Pitt’s “Forging the Future: The Intersection of Health, AI and Tech” global summit kicks off

Pitt kicked off its 2025 Global Innovation Summit on Monday, Oct. 20, with leaders from education, business, science and technology sectors. 

The summit, “Forging the Future: The Intersection of Health, AI and Tech,” will run for two days until Oct. 21. Over the next two days of the summit, attendees can attend panels, innovation spotlights, site visits and discussions about the use of AI in future policy, education and healthcare. 

The summit was preceded by the Global Federation of Competitiveness Councils’ annual conference, which was also hosted at Pitt on Sunday, Oct. 19.

In the event’s opening remarks, Chancellor Joan Gabel highlighted Pittsburgh as one of the top 20 most innovative universities. She said the University attracts the “best innovators and leaders and high-value investments and partners.” 

“It is in the spirit of partnership and competitiveness that we put together an event, [the summit],” Gabel said. “[Collaboration] creates friendly collisions that can catalyze entire ecosystems simply by having the right people in the right place together at the same time.”

The summit began with two panels presented to over 70 people on Monday, Oct. 20 in the seventh-floor auditorium of Alumni Hall. 

In the first panel, “The Health, AI and Productivity Imperative: From University Research to Community Impact,” educational leaders considered the benefits of integrating AI into education. Farnam Jahanian, president of Carnegie Mellon University and panel member, said the impact of emerging technologies in delivering more efficient healthcare is underestimated.

“There’s going to be a transformation of labor, and you need to be cautious of it,” Jahanian said. “One of the challenges for higher education and the private sector is how we embrace this point in history such that we can transition regardless of the state of the economy.”

Ted Carter, president of Ohio State University and presenter on the first panel, helped instate an AI Fluency initiative at OSU to ensure all students would be “AI fluent by 2029” — which means they would be able to confidently and effectively understand how to use AI.

“Higher education systems are playing defense now,” Carter said. “It’s a critical moment where it’s more than ChatGPT. This is about creating efficiencies and speed to solutions, changing how we live and think for the rest of our generation.”

There are still many ethical decisions on AI use that have yet to be made, Carter said — including the amount of energy usage that AI requires.

“If you use AI in Google search, that’s 25 times more energy than just a normal Google search,” Carter said. “If we don’t start paying attention to that, we’re going to run out of energy. We have to understand how to harness the power of AI and be smart with energy usage.”

Jahanian said AI can help promote the spread of misinformation, which is just one of the many challenges society faces with AI. He said higher education and government organizations must be cognizant of these challenges and identify solutions.

“The pace and scope of discovery is so unprecedented and fast,” Jahanian said. “There will be a need for new frameworks and new governance models — not to prevent progress and advances of AI because that advance has already happened.”

The second panel, “Innovation Spotlight: BioForge” focused on BioForge, an independent subsidiary owned by Pitt that aims to accelerate developments for precision medicine and personalized medical care. Kaigham Gabriel, CEO of BioForge, presented BioForge as a space where ideas can be pitched and developed. 

“BioForge is in a strategic position where manufacturing can occur between discovery research and the private sector,” Gabriel said. “BioForge will create the innovations, show it’s possible, reduce the risk and then the private sector can pick them up and scale them for the public.” 

Gabriel emphasized the financial support from foundations — including the Richard King Mellon Foundation — and collaboration across the Pittsburgh region that assisted BioForge’s development. The building housing BioForge is currently under construction at Hazelwood Green. 

“The exciting thing about Bioforge was the fact that there was consistent and critical support of foundations,” Gabriel said. “That allowed us to pull together the strength of this region, which are the health scientists coupled with AI machine learning automation.”

Rick Siger, Pennsylvania Secretary of Community and Economic Development and presenter on the spotlight panel, said he sees a large economic benefit to having BioForge and similar projects in the Pittsburgh region.

“BioForge is part of an ecosystem with two leading universities [Pitt and CMU] and terrific companies that we think can be a real magnet not just for starting companies, but to keep them here,” Siger said. 

Scot Stevens, chief information officer for the UPMC Hillman Cancer Center and a summit audience member, said both panels were “impressive” and looked forward to further events. 

“I thought the speakers were fantastic, well-selected and could represent the overall topic of AI,” Stevens said. 

Stevens said both panels covered their subjects “exceptionally well.” Over the rest of the forum, he hopes to learn more about practical applications of AI and health technologies in the local area.

“I do hope that [panels] get in a little bit deeper in engaging CMU and Pitt and the technological capabilities that we have here,” Stevens said. 

Mark Rosenblatt, executive dean of the University of Illinois College of Medicine, CEO at the University of Illinois Hospital and a summit attendee, said he found the forum and its topic convergence “extremely interesting,” especially for health care.

“It’s exciting to see the variety of viewpoints, the different lenses to which people with different experiences and roles, all for the betterment of figuring out how we can capture AI and other technology to improve the health of patients,” Rosenblatt said.

Jahanian highlighted the value of AI and its convergence with life sciences and biotechnology in bringing together new tools for transforming healthcare. 

“In many ways, AI is the most global technology in human history, shaped by collaborations and contributions from nearly every sector, but also every place on Earth,” Jahanian said. “This gathering celebrates the power of innovation to transform regions.”