InstructureCon 2026 Recap: What's New, What's Next

What we took away from InstructureCon 2026

InstructureCon 2026 wrapped up in Louisville last week. Three days at the Kentucky International Convention Center, more than 200 sessions across a program built for every role and experience level, keynotes from Instructure's leadership team laying out a clear direction for what comes next, and the volume of institutional case studies that has always made InstructureCon a peer-learning event.

For our team, IC26 was a real signal of where the Canvas community actually is. Adoption at scale, institutions past experimentation, and a program built around the questions institutions are asking now that AI is in production.

Here's what we took away from the conference, what the Instructure product direction means for institutions, and what to keep an eye on next.

What you can't miss from InstructureCon 2026 this year

If you couldn't be in Louisville, a few themes ran across the conference that are worth flagging for any Canvas institution planning the next academic year.

Education in the Making is more than a theme. The "Education in the Making" framing was the throughline of the entire program. Sessions leaned into creativity, cultivation, and the hands-on work of what actually gets built inside a Canvas institution. The tone across three days was practical rather than theoretical, and the strongest sessions were the ones where institutions walked their peers through what they built and how it landed.

The Canvas community is past the "should we adopt AI" question. The institutions presenting at IC26 were not describing pilots. They were describing production deployments, scaled programs, and the operational lessons from running AI across the student experience. The AI Readiness Certification introduced as a new pre-conference offering this year is a direct signal of where the community is. It exists because institutions are ready for structured AI adoption, not for another framing document.

The big InstructureCon 2026 keynote takeaways and what they mean for institutions

Three keynote moments defined the tone of the conference.

Instructure CEO Steve Daly's main stage keynote laid out a bold vision for how education and technology can move forward together in a time of rapid change. The framing was less about product announcements and more about direction, positioning Instructure as a partner to institutions treating the AI moment as an opportunity to build rather than to defend.

Chief Product Officer Shiren Vijiasingam unveiled the Instructure product roadmap. The direction is clear: AI reimagined as a collaborative force, deeper investment in enabling institutions to build their own solutions on top of Canvas, and continued innovation designed to simplify the educator experience rather than add layers to it. For institutions running Canvas at scale, this direction sets up meaningful capacity across the next academic year.

Chief Learning Officer Melissa Loble sat down with Michael Horn for a fireside conversation on AI in education. Horn, co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute, made the case for AI as a catalyst for connection, curiosity, and purpose-driven learning rather than as an efficiency tool. Loble connected the framing to the operational reality institutions are working through. Dr. Anne-Laure Le Cunff, a neuroscientist at King's College London and founder of Ness Labs, added a third keynote focused on what the research on curiosity says about how students learn, adapt, and grow. A genuinely fresh contribution to the AI-in-education conversation.

The big Instructure product direction from InstructureCon 2026

The IC26 program showcased direction across the full Instructure ecosystem. Here are the areas worth understanding as you plan for the next academic year.

What has changed in Canvas at InstructureCon 2026?

Canvas remains the center of the Instructure ecosystem, and the IC26 program reinforced continued investment in usability, accessibility, and workflow simplification. The roadmap direction emphasized reducing the operational load on educators and instructional designers, with tighter integration between Canvas and the broader Instructure product family. For institutions running large Canvas deployments, this direction sits well alongside the AI Campus Support and AI Student Tutor capabilities that already integrate with Canvas. Where that value shows up is in the depth of implementation: how closely these tools adapt to an institution's own data flows, workflows, and support processes.

What is Instructure's AI direction after InstructureCon 2026?

Instructure's AI framing at IC26 emphasized AI as a collaborative force rather than a replacement layer. The new AI Readiness Certification, introduced as a pre-conference offering this year, reflects that framing directly. It is designed for institutions past the experimentation phase and ready to operationalize AI adoption at the workflow level. For Canvas institutions thinking through their AI planning cycle, the certification is worth adding to the internal roadmap as a way to align teams around a shared vocabulary and shared expectations.

