KA Connect 2026 | Sundance

August 11 - 14, 2026

Designing Modern Learning Organizations

KA Connect 2026, our annual knowledge and learning management conference for the AEC industry, will take place at the Sundance Mountain Resort in Sundance, Utah from August 11th to August 14th, 2026.

We’ll explore what it means to design a modern learning organization—one that blends knowledge management, learning and development, and artificial intelligence into a more integrated and intentional approach to capability building.

We’re just at the beginning of this journey. The technology is evolving rapidly and best practices are beginning to emerge. By coming together as a community—sharing experiments, surfacing insights, and challenging assumptions—we can get smarter faster, together.

Over two mornings of general sessions, we’ll hear real-world stories from AEC firms navigating this shift and learn how they are:

• Accelerating knowledge transfer by blending on-demand learning, social learning, and AI-powered search approaches

• Building new learning experiences that are smarter, more concise, more effective, and more engaging for today’s learners

• Making expertise more scalable by using AI to surface and distribute firmwide knowledge in the flow of work

• Integrating KM and L&D—operationally, culturally, and technologically—to better serve employees and the business

• Designing for the future by investing in modern platforms, knowledge agents, smarter workflows, and high-trust cultures of learning

In the afternoons we’ll transition to a choose your own adventure format with roundtables, hangouts, product roadmap updates, Synthesis tours, nature activities, and plenty of unstructured time to connect, reflect, and recharge.

Sundance’s stunning location—at 6,100 feet in the north fork of Provo Canyon—will provide an inspiring backdrop for you to learn from and with your fellow KA Community members.

Join us as we explore how to integrate knowledge management, learning & development, and AI to build smarter, more adaptive learning organizations.

General Session Talks

This session offers a vision for transforming your AEC firm into a Modern Learning Organization—one that continuously captures, shares, and scales expertise even as projects grow more complex, experienced professionals retire, and AI reshapes the field. 

At its core, this session explores a fundamental shift: from learning that happens organically and unevenly across projects, to learning that is intentionally designed, scaled, and continuously improved.

Drawing on a practical maturity model, we’ll look at how firms evolve from learning through experience and shared conversations into more structured, scalable approaches—including codified knowledge, on-demand learning, hybrid learning models, and AI-powered systems that deliver knowledge in the flow of work. Rather than replacing traditional approaches, these capabilities build on them by strengthening apprenticeship, making expertise more accessible, and enabling firms to learn faster and more consistently. 

You’ll see real-world examples of how leading AEC firms are designing learning ecosystems by combining curated learning paths, modular on-demand content, expert-led instruction, hybrid learning experiences, and AI-powered knowledge delivery into a cohesive whole that connects people to the right knowledge at the right time.

We’ll close by helping leaders reflect on what this means for their own firms, identifying where they are today, where it matters most to invest, and how to take the next step, one domain of knowledge at a time.

Whether you're facing a wave of retirements, struggling with siloed expertise, trying to meet the learning expectations of a new generation of AEC professionals, or wondering how AI will change your firm, this session will help you take concrete next steps toward building a Modern Learning Organization.

What's the smartest format for upskilling your AEC firm's talent? Architecture, engineering, and interiors firm Lionakis has spent years refining how it helps people learn new tools, workflows, and ways of thinking. What began as hands-on, instructor-led training has steadily expanded into a more balanced learning ecosystem, one that blends in-person instruction, peer-supported learning, on-demand resources, and hybrid formats designed around how adults actually learn.

Kristina will share how Lionakis is evolving this ecosystem to keep pace with a changing practice, with a new emphasis on on-demand content, simplification and clarity of materials, and the development of structured learning paths that help employees understand what comes next.

She also shares the firm’s early experiments with AI—tools with the potential to guide employees through software questions, reinforce concepts outside the classroom, and provide real-time support during project work. Finally, she reveals how lessons emerging from Design Technology’s learning efforts are beginning to influence the broader firm, contributing to a cohesive, intentional, and modern approach to knowledge and learning management.

