March 2026 Tech Upload
| The NEW Digital Alliance would like to thank New Resources Consulting and TEKsystems for their support as Strategic Level investors! |  |
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NEW Digital News
Call for Proposals - NEW Digital Leaders Conference 2026
Back for another year, the NEW Digital Alliance (NEWDA), in collaboration with Women in Technology (WIT), will be hosting the NEW Digital Leaders Conference! This year’s event is scheduled to take place on Friday, May 15, 2026, once again at Kimberly-Clark Conference Center in Neenah, WI. This event is exclusive only to members of either the NEW Digital Alliance or Women in Technology.
Just like previous years, the conference will bring together technology professionals, leaders, and enthusiasts to discuss the latest advancements, strategies, and practices shaping the future of technology. We are currently seeking proposals for presentations, workshops, and panel discussions that align with the theme of the conference.
If you are interested, we invite you to submit your proposal by the end of the day, March 16. You or your company must be a member of either NEWDA or WIT to submit a proposal.
SUBMIT YOUR SESSION PROPOSAL HERE
Sponsorship Opportunities
Lunch Sponsor – $3,000
- Remarks at beginning of lunch (2 min)
- Opportunity to put literature on attendees chairs
- Highlighted within conference marketing materials
Printed Materials Sponsor – $600
- Highlighted within conference marketing materials
To become a sponsor, please email: Jason Mathwig at jason.mathwig@thenewnorth.com or call 920.328.0562.
Upcoming northeast Wisconsin IT events
WIT: Sip & Sync Green Bay
Thursday, March 5
8:00 – 9:00 a.m.
Karvana Coffee House (Green Bay)
Organizer: Women in Technology
WIT: Sip & Sync Appleton
Wednesday, March 18
8:30 – 9:30 a.m.
Copper Rock Coffee Company (College Ave location)
Organizer: Women in Technology
IT Roundtable: Building the IT Talent Pipeline
Tuesday, March 24
11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m.
Virtual (Zoom)
Organizer: NEW Digital Alliance
Have an IT, digital, technology related event happening in northeast Wisconsin? Let us know! We are happy to include it on our Events Webpage along with including it in future Tech Uploads. Email event details to: info@newdigitalalliance.org.
Fox Cities Chamber Accepting Speaker Applications for AI Business Summit
The Fox Cities Chamber is now accepting applications from industry leaders, innovators, and practitioners interested in presenting at its AI Business Summit.
The annual summit, held Nov. 3 in Appleton, brings together business professionals from across Wisconsin and beyond to explore how artificial intelligence is transforming the workplace and creating new opportunities for growth, efficiency, and innovation.
The Chamber is seeking breakout session proposals that provide practical, real-world insights through presentations, case studies, panel discussions, or hands-on workshops, focused on the following topic areas:
- Leadership & Strategy in the Age of AI: (AI literacy for leaders, strategy/roadmaps, leading through pace and paradox, staying current)
- Workforce Transformation & Skills for the AI Era: (Re-tooling, reskilling, upskilling, role evolution, human adoption)
- Responsible, Secure, and Trustworthy AI: (Responsible AI, cybersecurity, privacy, risk, guardrails)
- AI Policy, Compliance, and the Role of HR: (HR policy, acceptable use, workforce governance, legal/ethical considerations)
- Data Foundations & Enterprise Readiness: (Data management best practices, quality, integration, legacy realities, readiness)
- Agentic Systems, Automation, and What’s Next: (Agentic systems, autonomous workflows, humanoid robots foundations, hype vs reality)
- Personal Productivity, Prompting, and Everyday AI: (Prompting, prompt libraries, personal agents, transcripts to action, individual use cases)
- Hands-On AI: Learning by Doing: (Hands-on experiences, simple agents, end-to-end workflows, applied use cases)
Applications will be reviewed by the Chamber’s AI Task Force and chosen speakers will be notified following the review process.
The application deadline is March 9. For questions contact lwiegert@foxcc.net.
Labor Market Insights: February 2026
Here is the Feb Labor Market Update:
We tend to view the labor market in binary terms – it’s either strengthening or weakening. But sometimes it’s doing neither. Occasionally, it simply rotates. Today, we’re in a period of rotation. And that requires us to rethink some of our assumptions about how the labor market behaves.
As you read the following, view each point through the lens of rotation. This isn’t a short-term cycle. It’s structural.
Strategic Alignment: Turning IT into a Business Advantage in 2026
(Photo cred: New Resources Consulting)
By Christopher Downs
New Resources Consulting
As organizations enter 2026, the most forward-thinking executives are reimagining how technology fuels strategic growth. IT is no longer a function that merely enables business operations—it is a strategic advantage that defines competitive differentiation, stability, resilience, and agility.
