Latest Interviews

Fireside Chat with Ekin Dogus Cubuk, Co-CEO of Periodic Labs | RAISE Summit 2026

Ekin Dogus Cubuk, Iain Martin

Founded by former Google Brain and DeepMind researchers, a new company is deploying a hybrid infrastructure of large language models, reinforcement learning, and high-throughput robotics to overcome data limitations in physical science. The Bay Area laboratory automates semiconductor and materials research by executing thousands of daily experiments to create a recursive improvement cycle for chip manufacturing and solid-state chemistry. With an immediate goal of reaching 1,000 experimental trials per day, the venture aims to generate rapid process engineering breakthroughs for the industry while evolving toward profitable intellectual property generation.

From AI Adoption to AI ROI | Glean & Altimeter Capital | RAISE Summit 2026

Arvind Jain, Apoorv Agrawal, Vikas Khannabiswamy, Shyam Gollakota, Vikram Bajaj

Glean, co-founded by former Google and Rubrik executive Arvind Krishnan, differentiates itself in the enterprise AI market by building a proprietary context graph and retrieval layer rather than developing foundation models. The company is strategically pivoting from personal productivity tools to measurable departmental use cases like customer service and legal review to demonstrate clear return on investment amid rising infrastructure costs. By maintaining neutrality across major model providers and utilizing limited forward-deployed engineering, Glean aims to solve the critical gap between raw AI capabilities and secure, accurate enterprise implementation.

The New AI Challenge: Trust, Control, and Scale | JetBrains x NVIDIA | RAISE Summit 2026

Oleg Koverznev, Dion Harris

As enterprises transition from individual AI literacy to team-level agentic deployment, a strategic shift is required to restructure engineering units into integrated "teams of builders" that maintain shared context across the product lifecycle. This evolution necessitates a three-layer governance framework combining individual tool integration, centralized platform policy enforcement, and collaborative team environments to ensure agentic intelligence remains observable, traceable, and auditable. By leveraging open standards like the Agent Communication Protocol and secure infrastructure solutions, organizations can mitigate risks such as shadow AI and prompt injections while focusing on extracting tangible business value from agentic inference rather than superficial metrics.

Crusoe's Energy-First Vision for the AI Cloud | Chase Lochmiller | RAISE Summit 2026

Chase Lochmiller, Henri Delahaye, Francesc Campoy, DAN GALPIN, FRANCOIS BEAUFORT

Crusoe is establishing itself as a vertically integrated AI infrastructure leader by relocating compute from traditional hubs to stranded energy sources, having secured over 40 GW in its development pipeline with rapid construction cycles like the 11-month Abilene project. The company recently acquired Atero to deploy its "Crusoe Memory Alloy" for optimized inference, simultaneously shifting its product strategy toward distributed "AI factories" that monetize hardware investments through cost-effective token generation rather than large-scale training. As the industry transitions from theoretical announcements to execution over the next 24 months, Crusoe prioritizes operational resilience and end-user value delivery to dominate the emerging market for decentralized, energy-driven AI services.

David Bitton, David Dubrovsky, Andrew Dieckman & Rachel Metz | Fireside Chat with 5C & AMD

David Bitton, David Dubrovsky, Andrew Dieckman, Rachel Metz

The event examines the strategic co-design partnership between infrastructure builder 5C and chipmaker AMD, which aims to resolve global compute shortages through vertically integrated data centers optimized for multi-generational hardware cycles. Industry leaders prioritize site selection based on power grid capacity, political stability, and proactive community engagement to mitigate opposition while managing the intense market consolidation where top customers control half of global demand. Looking toward a decade ahead, the discussion outlines a bifurcated infrastructure future featuring massive liquid-cooled training clusters alongside edge AI, driven by the necessity of flexible power allocation and deep strategic trust between partners.

Fireside Chat with Yann LeCun, Executive Chairman of AMI Labs | RAISE Summit 2026

Yann LeCun, Tom Mackenzie, Chet Haase, Francois Beaufort, Romain Guyett

Yann LeCun founded AMI Labs to develop JEPA-based World Models that overcome the physical reasoning limitations of current Large Language Models by predicting abstract states rather than discrete tokens. This strategic departure from Meta, driven by incompatible visions for Artificial General Intelligence and business focus, positions the Paris-based entity to lead global industrial applications like Level 5 autonomy and domestic robotics. To ensure geopolitical neutrality and preserve data sovereignty, LeCun is also spearheading Project Tapestry, a distributed initiative aggregating parameters from diverse international contributors without requiring raw data sharing.

OpenAI x Cerebras: Sachin Katti & Andrew Feldman in Conversation | RAISE Summit 2026

Sachin Katti, Andrew Feldman, Henri Delahaye

In December 2024, OpenAI and Cerebras finalized a historic $20 billion partnership to deploy GPT-5.6 on Cerebras infrastructure, enabling a record-breaking inference speed of 750 tokens per second while expanding data center capacity across Europe to address sovereign AI demands. This collaboration has accelerated OpenAI's internal operations, establishing Codex as the default interface for all employees and driving a monthly release cadence of frontier models through AI-assisted research workflows. Looking forward, the alliance prioritizes enterprise adoption over token volume, anticipating that the rapid integration of AI agents will fundamentally rewire organizational structures and redefine productivity metrics within the next year.