You’ll learn practical ideas for designing flexible, scalable learning experiences tailored for AEC talent that meets people where they are—especially during periods of rapid change.

What does it take to consistently develop emerging professionals into great architects and designers? At Diamond Schmitt, that question has led to a deeper challenge: how to scale the judgment and expertise of principals across a growing, distributed team. Traditional approaches—redlines, one-on-one mentoring, in-the-moment feedback—are valuable, but are limited in reach and hard to scale. The firm began exploring a different model: one where knowledge could be captured, shared, and reused to support both learning and design excellence.

In this session, Principal Michael Leckman and Learning & Development Consultant Sam Horton share how Diamond Schmitt is evolving Diamond Schmitt University (DSU) and their Synthesis-powered platform (DSX) into what they describe as a knowledge amplification system. From a firmwide needs analysis that refocused learning on core competencies, to a dual-track model balancing foundational knowledge and creative exploration, to shorter, more targeted content designed for real-world application. Today, leaders can point teams to shared standards of excellence—videos, resources, and guides—and use their time for deeper design conversations, while AI-powered search and knowledge agents make that knowledge easier to access in the flow of work.

The result is a learning system that does more than inform—it extends the reach of expertise across the firm. By continuously evolving how knowledge is captured, delivered, and applied, Diamond Schmitt is building a model for scaling design excellence in an increasingly complex and fast-moving environment.

For more than 16 years, Turner Fleischer’s Academy has provided structured learning to support professional growth across the studio. What began as an in-person program has expanded into a broader learning ecosystem, shaped by changes in practice, technology, and how adults learn. Today, that evolution is more important than ever, as firms navigate an increasingly volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) environment.

CEO Ellen Bensky shares how Turner Fleischer approaches learning as an ongoing practice rather than a finished product. Central to this work is a Learning + Development team of three professionals with formal backgrounds in adult education, grounding programs in adult learning principles and a deep understanding of how professionals engage with learning over time.

The session will explore how learning programs are continually assessed through feedback, retrospectives, and ongoing dialogue with studio members. Rather than assuming programs remain effective, learning at Turner Fleischer is treated as a living system—regularly reviewed, refined, and adapted as needs shift.

Ellen will also reflect on how the learning ecosystem continues to evolve. In 2025, two new programs were introduced alongside the Academy, continuing a long-standing approach of expanding learning to meet emerging needs. Looking ahead to 2026, the focus turns to defining an overarching learning framework—bringing greater structure and intention to how learning is designed and experienced. This includes more intentional learning pathways, spanning leadership development, digital learning through an LMS, and other targeted programs aligned with the evolving needs of the studio. This direction is shaped by the growing complexity of our work, and the recognition that not all challenges are the same—some are tame, with clearer paths to resolution, while others are wicked: hard to define, with no single right answer, and shaped by multiple, often competing demands.

Modern learning organizations are not built on platforms alone. They are built through intention, trust, and design. In this talk, Brandon Norton, Senior Multi-Media Manager at Fuscoe Engineering, shares a creative, behind-the-scenes perspective on building ARC (Fuscoe’s integrated intranet and LMS) as a branded learning experience rather than a traditional training system.

Drawing from years of design leadership and hands-on implementation, Brandon brings these ideas to life by showcasing a range of modern learning experiences he and his team have created within ARC. Along the way, he explores the unseen barriers that often undermine learning initiatives: clarity of ownership, aligning expectations, cultural buy-in, and developing trust in the system itself.

He makes the case that branding is not merely decoration, but essential infrastructure which helps learners understand what matters, where to go, and why they should engage. When learning feels intentional, cohesive, and well-crafted, it earns credibility, and credibility is what drives adoption.

This session will challenge KM and L&D leaders to think like designers. How do you balance brand and information without losing clarity? How do you identify the right experts, respect their voices, and help them share knowledge in a way that feels authentic and scalable? And how do you design learning systems that improve workflow, strengthen culture, and become part of how people work, not something they step away to complete?

