As the FAA accelerates modernization, artificial intelligence (AI) offers powerful opportunities to enhance safety, efficiency, and resilience across the NAS. This panel will bring together FAA leaders, air traffic control integrators, and AI innovators to explore how AI capabilities can be responsibly evaluated, integrated, tested, and deployed within operational environments. Discussions will highlight innovative approaches to using AI in decision support, automation, and anomaly detection while addressing technical, operational, and governance challenges. Attendees will gain insight into how structured, yet agile AI integration can improve NAS performance. 

Accelerating delivery of complex NAS capabilities requires an adaptive approach to testing, validation, and learning approach that is both adaptive and uncompromising on safety. This panel will examine how agile test and evaluation frameworks accelerate capability delivery while ensuring uncompromised safety, focusing on continuous validation, experimentation, and informed deployment decisions. Panelists from defense, research, and aviation operations will share perspectives on implementing a verification and validation (V&V) continuum to support rapid, informed deployment decisions while maintaining the highest safety standards. Attendees will gain a deeper understanding of how agile test and evaluation practices can reduce risk, accelerate readiness, and ensure tomorrow’s NAS delivers safer, more efficient, and globally leading air traffic management.

Advanced automation is central to modernizing the NAS, enabling safer operations, greater efficiency, and expanded airspace capacity. This panel will explore how automation is being implemented to enhance resiliency, optimize performance, and maintain safety in an increasingly complex and diverse NAS. Panelists will discuss deployment strategies, system interoperability, and how government - industry collaboration drive automation forward with safety-first design principles and proactive risk management. Attendees will gain insight into how automation can optimize airspace operations, strengthen safety safeguards, and apply intelligent risk mitigation with real-time monitoring.

As the NAS advances toward greater automation and digitalization, the role of air traffic controllers is evolving from real-time execution to strategic oversight of complex, human-automation systems. This transition raises critical challenges in preserving situational awareness, managing dynamic workloads, designing effective interfaces, and sustaining proficiency in evolving operational environments. This panel will examine how and human–system integration and advanced training approaches sustain controller performance and situational awareness in a digital NAS, ensuring automation strengthens, rather than replaces, human decision-making. Panelists will share strategies for safety-centered system design, advanced training approaches, and integrated risk mitigation protocols. Attendees will gain practical insights into designing, implementing, and sustaining human-centered automation that reinforces controller performance, strengthens safety assurance, and optimizes airspace use.

Modernization represents more than a technology refresh, it represents a broad digital transformation across the FAA's air traffic mission. This transformation is designed to strengthen safety protocols, expand airspace capacity, and embed intelligent risk management into every layer of operations. This panel will examine the FAA’s broader digital transformation, exploring how cloud, edge computing, extended reality, and low-code tools are reshaping mission delivery. Panelists will disucss organizational change, adoption barriers, and safety validation required to realize modernization at scale. Attendees will gain a clearer understanding of what digital transformation means for NAS modernization and how to lead change in complex mission environments with safety assurance and airspace optimization at the forefront.

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Tomorrow’s NAS will rely on timely, high-quality data to drive predictive analytics, strengthen safety assurance, and guide operational decisions that maximize airspace efficiency without compromising safety. This panel will explore how high-quality, real-time aviation data supports predictive analytics, proactive risk management, and integrated decision-making, while addressing governance, interoperability, and safety assurance. Panelists will discuss the expanding use of real-time data exchange, collaborative platforms, and advanced analytics, while addressing the challenges of data integration and governance with a focus on safety-critical metrics and airspace optimization. Attendees will gain insight into how data-centric strategies improve NAS decision-making, reinforce FAA leadership, and advance modernization goals through intelligent safety monitoring and airspace optimization.

Cloud technologies are redefining how the FAA delivers and sustains NAS infrastructure, enabling tomorrow’s NAS to achieve greater speed, flexibility, and resilience. This panel will examine how cloud-native services, infrastructure-as-code, and zero trust architectures are modernizing NAS infrastructure. Panelists will highlight strategies for scaling, securing, and validating cloud-enabled services to strengthen safety assurance and enable real-time collaboration. Attendees will gain practical insights into how cloud-enabled collaboration is accelerating innovation, strengthening safety assurance, and driving more efficient and optimized airspace operations.

As NAS modernization advances the FAA’s vision for a fully connected, digital NAS, the cybersecurity threat surface expands in parallel. This panel will examine how increased NAS connectivity introduces new cybersecurity risks and how resilient, adaptive defense strategies are being embedded into modernization. Panelists will share emerging practices in governance, defense architectures, and cross-sector collaboration to safeguard mission-critical systems. Attendees will gain insight into how cybersecurity is being integrated into NAS planning and how resilient security frameworks are essential to ensuring safety, reliability, and efficiency in the connected NAS ecosystem.