Contentsquare & Eurazeo: From Data Rich to AI Smart Reinventing a Scale Up in Real Time

Anne-Charlotte Filbert, Ilan, Remy

Eurazeo's Anne-Charlotte Filbert and Content Square's Ilan analyzed the latter's strategic pivot from a traditional analytics provider to an AI-native platform following a 2023 acquisition of Heap. Driven by CEO John, the company restructured its organizational culture and product roadmap to prioritize agentic workflows, launching proactive "Sense" insights while implementing strict security protocols for tools like Gemini and Dust. The discussion concluded that future market survival hinges on the "velocity" of leadership to transform late-stage enterprises, contrasting Content Square's scale with the agility required for AI-native success.

A Fireside Chat with Sébastien Verger, CTO at Dell Technologies ft.The French Tech Journal

Sébastien Verger, Francois Beaufort

Dell positioned AI as a core strategic pillar through its "Dell AI Factory," addressing the critical challenge where 80% of proof-of-concepts fail to reach production by emphasizing data quality and secure on-premises deployment. The company highlighted its logistical prowess in rapidly scaling infrastructure for partners like XAI and Mistral AI while launching tools such as Dell Pro AI Studio to enable local model execution on AI PCs. Looking toward the next five years, Dell anticipates healthcare breakthroughs in personalized cancer treatments and champions sovereign European data strategies to ensure sustainable, responsible AI governance.

Adrian McDermott, CTO, Zendesk: What CX Teaches Us About AI And The Future Of Work

Adrian McDermott, Joseph

During a presentation on enterprise AI transformation, Zendesk representatives detailed how their platform now supports 15,000 generative AI users and redefines customer service as a critical revenue engine where 94% of value derives from support interactions. The company outlined a strategic shift toward outcome-based pricing and the development of voice-enabled agents, aiming to reduce the customer service market's dependence on human labor by the end of the decade. Data from 33 million analyzed tickets suggests that AI will primarily address upstream business failures and low-value queries, allowing human agents to focus on high-empathy tasks that prevent churn.

Windsurf, BUZZ HPC, Gnosis, ElevenLabs, Prosus & Bloomberg: The Agentic Economy AI’s Unseen Hand

Rachel Metz, Tim Cowley, Jero, Alex, Matty, Maria Zuber, Matias Niemelaer, Andrzej Baliczak

A diverse panel of industry leaders from BuzzHPC, Prozus, Windsurf, and 11 Labs defined AI agents as autonomous systems requiring multi-modal feedback loops to drive enterprise adoption. Real-world deployments at companies like DHL and Prozus have demonstrated significant operational gains, including 20% faster delivery times and a 1.7 million-hour productivity increase, while OpenAI's $3 billion acquisition of Windsurf validates the technology's strategic value in software engineering. Despite hurdles regarding data disambiguation and regulatory compliance, the panel predicts a shift toward a task-based internet where agents outperform human operators in efficiency and revenue generation.

A fireside Chat with Mati Staniszewski, CEO & Co-Founder of Eleven Labs ft. Balderton Capital

Mati Staniszewski, James Wise

Founded by Mati Kovacs and Peter, Eleven Labs has evolved from addressing Polish film dubbing limitations into a global AI voice leader operating with offices in the US, Europe, India, and Japan. The company currently executes a dual strategy of frontier research and application development, delivering production-ready voice agents for healthcare scheduling and interactive entertainment while distinguishing itself through high-fidelity dialect recognition and a creator marketplace that has paid over $5 million. Looking forward, leadership is prioritizing a three-tier trust framework for safety and a technical pivot toward combining cascaded reliability with end-to-end Duplex models to achieve human-like latency in the coming year.

Scaleway & SemiAnalysis: Unlocking AI's Potential Insights from Deploying Europe's Most Advanced

Scaleway launched Europe's largest Hopper GPU cluster in 2023 to secure data sovereignty and prevent U.S. hyperscaler dominance, now hosting major AI players like Mistral for training and inference. The provider is advancing "Project ION," a consortium-backed initiative aiming to build capacity equivalent to 280,000 H100 chips with private capital while seeking government demand assurance rather than direct subsidies. Operating across five European regions, Scaleway positions itself as a full-stack public cloud solution that prioritizes legal immunity from U.S. laws over domestic hardware manufacturing, targeting a consolidated market of EU-based public and private AI consumers.

Poolside AI, IREN, Forbes: From 10x to 100x Building AI Systems for Real World Scale

Emma Allen, Dennis Skriniop, Isa Kent

Dennis Skriniop of Iron and Isa Kent of Poolside discuss the critical infrastructure and energy requirements for scaling foundation models toward human-level intelligence. Kent outlines Poolside's $500 million investment in automating a "model factory" that executes 1,800 monthly experiments, emphasizing that 80% of success relies on distributed systems engineering rather than algorithmic discovery. Skriniop and Kent further analyze the necessity of hybrid power grids, disaggregated storage architectures, and the emerging role of specialized "Neo-Clouds" to address the exponential complexity of operating clusters exceeding 10,000 GPUs.

Inception Fund & AI: From Inception to Exit Building AI Giants from Europe and the Nordics

Peter Sarlin, Oliver

Former professor Peter Sarlin founded the private AI lab Silo AI in 2017 and led the bootstrapped company to a $700 million exit when acquired by AMD in 2022, establishing the largest pure-play AI acquisition in Europe. Sarlin attributes this success to a contrarian philosophy that prioritized functional machine learning over hype while hiring primarily from academia, resulting in a workforce of over 220 AI scientists before the strategic sale. Beyond this specific case study, Sarlin highlights that the fragmentation of the European single market remains the primary barrier preventing regional startups from scaling into trillion-dollar enterprises, forcing founders to adopt a global-first strategy despite Europe's strengths in industrial AI applications.