Data-Driven Wisconsin 2026
August 12 & 13, 2026
Join Cameron Vetter, NRC’s AI Practice Director, at Data-Driven Wisconsin 2026, where he will be presenting “6 Years Later: Our AI Is Still Kicking — And Here’s the Messy Reality.”
What happens when an AI project survives the hype cycle, funding shifts, team turnover, model drift, and six full years of production? Spoiler: it doesn’t look anything like the demos from year one.
In this talk, I’ll share the unfiltered story of a long-running AI initiative at one of my clients, an effort that started as a promising idea in manufacturing and has quietly become a core part of daily operations. Over six years, we’ve retrained models a ton of times, switched models, battled bad data, outlasted CI/CD pipelines, and learned to measure ROI not in flashy metrics but in sustained, compounding business value—by enabling business scale.
Expect candid war stories: the tools and architectures that aged gracefully (and the ones we had to euthanize), the technology shifts we needed to keep up with, and the small but critical tweaks that turned “it works… mostly” into “it just works.”
This isn’t a fairy tale of effortless AI magic—it’s the messy, human, practical reality of making AI stick around and deliver for years. If you’re tired of one-and-done pilots and want to build something that lasts, let’s have some real talk.