What is next for the wider Instructure ecosystem?

The IC26 program positioned the Instructure ecosystem, including Canvas and Parchment, as an interconnected platform serving the full student journey from enrollment through credentialing. Roadmap sessions emphasized deeper integration across the family of products, with a clear direction toward giving institutions the tools to build their own experiences on top of the platform rather than only consuming what Instructure ships.

What we heard on the floor at InstructureCon 2026

The Canvas community is a step ahead of where the LMS conference conversation was even six months ago. The questions at Booth 53 centered on two products in particular: AI Student Tutor and AI Ops Assistant.

The tutoring conversation was the dominant one, and it consistently came back to ownership. AI Student Tutor is institutionally-led. The institution controls what the tutor sees, who has access, which courses it lives in, and how it interacts with institutional policies. That framing matters for FERPA, faculty content ownership, and the depth of course context the tutor actually has visibility into.

The AI Ops Assistant conversation was one of the strongest of the event. Instructional designers responded to the course cleanup use case in particular. Instructional design teams are carrying more work than most institutions realize, and the framing that resonated most at the booth was capacity: a way to give teams room to focus on higher-leverage work rather than absorbing every ad-hoc request across the institution. AI Ops Assistant was designed for exactly that.

A final theme worth naming is that human-in-the-loop is becoming more important to institutions than ever. The conversations at the booth centered on how AI can work alongside faculty and staff rather than replace them, with people staying in control of what the AI does and when. That principle sits at the core of all LearnWise products including AI Feedback & Grader and AI Campus Support.

The session: scaling AI support at CCSNH

Our session on the agenda was Start Where You Are: Scaling AI Support Across a Multi-College System in Canvas, with Alisa Kadenic-Newman, Director of Educational and Student Success Technologies at the Community College System of New Hampshire. Alisa walked through how CCSNH deployed AI Chat Support across seven colleges and thirteen locations without waiting for an institution-wide AI policy. The core reframe: you don't need a policy to start, you need a use case. The session covered the deployment model, the governance approach that got IT and academic leadership comfortable, and the data showing why a closed, institutionally owned knowledge base beats an open database for institutional trust. The full CCSNH case study is worth reading if you missed the session.

How does LearnWise keep AI safe and compliant for institutions?

LearnWise pairs institutional-grade security with a human-in-the-loop design in every product. The AI assists; staff and faculty always review and approve. That was the answer institutions at IC26 were looking for.

On governance and integrity, LearnWise products work from an institution's own approved content rather than generating coursework, and every workflow keeps a person in control of what the AI does. That approach is set out in our Ethical AI in Education principles.

On security and data protection, LearnWise holds ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, FERPA, and GDPR. Data is encrypted in transit and at rest, each institution's data sits in its own segregated database, and access to production is protected by enforced multi-factor authentication, backed by an ongoing risk management program.

Institutions evaluating AI can review the full set of policies, certifications, and subprocessor details in the LearnWise Trust Hub.

Looking ahead

Instructure closed InstructureCon 2026 with an announcement worth circling on the calendar.

InstructureCon 2027 will be held in Cleveland, Ohio, July 20–22, 2027.

The Canvas community is entering a new phase, and the IC26 program made clear that the direction is going to be shaped as much by the community as by the product team. For institutions running Canvas and planning the next academic year, that is a good signal. Session recordings will be available in the Instructure Community shortly if you missed anything.

Between now and Cleveland, if you want a broader perspective on where the sector is heading, our 2026 State of AI-Powered Teaching & Learning Report is a good place to start. It draws on more than 191,283 aggregated and anonymized student-AI conversations across 56 of our 150+ global partner institutions, and it uncovers how AI has moved firmly from front-office administration straight into the classroom.

If you would like to talk through what any of this means for your institution's Canvas strategy, request a walkthrough. And if you were in Louisville, thank you for the conversations and the coffee. See you in Cleveland next year!