigating tech, geopolitics, and the big trends: A conversation with Olaf Groth
Past participants have used the program to move AI initiatives beyond pilot mode, align stakeholders around clearer priorities, and stand up governance frameworks soon after returning to their organizations. Many describe the biggest shift as confidence: knowing how to ask better questions of vendors, consultants, technical teams, and internal stakeholders.
Hakeem Oseni
Kasey Erickson
through change?
Over the next few years, senior leaders will need to make increasingly complex decisions about where, how, and how quickly to deploy AI. This program gives participants the frameworks, technical grounding, and peer perspective needed to make those decisions with confidence.
- Where should AI agents or autonomous systems be deployed, and where should humans remain in the loop?
- How can leaders create governance that is rigorous without slowing innovation?
- When should an organization build, buy, or partner on AI capabilities?
- How should work, teams, and decision-making processes be redesigned around AI?
- How should leaders communicate AI strategy, risk, and investment priorities to the board?
Explore the AI landscape, identify where AI can create measurable business impact, and begin connecting AI opportunities to your organization’s strategic priorities.
Participants begin by establishing a shared understanding of today’s most transformative AI technologies—from large language models and autonomous agents to the ethical, policy, and governance questions they raise. Sessions will explore both the potential and the risks of AI deployment, including real-world case studies of unintended consequences. The day also features a curated showcase of early-stage AI ventures, followed by a fireside conversation on applied AI leadership across sectors.
Sample themes:
- The evolving AI landscape: what leaders need to know now
- AI ethics, governance, and legal risk
- Insights from Berkeley-born AI startups
- Leading through uncertainty and acceleration
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