- Strategy First, Technology Second
- Data and AI as the Currency of Alignment
- Governance for the Changing Business World
- The Human Factor
Other IT News
Starkiller: Cyber experts issue warning over new phishing kit that proxies real login pages
(Image credit: Getty Images)
By Emma Woollacott
ITpro.com
Security researchers have identified a sophisticated new phishing kit called Starkiller that represents a major evolution in credential theft. Unlike traditional phishing pages that use static, easily flagged HTML copies, Starkiller runs a real browser instance in the cloud and proxies legitimate login pages in real time. This means victims see actual content from services like Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook and more — making the attack far harder to spot or block with conventional defenses.
Key concerns for IT teams:
- MFA Bypass: Because users are authenticating with the real site through the proxy, any one-time codes or authentication tokens they enter are forwarded to the legitimate service — effectively neutralizing multi-factor protections.
- Real-Time Harvesting: The platform logs every keystroke, session token and cookie, and even offers live session monitoring to attackers.
- Easy for Attackers: Sold like a commercial SaaS toolkit with support and updates, Starkiller’s control panel requires minimal technical skill to deploy at scale.
- Detection Challenges: Traditional signature-based and static page analysis tools are largely ineffective — defenders will need to focus on behavioral detection (e.g., anomalous login patterns) and identity-aware analytics to catch these attacks.
Modernizing a 100-year-old business model with AI
(Photo cred: McKinsey & Company)
By McKinsey & Company
In a recent McKinsey QuantumBlack interview, the president and CEO of the American Arbitration Association (AAA) explains how an institution founded in 1926 is using AI to transform dispute resolution — an arena long dominated by slow, manual processes.
Rather than simply automate tasks, the AAA partnered with QuantumBlack to build an AI-native case management platform and AI Arbitrator that works alongside human experts to speed decisions and scale capacity. Early results are promising: the system is projected to resolve cases at least twice as fast, cut costs by around 35 %, and support a potential tenfold increase in caseloads — all while preserving fairness and the feeling of being “heard” that’s vital in legal disputes.
Key insights for IT and business leaders:
- Innovation in a legacy domain: The traditional civil justice system has changed little for centuries; AI offers a way to rethink workflows that are otherwise resource-intensive and inaccessible for many.
- Governance and trust: The AAA balanced technological ambition with careful governance, clarifying where human judgment sits versus AI decisions and helping build trust across internal teams and clients.
- Avoiding pilot purgatory: By encouraging experimentation and using structured innovation metrics, the organization focused only on high-impact AI initiatives rather than scattered pilots.
- Meaningful impact: Beyond efficiency gains, the AI Arbitrator is designed as a decision support layer, accelerating simpler cases and augmenting more complex ones, with human arbitrators retaining ultimate control.
How to Choose the Right Data Annotation Approach for AI/ML Development?
(Photo cred: IoT For All)
By Brown Walsh
IoT For All
A new IoT For All article breaks down why data annotation is a foundational step in building effective AI and machine learning systems — and how selecting the right annotation approach impacts speed, quality and compliance.
Why it matters:
Data annotation — labeling raw data so models can learn from it — is essential for training accurate AI/ML systems. But not all approaches deliver the same results: automated methods scale quickly but struggle with nuance, while manual annotation offers precision but is slower and resource-intensive.
You’ll learn:
- Automated annotation: Best for large datasets and repeatable tasks; improves throughput and cost efficiency but can miss edge cases without human oversight.
- Manual annotation: Ideal for projects requiring domain expertise, regulatory compliance (e.g., HIPAA/GDPR), and high-context interpretation — though it can slow timelines and increase costs.
- Human-in-the-Loop (HITL): A hybrid approach that combines machine speed with human judgment — often the sweet spot for balancing quality and scalability.
The article also covers real-world use cases (like autonomous vehicles and medical imaging) to show how different annotation methods fit specific AI/ML challenges.
AI Will Never Be Conscious
(Photo-Illustration: WIRED Staff; Getty Images)
By Michael Pollan
WIRED
In a WIRED excerpt from “Book Excerpt: A World Appears”, acclaimed author Michael Pollan takes readers on a philosophical and scientific journey into the heart of consciousness — and explains why artificial intelligence, no matter how advanced, can’t truly be conscious.
Pollan’s piece, adapted from his forthcoming book (A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness), argues that consciousness isn’t just computation or clever algorithms. Although AI models today can mimic understanding and problem-solving, they lack the biological, emotional, and subjective experience that defines human (and many animal) awareness.
Key takeaways for tech readers:
- AI’s Limits: Pollan challenges the idea that replicating brain-like computation could yield genuine consciousness, pointing out that brains aren’t simply hardware running software — they’re embodied, chemistry-rich systems shaped by experience.
- Philosophical Stakes: The conversation isn’t just academic — it affects how we define ourselves relative to machines and other sentient beings.
- Ethical Implications: If AI were conscious, what obligations would we owe it? Pollan suggests we still have a long way to go before that’s a real question.