On September 10, 2026, Crestmont University hosted Global AI Summit 2026, a virtual research summit where Doctor of Business Administration (DBA) candidates presented Doctoral Research Projects (DRPs) built around artificial intelligence. The event ran under the theme “Think. Build. Transform.”, with a central topic of “AI-Powered Entrepreneurship: Innovating Sustainable, Ethical, and Scalable Global Enterprises.”
Working DBA students presented original, applied research — exactly the kind of doctoral-level output a Doctoral Research Project is built to produce.
Global AI Summit 2026
The summit ran for approximately 3.5 hours with more than 30 DBA candidates in attendance from different parts of the world, eager to discuss artificial intelligence research.
The topic itself — AI-powered entrepreneurship built to be sustainable, ethical, and scalable — reflects where a lot of applied business research has moved in recent years. Artificial intelligence adoption inside real organizations rarely comes down to a single technical question. It raises governance questions, workforce questions, and sustainability questions all at once. A summit built around that topic gives doctoral candidates room to research the parts of AI adoption that a purely technical conference wouldn’t cover: who’s accountable for an AI system’s decisions, how a business scales an AI pilot responsibly, and what ethical guardrails look like in practice rather than in policy documents.
Meet the Doctor of Business Administration presenters
Nine DBA candidates presented Doctoral Research Projects. Each project applied AI research to a real, specific business or organizational question:
- Bita Lyons — “Scaling Healthcare AI Globally: From Clinical Validation to Sustainable Commercial Adoption.” Healthcare AI tools routinely clear clinical testing and still fail to reach patients at scale, since regulatory, reimbursement, and adoption barriers differ by market, the kind of commercialization gap this project addresses.
- Alex Tessema — “AI-Driven Forecasting and Workforce Optimization in Ground Logistics Operations.” Ground logistics relies on demand forecasting and staffing adjustments, and AI-driven forecasting is one of the more immediately applicable uses of the technology in operations management.
- Prosper R. Kaondera and Guy Christian Agbor — “Ethical AI, Governance & Responsive Innovation.” As organizations adopt AI faster than most governance frameworks can keep pace with, building structures that respond to new risks as they emerge, rather than after the fact, has become a distinct area of applied research.
- Chimankpam Michael Oleru — “Who Decides? Building Enterprise Decision Systems for Responsive AI Transformation.” The title itself names the core tension in enterprise AI adoption: deciding which decisions an AI system supports versus which stay with a human, and building the systems that make that division explicit.
- Jacob Ennin — “Generative AI in Enterprise: A Strategic Enabler for Transformation Projects.” Generative AI’s business value increasingly depends less on the technology itself and more on how deliberately an organization integrates it into an existing transformation strategy.
- Shenkla Khan — “AI-Assisted Development: A Multi-Agent Approach to Software Development Lifecycle.” Multi-agent AI systems — multiple coordinated AI processes working together rather than one model working alone — are an active area of research in software engineering specifically.
- Jaquan Williams — “Verde Nexus as an AI-Enabled Sustainability and Global Learning Platform.” Pairing an AI platform with both sustainability and global learning goals points to the kind of dual-purpose tool doctoral research in this space increasingly examines: technology built to serve an environmental and an educational outcome at once.
- Yolanda Hawkins — “Beyond the Machine: AI-Enabled Vending & the Evolution of Hospitality”. The AI is transforming vending machines from passive dispensing equipment into an intelligent services infrastructure.
Studying AI from a Doctoral POV
Every project on this list traces back to the same structure that defines Crestmont University’s DBA: the Doctoral Research Project. A DRP asks a student to take a real organizational problem, apply doctoral-level research to it, and produce a working solution, not just a theoretical paper. Artificial intelligence, as a live and unresolved question across healthcare, logistics, software, governance, and sustainability, gives DBA candidates exactly the kind of real, unsettled problem a DRP is built to address.
That’s also why a summit like this matters for anyone researching the degree: it’s direct evidence of what a Doctoral Research Project actually produces, rather than a description of it.
The alternative capstone path, a dissertation, asks a different question: what new theoretical contribution can this research add to the field? Both paths require the same doctoral-level rigor and faculty supervision; the difference is whether the research is conducted within one organization or contributes to the broader academic literature. A summit built entirely around DRPs, as this one was, naturally leans toward the applied, industry-facing side of that split.
How the presentations worked
Each presenter had 10 minutes to present, followed by a 5-minute question-and-answer session, a format that keeps a 3.5-hour, multi-presenter summit moving while still leaving room for real audience engagement. Presenters were expected to maintain a professional standard throughout, consistent with the rigor applied to their doctoral research.
Presentation materials went through faculty review in advance of the summit, rather than being shown to an audience for the first time on the day itself. That review step matters more than it might look: it means what attendees saw had already been checked for structure and clarity by Crestmont University faculty, not just prepared independently by each candidate.
Learn More About Crestmont University’s DBA Program
If research like this is part of what you’re looking for in a doctoral program, explore the Doctor of Business Administration program at Crestmont University, including its Doctoral Research Project and Dissertation pathways and its four specializations.
