FEATURING James POULTER, AUTHOR OF AI AT WORK, AI Christian ethics expert, TED speaker and advisor to major corporations
The other leaders in this room will be principals of companies ranging between $2M and $500M in the Fort Worth area.
Applications close when the room is full.
You already know AI is changing everything.
What you may not know is how to prepare or respond. Not in the abstract. Specifically, for your company, your culture, the people on your team whose growth you care about. Every time AI comes up in the room with other business owners, the agenda disappears. Nobody wants to stop talking. Because the questions are real and they’re yours:
Am I getting left behind while competitors move faster?
What happens to the culture I've spent years nurturing?
Are we going to quietly make our best people worse at their jobs?
Where does faithful stewardship end and reckless negligence begin?
If I implement this wrong, what does that make me in front of my team, my family, my faith community?
As technology usage grows, it can often outpace leadership direction. The people on your team are already using AI. Some of it you know about. Most of it, you may not. And without a clear framework from the top, the gap between what AI is doing inside your company and what you actually intend keeps widening. That gap is where culture gets quietly eroded, where your best people get deskilled without anyone noticing, and where a leader who cares deeply about doing this right starts to feel like a hypocrite.
AI implementation in your company is not a technology question. It's a stewardship question wearing a technology costume. The hard part isn’t finding information. There’s no shortage of information. The hard part is knowing who to trust, how to evaluate it, and how to act on it without compromising what makes your company worth building in the first place.
You need a decision. Not a blog post.
Thirty Chairs is not a conference. It is a working council.
There is no stage. There is no audience. There are thirty chairs, and every person present is a principal, a business owner generating over $2M in revenue, wrestling with the same decisions you are. You will not sit through a keynote and go home with a notebook full of notes you’ll never use. You will leave with a working draft of your own company’s AI Stewardship Charter, written in your words, shaped by professionally-facilitated, peer discussions at your table, and finished one-on-one with a complete review and discussion with Joe Petersen just a few weeks later. It is a room you will want to have been in.
1.
The fear of being left behind
2.
The widening gap between your convictions and your company’s current practices
3.
The loneliness of decisions no one else at the top is talking about openly
4.
The cognitive overload of trying to govern AI while running a company
5.
The unspoken weight of what AI could quietly do to your people
6.
The fear of becoming a hypocrite in front of your team, your family, your faith community
7.
The practical need for a realistic and comprehensive AI policy you can actually use
8.
The fear of falling further behind on the practical use of AI itself
Every pain has a home in this day. You leave with answers to all of them, in your own language, for your specific company.
THE SPEAKER
Why James Poulter leads this day.
James Poulter has spent his career at the intersection of technology and the humans who have to make decisions about it. He spent nearly a decade at The LEGO Group leading emerging platforms, helping one of the world's most beloved brands navigate technology that didn't have a playbook yet. He then founded Vixen Labs, grew it into a market leader in voice AI, and sold it to House 337 in 2023.
What he did next tells you who he is. With a proven exit behind him, James turned a large portion of his attention to organizations doing kingdom work. He founded ThreePoint Labs to bring what he learned building a company to ministries and mission-driven teams, and he serves as Fractional Head of AI at Dunham & Company in Dallas. He works with RightNow Media, Biblica, and Missional AI on how to adopt AI without compromising what they believe. He serves on the board of Christian Aid, advises Christian Vision, and has advised the Church of England's digital board. His faith isn't a line in his bio. It's the reason his client list looks the way it does.
That's what makes him the right leader for this room. James is a fellow believer who treats AI governance the way you do: as a stewardship question, answered before God, with consequences for the people in your care. His book, AI at Work: How to Build a Full Stack Organization (Bloomsbury, September 2026), is built not around what AI can do but around what leaders are responsible for deciding.
"The future belongs to the minority of businesses that follow this advice." Rory Sutherland, Vice Chairman, Ogilvy Group, on AI at Work
The book publishes nineteen days before this room convenes. You'll be among the first leaders anywhere to work the material with its author.
He's flying in from the UK for this day.
James isn't coming to Fort Worth to deliver a keynote and leave. He will lead the working rounds himself. He can answer the questions nobody else in the room can. And he'll inscribe a copy of his book to each attendee by name.
He has spoken at Forbes conferences and CES in Las Vegas. You may have heard him on the Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast. Those rooms hold thousands. This one holds thirty.
