Latest Interviews
Showing 316–330 of 1,549 transcripts.
Clear all filters- RAISE Summit26 min
Adrian McDermott, CTO, Zendesk: What CX Teaches Us About AI And The Future Of Work
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.
- RAISE Summit20 min
A Frieside chat with Rafay & BUZZ HPC: Sovereign AI in Action From Infrastructure to Impact
Rafay, BUZZ HPC, Haseeb, Craig
BuzzHPC positions itself as a sovereign AI provider for Canadian enterprises by operating an integrated stack across Sweden and Canada that delivers over 135,000 GPUs while ensuring strict data residency and compliance with regulations like the U.S. Cloud Act. By transitioning from declining bare metal margins to value-added model-as-a-service offerings, the platform achieves revenue per H100 of $3.50 to $5.00 through self-service consumption, multi-tenancy, and enterprise-grade SLAs. This approach satisfies modern developer expectations by offering granular isolation from single units to 1,000+ GPU clusters, enabling efficient end-to-end project hosting without the friction of data movement between hyperscalers and domestic clouds.
Base Power Raises $1B led by Addition, with Trust Ventures, Lightspeed, a16z, Altimeter, Elad Gil
Elad Gil, Zach Dell, Justin Lopas, Molly O'Shea
Base secured an oversubscribed $1 billion Series C led by Addition, accelerating from its previous $200 million round to fund its "Speed to Power" product designed to bypass traditional grid interconnection delays for data centers. Backed by strategic investors like Lennar and Starwood alongside founders from SpaceX and Tesla, the company is deploying gigawatt-scale battery capacity from its Austin "Factory One" at a target rate of 100 megawatts per month. This capital infusion supports a strategic pivot to replace fossil fuels with cost-efficient solar and storage, aiming to solve critical energy bottlenecks for AI development while expanding operations into high-solar states like California and Florida.
- RAISE Summit23 min
A fireside Chat with Mati Staniszewski, CEO & Co-Founder of Eleven Labs ft. Balderton Capital
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.
- RAISE Summit21 min
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.
- RAISE Summit22 min
Inception Fund & AI: From Inception to Exit Building AI Giants from Europe and the Nordics
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.
- RAISE Summit37 min
OVH Cloud, ClickHouse, Neon, Aiven, Airbyte & Commit: Open Software Infrastructure 2.0
Abel, German, Oskari, Heike, Michel, Alexei, Francois Beaufort
Executives from Aiven, Neon, Airbyte, ClickHouse, and OVHcloud converged to discuss how open-source data platforms are securing $10 billion in combined valuations while addressing enterprise needs for data sovereignty and interoperability. The panel detailed how the AI boom is driving a shift from human-led development to agentic provisioning, creating demand for storage-centric architectures that support short-lived, unstructured data workloads. Looking ahead, industry leaders predict a five-year trajectory where hundreds of millions of citizen developers leverage commoditized AI to compress development cycles, necessitating hybrid infrastructure strategies that balance local model execution with scalable cloud data management.
- RAISE Summit40 min
Alix, SAP, Daytona, Feedly, Prosus & Handelsblatt: The Future Agentic AI & Autonomous Workflows
Alix, Edwin Kodabachan, Paul Van der Boor, Alexander Maisor, Emmanuel Casimates, Ivan Bourazin
Experts at a recent industry gathering defined Agentic AI as a shift from simple request-response models to autonomous systems capable of multi-step planning, emphasizing that security and governance remain critical barriers requiring strict human oversight. SAP and other leaders proposed frameworks like "agentic quality controls" and locally hosted environments to manage agent identities and comply with regulations, while anticipating a workforce evolution where humans supervise "digital teammates" rather than performing manual tasks. Despite concerns over the hype cycle, participants agreed that organizations with mature data and processes will soon leverage these tools to exponentially increase productivity, provided they implement robust guardrails to direct this technological capability toward tangible business value.
- RAISE Summit23 min
Oege De Moor (XBOW) & Apoorv Agrawal (Altimeter): Hackers with GPUs Offensive Security in the AI Era
Oege De Moor, Apoorv Agrawal, Uhey Dhimur
Altimeter Capital-backed startup Expo has deployed an autonomous AI agent that ranks as the world's top ethical hacker, identifying over 1,200 vulnerabilities including critical zero-days in enterprise giants like Palo Alto Networks and Salesforce within a single week. This superhuman capability forces a strategic industry shift toward AI-driven defense to combat a "skill shortage" in malicious actors that has enabled nation-states to automate attacks with unprecedented speed. While the market anticipates a major cyber incident within twelve months due to rising AI-generated code risks, human security roles are expected to evolve from technical execution to the strategic orchestration of these autonomous systems.
