Mackenzie is the Global Startup Evangelist at AWS. His days are spent traveling the globe to meet startups, share their stories, and connect engineering teams together. Every day there are a large number of startups launching on AWS across every imaginable industry. It’s Mackenzie’s mission to find stories of startups that are helping to improve the world and share these stories with a wide audience.
Join AWS for an immersive event designed to help Texas public sector leaders and technologists across state and local government and education turn modernization from a multi-year risk into an achievable, near-term reality. Legacy systems carry decades of mission logic — and the gap between what they deliver today and what your mission demands tomorrow continues to widen. This event shows how agentic and generative AI now let agencies analyze, map, and modernize those systems in days, not years.
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Whether you’re setting strategy or writing code, you’ll leave with practical frameworks, live demos, and hands-on workshops that turn modernization intent into a working plan.
The Texas Department of Information Resources (DIR) is an educational sponsor for this event. Texas State agency Information Resource Managers can earn continuing education credit to fulfill Texas Government Code 2054.076 by attending.
The day kicks off with a keynote and fireside chat exploring how purpose-built AWS infrastructure delivers lower costs, advanced tools, and real results for agencies like yours. From there, choose your path:
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Executive track (half-day): Strategy-focused sessions on building a modernization business case, forecasting cost, and shaping a 90-day roadmap — with a focus on how agentic AI turns legacy modernization from a hundred-million-dollar gamble into an evidence-based, manageable program. No technical background required.
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Technical track (full-day): See how AWS generative AI services support every stakeholder persona, then get hands-on with Amazon Quick and Kiro through live agency scenarios. In the afternoon, workshops put the tools to work on the real thing: modernize .NET applications and plan your VMware migration with AWS Transform. Please bring your laptop — it is required for the hands-on sessions.
This event is for state and local government and education customers including:
- Executives, IT directors, and decision makersÂ
- Business analysts and program managersÂ
- Developers and technical staff who want hands-on experience with AWS services
Parking will be validated onsite. Just bring your ticket stub to the registration desk. We've got you covered!
A guided tour from the ground up: how purpose-built infrastructure delivers the lower costs and advanced AI tools that make modernization affordable, how the right culture and mechanisms drive continuous innovation, and how organizations are already modernizing to serve constituents better and stretch budgets further.
Executive track:
From quick wins to modernized programs: An AI-powered execution playbook
This session provides a practical playbook for public sector leaders ready to move beyond AI strategy into measurable execution. Attendees will walk away with a clear framework for identifying high-value, low-risk AI use cases, a plain-language understanding of how AI costs are structured and forecasted, and a concrete 90-day roadmap they can begin implementing immediately.Â
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Technical track:
From citizen to code: Using AI to modernize how every stakeholder is served
Every agency serves multiple stakeholders — executives who need dashboards, program managers who need workflows, developers who need to ship faster, and citizens who need answers. This session shows how AWS AI meets each persona: Amazon Connect for citizen-facing intelligent contact centers, Amazon Quick for natural-language dashboards and workflow automation, and developer tools including Kiro, Claude Code, and OpenAI Codex on Bedrock for application modernization and agentic development. All are built on foundational AWS infrastructure — custom silicon, Amazon Bedrock with model choice (Claude, Nova, GPT), and FedRAMP/CJIS compliance. Your team will be able to pick the right tool for their specific workflow - from low-code (Quick) to AI-assisted IDE (Kiro) to agentic coding (Claude Code, Codex, Cowork) — all running securely on AWS.
Executive track:
Understand before you change: How agentic AI accelerates application modernization
Your legacy systems aren't failures, they're inherited complexity. But the distance between what those systems can deliver today and what your mission demands tomorrow is growing every quarter. In this talk, we'll show how Agentic AI now enables organizations to analyze, map, and comprehend decades-old systems in days, turning what used to be multi-year, hundred-million-dollar gambles into manageable, evidence-based transformations. You'll also learn why 95% of the problem is now solvable at speed, and why the critical 5% still requires your leadership to get across the finish line. Â
Technical track:Â
Accelerating modernization with Amazon Quick, Kiro and other AI developer capabilities
This hands-on session puts AWS AI developer tools in your hands. Experience Amazon Quick — turning natural language into dashboards, automated workflows, and AI agents with no code. Then step into Kiro — AI-powered agentic development that helps teams build, test, and deploy cloud applications faster. Along the way, we'll show where these fit within the broader AWS developer landscape — including Claude Code on Bedrock, OpenAI Codex on Bedrock, and Claude Cowork — so your team can access multiple AI development models through a single secure Bedrock platform. Whether you're a business analyst, program manager, or developer, you'll see how Quick and Kiro accelerate modernization from idea to production. All tools are available in AWS commercial regions with FedRAMP and CJIS compliance pathways.
Modernize your .NET applications with AWS TransformÂ
Hands-on assessment of .NET Framework applications for containerization or re-platforming to managed AWS services. You'll run code analysis, estimate migration effort, and build a modernization roadmap.Â
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Assess and plan your VMware migration with AWS TransformÂ
Get hands-on with AWS Transform for VMware — AI-assisted tooling that takes the guesswork out of migration planning. In this session, you'll run a live assessment of VMware workloads, map application dependencies, build migration waves, and receive tailored rehost/replatform guidance. Walk away with a clear, actionable migration plan and the confidence to move forward.Â
Brian Eisenlauer leads a team of technical professionals supporting state and local government and education customers across the Western United States. With over 25 years of experience working alongside public sector organizations, Brian is passionate about helping government and education institutions leverage technology to better serve their communities. Prior to joining AWS, Brian spent 12.5 years at Cisco Systems, progressing from Systems Engineer to Senior Systems Engineering Manager for state and local government and education in the West. He combines his leadership experience and technical background with a deep understanding of public sector challenges to help organizations navigate their cloud transformation journeys.Â
Jordan Hager is the Senior Vice President of Engineering at Q2, a leading provider of digital banking and lending solutions serving more than half of the top financial institutions in the United States. In this role, Jordan leads Q2’s global engineering organization, driving the company’s large-scale cloud transformation and accelerating the delivery of innovative, resilient, and secure digital banking experiences.
Throughout his career at Q2, Jordan has played a pivotal role in modernizing the company’s technology platforms and scaling its cloud-native architecture. Passionate about both technology and leadership, Jordan is committed to mentoring the next generation of engineers, scaling global talent, and advancing Q2’s mission to strengthen communities by connecting people with their financial institutions in meaningful ways.