In this session, Nicole Chavas, Chief Operating Officer at Greenprint Partners, shares how her team is taking a clean-sheet approach to designing work in the AI era. At a 35-person firm without dedicated knowledge management or L&D teams, AI is becoming a core teammate embedded directly into how work gets done.

Rather than layering AI into existing processes, Nicole is rethinking those processes entirely, starting from a challenge most growing firms share: the people who hold the knowledge the firm needs are often not the same people doing the work that needs it. Institutional memory, market awareness, process expertise and client relationships live in different heads, and getting them into the right conversation at the right time is harder than it sounds.

Three principles are guiding Greenprint's approach: redesign the work instead of retrofitting what already exists, foster human connection where it matters most, and use AI to elevate implicit knowledge into repeatable processes.

Nicole will walk through two parallel efforts. The first reimagines the pursuit process — from how the firm surfaces and evaluates opportunities to how it develops the content that wins them — using AI to draw on institutional knowledge rather than reinvent it each time. The second builds a learning and development pipeline from scratch, capturing expertise through structured interviews with subject matter experts, then using AI to transform those conversations into scalable learning content.

She'll also explore what it takes to shift mindsets across a firm, and why the emerging KM function may sit at the intersection of strategy and operations, bridging the "why we do things" with the "how we do things" and making sure the organization's collective knowledge is greater than what any one person carries.

Most of us assume more human involvement in learning is better. A human voice. A live trainer. A community. Todd Henderson spent the past year testing that assumption … and kept getting answers he didn't expect. 

He tried distilling live training recordings into short, polished on-demand content, then asked people to weigh in. He joined a 90-minute live session he found nearly unbearable, then discovered it was among the highest-rated content in his onboarding program. Along the way, he's also been facilitating a video series where the most interesting question turned out to be who the real beneficiary is. Finally, he’s cultivating a community of practice with minimal technology – just people talking. Taken together, these efforts span a surprising range: from purely synthetic content to purely human interaction, with a lot of complicated middle ground in between.

Each experiment nudged the same question: when does the human actually make a difference? And a few of them landed as a reminder that UX practitioners figured out a long time ago: you are not the user. Our intuitions about what learners value are worth testing.

Program Overview

Early Registration is Now Open

We’ll announce the full conference program in the spring of 2026. In the meantime, take advantage of early registration pricing while we plan!

Your registration to KA Connect 2026 includes all sessions and activities, all meals, and Salt Lake City (SLC) airport transportation to and from your hotel (either Sundance Mountain Resort or Provo Marriott), as well as transportation between Provo Marriott and Sundance Mountain Resort during the conference.

Please Note: Due to limited space, only active employees of AEC firms will be eligible to attend KA Connect 2026. If you are unsure of whether or not you meet this criteria, please email us at connect@knowledge-architecture.com.

Where to Stay

Why do our attendees keep coming back to KA Connect?

“KA Connect is one of the best AEC industry events if you are looking to get inspired and learn from firms that are in various parts of their KM journey. There is relevant learning and engagement at every level, whether you are a firm leader, design professional or a business partner. Every conference, we meet and forge connections with other firms that inspire us and our attendees go back to our firms with immediately applicable action items — big and small. The KA team also has a secret sauce — not only are they connection builders, but they truly make you feel like they SEE you and your firm and proactively help you navigate through your KM journey, no matter where you are in that journey.

KA Connect was the jump start into knowledge management we didn’t even know we needed. The connections I have made within the KA community are genuine and long-lasting. I still search prior KA Connect speaker recordings for inspiration and won’t hesitate to reach out to another firm to ask questions or openly share details about our own KM journey.

If you are seeking a community that values empowerment through knowledge sharing for the betterment of the AEC industry (and beyond) above all else, consider going to KA Connect. If staying curious is one of your firm’s core values, you will never stop learning at KA Connect…get ready for a transformation!”

Watch KA Connect 2025 Talks

Questions about KA Connect 2026?

Send us an email    |     415.523.0410