Kristin Russ
Founder & CEO
Practical Edge AI
Kirstin Russ doesn't just talk about AI — she builds with it. As founder of Mountains to Sea Media and Practical Edge AI, she helps businesses in trades, manufacturing, healthcare, and B2B services eliminate manual processes through custom AI automation workflows. Her implementations have cut client workloads by up to 87% without sacrificing quality. With a journalism background and 30 years across marketing, sales, and operations, Kirstin translates complex AI systems into practical business wins — from customer intelligence dashboards to smart quoting tools. She works with business owners who are ready to stop doing things the hard way.
Session from the Speaker
Intelligent Operations: Turning Data into Decisions/Workforce Multiplier
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM, June 5
Room 407
Category
Business
Abstract
MIT published a study in 2025 that found 95% of enterprise AI pilots fail to deliver measurable returns. It's not because the technology doesn't work. It's because companies skip the foundations. Three failure patterns show up over and over. First: unclear process definition. Companies tried to automate before they even understood what they were automating. You can't automate chaos. Second: tools without adequate training. Vendors installed the technology, gave a two-hour overview, and left. Adoption never happened.Third — and this is the big one: automating a broken process. They didn't fix the process first, so all they did was make the bottleneck show up earlier. AI isn't magic. It's an amplifier. So if your systems and processes are good, it will make them better. If your systems and processes are questionable, you just get to bad faster. This is why we Diagnose before we Design before we Build. Every time.