Two Takeaways From HumanX

1.

Past the point of certainty: When I attended HumanX last year, conference C.E.O. Stefan Weitz described his mantra to me as, “We’re here to give you confidence and conviction in your A.I. journey.” But a lot has changed in the past 12 months: the rise of the agentic web, debates over L.L.M.s versus world models, Anthropic’s battle with the Pentagon, the SaaSpocalypse panic, OpenAI’s “code red” strategic pivot, etcetera. So when I connected with Weitz a few days before this year’s conference began, I wasn’t surprised by his newfound belief that it’s no longer “realistic” to stand by that thesis. “You’re moving at a speed you didn’t choose through conditions that you can’t see,” he told me. (And this was several days before Anthropic revealed Mythos.)

This year, Weitz said, HumanX has been more focused on promoting practical applications for A.I., as well as enterprise adaptability and readiness, rather than predicting the future—“because who the hell knows what’s dropping tomorrow?” It’s a point I heard echoed by a number of executives over the past few days. Jennifer Tejada, the C.E.O. of software firm PagerDuty, told me, “We want our customers to benefit from new technology, and we are expected to manage the risk.” She said that failure to strike a balance between opportunity and risk could put a company in “real material business trouble,” and concluded, “There’s still a lot more that we don’t know than what we know.” Steve Lucas, the C.E.O. of Boomi, told me that, between the “ticking time bomb” of cybersecurity implications, increasingly tense governance considerations, rising urgency around regulation, and the opportunities the technology affords, uncertainty about the near-term future is almost unavoidable. “I see it evolving,” he said. “I see it changing every second of every day.”

2.

The art of the practical: The conversations on the sidelines of HumanX focused on the same industry-wide issue that I’ve been hearing about for years: Enterprise adoption is still a big question mark. While companies are vastly increasing their budgets to make room for A.I. experiments, many deployments are shallow, and the majority of pilots are all but dead on arrival. In a recent survey of a few thousand executives and employees, enterprise A.I. firm Writer found that 79 percent of executives are struggling with lagging R.O.I., and 75 percent said their A.I. strategy is “more for show than for actual internal guidance.”

In its report, Writer noted the need for organizations to “radically redesign” their internal operations in order to get actual value from A.I. systems. This notion was echoed across the HumanX conference floor—although it’s far easier said than done. As several executives admitted to me earlier this week, unless tech companies shift their strategy to offer holistic partnerships rather than specific tools, the rate of A.I. diffusion throughout the economy will be limited by predictable frictions—employee education and retraining, structural reorganization, etcetera—which can be costly and cumbersome. Clearly, the industry is at an inflection point: Companies will need to validate the R.O.I. for adoption to continue.

Ian Krietzberg, Puck News