We’re Heading to Community Summit North America 2026

Gaylord Opryland • Nashville, TN • October 11–15, 2026

We’re Not Just Attending—We’re Speaking

Weidenhammer is attending Community Summit this year, and we’re also speaking. That matters to us. Our team spends most of the year helping you put Microsoft tools to work, so the chance to share what we’ve learned on a stage this size is a real moment for us. Chris Smith, our Director of Business Analytics & Cloud Solutions, is leading three sessions across the week.

Meet Our Speaker: Chris Smith

Chris Smith, Director, Data & AI, is a senior technology leader, architect, and analytics strategist at Weidenhammer, where he serves as a fractional CTO and Chief Data Officer, providing executive-level technology, data, and platform leadership to clients. In this capacity he owns technology platform evaluation and methodology, sets architectural and data strategy, and guides clients from vision through delivery. He also shapes Weidenhammer’s own engineering, architecture, and analytics standards, extending the same rigor he brings to client engagements across the firm’s practices.

Expand Chris’s Bio

With more than 25 years at Weidenhammer as a senior technical leader and architect, including service as Director of Analytics and Intelligent Automation, Chris brings deep institutional knowledge and platform-scale architectural experience. He serves as chief architect for complex, data-driven platform ecosystems, specializing in cloud-native architecture, analytics, attribution, and integration-heavy commerce environments. His hallmark is building scalable, maintainable platforms that evolve with the business without requiring disruptive rewrites.

Software Development & Architecture. Chris defines target-state architectures across multi-system ecosystems, favoring API-first, integration-centric platform design with abstraction layers that manage vendor dependencies and enable composable architectures. He leads technical discovery and modernization assessments — evaluating replace-versus-adapt economics, integration cost, and long-term platform value — and translates business requirements into evolvable technical designs. His data- and integration-first mindset ensures the platforms he shapes remain composable, transparent, and future-ready as they scale.

AI & Intelligent Automation. Chris brings a pragmatic, results-driven approach to AI and machine learning, embedding predictive and prescriptive capabilities directly into the analytic and operational workflows decision-makers rely on. He champions generative-AI-driven software development, leading Weidenhammer’s adoption of an AI-assisted SDLC — including GitHub Copilot & Claude Code — and pioneering the instruction files, prompting practices, and repeatable patterns that make AI a consistent part of client solution delivery. He also applies GenAI-assisted architectural review and modernization analysis to accelerate assessment, documentation, and decision-making while grounding recommendations in long-term platform economics.

Microsoft Data & Analytics Platforms. As a Microsoft Cloud Solutions Partner, Chris specializes in the Microsoft data ecosystem — including Microsoft Fabric, Azure Synapse Analytics, Databricks, and Power BI. He architects end-to-end data lakehouse solutions for Weidenhammer clients that unify ingestion, transformation, and consumption layers into cohesive platforms built for performance, governance, and scale.

Data Engineering & Integration. Chris’s work spans data engineering, ETL/ELT, and integration architecture, ensuring clean, reliable data flow across disparate systems and establishing a trusted single source of truth. He has designed systems where attribution, financial transparency, and auditability(traceability, revenue splits, commission logic, and transaction tracking) are mission-critical requirements.

Known for his ability to engage cross-functional stakeholders from executive leadership to front-line operators, Chris translates complex technical and data concepts into clear, compelling narratives that drive adoption and cultural change. Throughout his career, he has delivered business-changing results across a range of industries and functional domains. His focus remains constant: designing modern data and automation solutions that are not only make full use of an organization’s data, but that fundamentally reshape how organizations compete, operate, and grow.

Chris’ Sessions

Microsoft Fabric for the D365 Power User: From Curious to Confident in 60 Minutes

Breakout Session (60 min) · 101 – New To

A practical, beginner-friendly walkthrough of Microsoft Fabric’s core pieces — OneLake, lakehouse, warehouse, dataflows, and semantic models — and how they connect to the Dynamics 365 reporting work you already do.

Data Warehouse vs. Lakehouse vs. Fabric: Making the Right Architectural Choice for Your Organization

Breakout Session (60 min) · 201 – Intermediate

A clear comparison of data warehouses, lakehouses, and Fabric so you can match your platform choice to your organization’s analytics maturity and goals.

Governing Your Lakehouse: Data Quality, Lineage, and Security in Microsoft Fabric

Deep Dive (90 min) · 301 – Advanced

A hands-on look at governing your lakehouse — cataloging assets and lineage with Purview, designing least-privilege security for Dynamics 365 data, and automating data quality monitoring in Fabric.

What Is Community Summit (And Why It Matters)

Community Summit North America is the largest independent Microsoft AI & Business Applications user conference — created for Microsoft users, by Microsoft users. It brings together 5,500+ attendees, 500+ speakers, 600+ sessions, and 300+ partners across the Microsoft AI & Business Applications ecosystem. The education and training spans Microsoft AI, Azure, Dynamics, Copilot Studio, Fabric, and Power Platform, aligned to wherever you are in your Microsoft journey.

Here’s why that’s worth your time. The people presenting are practitioners, not pitch decks — they’ve done the work and they’ll tell you what actually happened. Whether you’re weighing new AI, cloud, data, ERP, or low-code investments, new to a platform and need training, migrating from one system to another, or optimizing what you already run, there’s a track built for where you are. If you’ve ever sat through a vendor demo and wondered what it looks like once the lights come up, this is the antidote.

Want the full picture? Visit Community Summit North America or read Why Attend.

5,500+ Microsoft Business App Users

600+ Education Sessions

500+ Expert Speakers

35 Academy Classes

300+ Microsoft Business App Partners

Why Weidenhammer Is Attending

We’ve been a Microsoft solutions partner for more than 20 years, and the learning never stops. The platforms keep moving, and staying current is part of the job — not a nice-to-have. So we show up where the work is being discussed honestly.

We work across the same areas this conference covers: Microsoft AI, Azure, M365 Dynamics Business Central, Copilot Studio, Fabric, and Power Platform. This year we’re paying closest attention to data and analytics, Microsoft Fabric, AI and Copilot, and Business Central — the places where we’re seeing the most movement and the most questions from the teams we work with. If you’re wrestling with any of those, come find us. It’s a good week to compare notes.