- RAISE Summit37 min
Fractile AI, Rogo, Scribble VC, San Francisco Compute: The AI Trillion-Dollar Opportunity
Eric Manisse, Elizabeth Weill, Walter Goodwin, John Willett
San Francisco Compute CEO Eric Manisse, Scribble Ventures' Elizabeth Weill, and founders Walter Goodwin and John Willett convened to analyze strategies for scaling AI infrastructure, hardware, and enterprise solutions amidst rapid technological evolution. The panel detailed critical operational frameworks, including balancing hardware development timelines with software agility, mitigating hallucination risks in financial applications, and proactively shaping export control regulations rather than merely complying with them. Experts concluded that long-term success in this sector relies on specialized human expertise for deep tech, the creation of durable data moats, and a shift toward treating global compute as a utility to drive the next industrial revolution.
- RAISE Summit21 min
Fireside Chat with George Robson, Partner @ Sequoia & Felix Blossier, Co-Founder & COO @ Pennylane
Penny Lane, founded by seven entrepreneurs after the Price Match acquisition, transitioned from a service-led hybrid model to a pure software platform designed to empower SMB accountants through AI-driven co-pilot tools rather than automation. The company navigates the complex regulatory landscapes of Continental Europe, particularly France and Germany, by leveraging a business rule management system that allows non-engineers to manage compliance updates without code changes. With a recruitment strategy prioritizing curiosity and domain expertise over experience, Penny Lane aims to scale its all-in-one bookkeeping and tax solution across Europe despite the severe scarcity of local accounting talent.
- RAISE Summit34 min
Ori, PolyAI, Cresta, Writer & Fireworks AI: Is Enterprise Defensibility Possible in an AI's World?
Mike Butcher, May Habib, Russell Banzon, Nicola, Lynn, Amalia, Mahdi
Industry leaders convened to declare that traditional SaaS and seat-based pricing models are collapsing as enterprises pivot to agentic AI, where value is derived from direct outcomes and autonomous revenue generation rather than software access. The consensus emphasizes that architectural advantages are temporary, with true defensibility emerging only through proprietary data flywheels and comprehensive organizational adoption strategies that integrate AI into core workflows. Looking toward 2025, the panel predicts a surge in production-level deployments driven by a tenfold reduction in infrastructure costs, forcing companies to prioritize offensive scaling over defensive postures to survive rapid market disruption.
- RAISE Summit29 min
Anjney Midha of a16z: Algorithmic Independence The Next Frontier in National Infrastructure
The event defines Sovereign AI as a four-tiered strategy for achieving technical and cultural independence, utilizing methods like mid-training to correct deep-seated biases rather than simple fine-tuning. As nations transition from closed-source prototypes to open-source models, a geopolitical divide is emerging where "hypercenters" like the US and China face competition from Europe's "Mistral Compute" initiative while non-hypercent nations adopt joint-venture models to retain value. The discussion concludes with predictions that general-purpose robotics and universal computer use will mature within two years, leveraging Europe's specific strengths in computer vision to secure its strategic position in the global AI landscape.
- RAISE Summit35 min
AI Visionaries Panel: Collaboration is All You Need! Open Source as AI's Great Accelerator
Olivier, Ankit, Matt, Mitchell, Jim, Jonathan
Leaders from Nvidia, Red Hat, Mozilla, and the Linux Foundation convened to analyze the symbiotic relationship between AI-driven investment strategies and the accelerating open-source ecosystem. The panel emphasized that while artificial intelligence boosts code velocity, the primary value in commercial open source now lies in community coordination and neutral standards that prevent market fragmentation. Key outcomes included the identification of a "reverse venture capital" approach for selecting durable projects and a consensus that human oversight remains critical for navigating the legal and architectural challenges of AGI development.
- RAISE Summit34 min
Bruno Gagliardo, Global Head of Data & AI @ Sanofi : Molecule to Market, Driving AI Transformation
Bruno Gagliardo, Larry Orimoloe
Sanofi CEO Bruno Gagliardo unveiled a five-year strategy to transform the pharmaceutical giant into a "pharma tech" leader by migrating 85,000 employees to a cloud-based data mesh architecture powered by large-scale AI. The initiative integrates the RAISE governance framework and a $100 million impact barrier to mitigate hallucination risks while accelerating drug discovery and regulatory submissions from 19 weeks down to five. This cultural shift prioritizes AI augmentation over replacement, utilizing agentic systems and a hybrid build-or-buy approach to deliver substantial efficiency gains across research, manufacturing, and commercial operations.