James has an incredible ability to make complex technological concepts accessible and exciting for any audience.
— Global Head of Innovation, Fortune 500 Company
YOUR HOST
Joe Petersen
Managing Chairman, C12 Business Forums of Tarrant County
Helping leaders be encouraged, better equipped and genuinely inspired
Joe Petersen spends his days in the room with owners and CEOs. Not as a consultant, but as the person willing to ask the question no one else in the building will. Most of the leaders he meets have accepted a punishing pace as the cost of running something well. Joe's work is to interrupt that. He looks for the blind spot, names the thing being avoided, and helps a leader trade constant motion for clarity. In his experience, clarity is the scarcest resource in most companies, and the one their teams need most.
That work runs deeper than strategy. Joe walks alongside leaders who look successful from the outside and feel hollow underneath it, people striving hard at lives that should satisfy them and somehow don't. He helps them loosen their grip. The shift he cares about most is the move from striving to surrender, from carrying it all to handing the day back to God and leading from there.
He's earned the right to that conversation. Across more than three decades in the housing industry, Joe built what most people would call a success by any measure. He was named America's Multifamily Builder of the Year by the National Association of Home Builders, served as chairman of the National Multi Housing Council, and was recognized early as a Dallas Business Journal "40 Under 40." He has sat in the chair these leaders sit in, and he knows what it costs.
A father of eight, Joe doesn't teach surrender from a distance. It's the practice he works at every day, in his business and his home. It's also what he offers the leaders who sit across from him.
Why can’t I just buy a ticket?
Because this room only works if everyone in it belongs there.
Thirty Chairs is invite-only and application-required for a reason. Every seat is protected. The conversation at these tables is frank, specific, and worth having only because the people having it are principals: company owners with real stakes, real decisions, and real accountability for the people under their care. You are not asked to apply because access is artificially scarce. You are asked to apply because your experience at this event depends entirely on who else is in the room. A room that was curated is a room where you can be honest. Joe will personally review every application within 48 hours. If you are accepted, you will hear from him directly.
THE SEAT: $1,195 paid upon acceptance.
For context: the decisions you make about AI in the next twelve months will shape your company for the next ten years. This is one day, with the right people, building the framework that guides those decisions. It includes a buffet breakfast, a plated working lunch, a personally inscribed copy of James Poulter's AI at Work, and a one-on-one session with Joe Petersen to finish your AI Stewardship Charter.
Nothing is sold at this event. Nothing.
The application takes less than 90 seconds.
THE WORK PRODUCT
You leave with something real.
At the end of the day, you will have a working draft of your company’s AI Stewardship Charter, a document that says:
1.
Where AI belongs inside your company, and where it must not go
2.
What you owe the people on your team whose growth you’re responsible for
3.
The hard limits you are setting, in your own words, that your company can actually enforce
4.
The three actions you are taking this week
The draft isn’t finished on the day. That is deliberate. Two to three weeks later, you and Joe complete it in a one-on-one session, the same kind of peer advisory conversation that C12 members have every month.
The decisions you make over the next twelve months will determine the success of your next ten years. You will leave September 22 knowing what those decisions are.
THE DETAILS
Thirty Chairs
An AI Stewardship Workshop for Christian Business Owners
DATE
September 22, 2026
THE SEAT
$1,195 per seat, paid upon acceptance
SCHEDULE
8:00 AM Arrival and Buffet Breakfast
8:30 AM Program Begins
12:00 PM Plated Lunch is Provided
2:00 PM Adjourn
LOCATION
The President’s Room, The City Club of Fort Worth
301 Commerce Street, Fort Worth, TX 76102
(4th Floor - South Bass Tower)
WHO IT’S FOR
You're already using AI, or trying to. You're overwhelmed by the options, skeptical of the hype, and quietly wondering if you're falling behind. You want to lead your company through this with integrity, and you're not sure who to trust to help you do it.
The application takes less than 90 seconds.
Questions worth answering.
Joe Petersen is a C12 Chair serving business owners in the Fort Worth area. C12 is a peer advisory and coaching organization for Christian business owners, and the one-on-one that follows Thirty Chairs is the same kind of conversation C12 members have every month. Joe built this event because every time AI came up in a C12 forum, no one wanted to move on. He wanted to give that conversation the room it deserves.