5 Sessions You Can't Miss at This Year's PWX
What are the best sessions to attend at PWX 2026?
Every year, one of the most valuable parts of PWX event is the opportunity to step away from day-to-day operations and hear directly from the municipalities, contractors, engineers, and public works professionals tackling the same challenges we all face.
As our team prepares for this year’s conference in Houston, we’ve been reviewing the education program and identifying a few sessions we’re particularly excited to attend. With dozens of technical presentations, workshops, and discussions taking place throughout the week, narrowing the list down wasn’t easy, but these are five sessions that stood out to us.
1. Houston’s AI-Powered Pipe Prioritization for Smarter Wastewater Infrastructure
Monday, August 31 – 3:00–3:50 PM
You’ve heard “AI” thrown around in every industry conversation for two years now and still aren’t sure what it’s supposed to do for a sewer system? This one is for you.
Houston Public Works manages roughly 5,800 miles of sewer pipe for 2.3 million residents, and like most cities that size, sanitary sewer overflows are a constant fight. Instead of guessing which pipes to prioritize, their team fed three years of overflow data into an AI model to flag the highest-risk sections.
2. To Master Plan and Beyond — Tomball’s Story of Integrating Planning with Multiple Concurrent Utility Projects
Sunday, August 30 – 4:00–4:50 PM
This one’s for you if your city is growing faster than your master plan can keep up… and half your team isn’t sure which numbers in that plan is still valid.
Tomball, Texas expects to double its population in the next 25 years, all while running several water and wastewater projects at once. Their team kept their hydraulic models alive as working tools, giving leadership a clear, fiscal-year-by-fiscal-year picture of budget needs from design through construction.
3. Sewer Inspections: 10 Common Pain Points and How to Solve Them
Tuesday, September 1 – 9:00–9:50 AM
This one is our very own session (the best one), where we’re skipping the theory and going straight to the 10 bottlenecks that actually slow inspection crews and utilities down, with field-tested fixes for each one. We’ll bridge the gap between the office and the field, bringing practical insights from real-world operations to both sides.
Whether you manage a utility or lead an inspection crew, the goal is for you to leave with something you can apply the next time you’re in a manhole, or reviewing a report in the office.
4. Operations and Maintenance Jam Session
Sunday, August 30 – 4:00–4:50 PM
If you’re not sure whether attending educational sessions at a tradeshow is worth your time, this is the one to attend. It’s a hands-on, interactive workshop focused on real-world challenges, where participants can share their experiences, ask questions, and contribute their own perspectives.
This one’s basically an hallway conversation, just given a room and a time slot. It’s an open, roundtable-style discussion with the O&M Subcommittee on labor shortages, training gaps, and turnover. Worth noting: it runs at the same time as the Tomball session above, so you’ll have to pick one!
5. Small Town, Big Stormwater Issues: Strategic Stormwater Program Development for Jackson, Wyoming
Sunday, August 30 – 4:00–4:50 PM
This one’s for you if you’re running a stormwater program held together with good intentions, but limited staff, and little dedicated funding.
Jackson, Wyoming has about 10,500 permanent residents and millions of visitors a year, aging infrastructure, snowmelt to deal with, and like a lot of small municipalities, no dedicated stormwater staff or budget. They built a 10-year Strategic Stormwater Program Plan designed to be replicated regardless of community size, which makes it one of the more genuinely useful case studies for utilities in the whole program
See you in Houston!
Beyond the sessions themselves, some of the best conversations at PWX happen between them, in a hallway, at a booth, or over coffee. The Can-Ex Technologies team will be at booth #955 all 3 days, showing our latest inspection technologies and workflow tools. If you’re heading to Houston, come compare notes with us on whatever’s slowing your team down in the field right now.
We look forward to seeing you there!