Latest Interviews

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.

Anjney Midha of a16z: Algorithmic Independence The Next Frontier in National Infrastructure

Anjney Midha

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.

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.

Aurélien Rodriguez, Director at Cohere: Building AI for Security-Minded Enterprises

Aurélien Rodriguez

In this session, a former Meta AI researcher now directing foundation model training at Cohere explains how the company prioritizes secure, grounded generation over pursuing Artificial General Intelligence. The discussion highlights a strategic shift toward on-premise deployment and retrieval-augmented pipelines that ensure data remains within client environments while minimizing hallucinations through strict source verification. By leveraging co-development partnerships with entities like Fujitsu and RBC, the organization focuses on specialized, high-value tools that deliver concrete business impact in regulated sectors without mimicking human biology.

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.

WEKA, Cohere, Nebius: Rewriting the Rules Agentic AI and the Race to Scale

Lauren Vaccarello, Cécile Robert-Michon, Dan Shtan, VYACHESLAV TYKHONOVSKYI, DAN GALPIN, Danila

At a panel on AI infrastructure and economics, Weka CMO Lauren Vaccarello, Cohere's Cécile Robert-Michon, and Nabeus CTO Dan Galpin discussed the necessity of rethinking legacy systems to support massive scale and agentic AI. The speakers emphasized that modern requirements prioritize intelligence per token over raw cost efficiency, citing Nabeus's software-first approach that achieves near-NVIDIA benchmark performance without virtualization and Cohere's converged storage solutions that deliver 20x faster checkpointing. They concluded that enterprises must abandon rigid long-term planning in favor of short-cycle agility to navigate the rapidly shifting demands of privacy, security, and compute resources in a commercial AI landscape.

Alok Sama & Nikesh Arora: AI, Cybersecurity, and Bold Leadership

Alok Sama, Nikesh Arora

The event outlines a systemic shift toward the democratization of intelligence, where agentic AI transforms search, disrupts traditional ride-sharing economics through autonomous fleets, and expands cybersecurity threats into state-sponsored warfare. Parallel to these technological shifts, the discussion contrasts high-risk investment strategies at SoftBank with Palo Alto Networks' disciplined acquisition model of retaining founders to build unified security platforms. The presentation concludes by warning of an imminent quantum computing vulnerability that threatens current encryption standards before defenders can establish quantum-safe protocols.

Alexis Ohanian, Founder, 776, Reddit & Victorien Tixier, CEO, ScorePlay: The Future of AI in Sports

Alexis Ohanian, Victorien Tixier, Vic

At an industry conference, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian interviewed Scoreplay CEO Vic LaRosa to discuss how artificial intelligence will commoditize content production while elevating live sports as the premier vehicle for authentic, real-time human connection. Their dialogue highlighted Scoreplay's mission to replace legacy infrastructure with centralized AI automation for media asset management, a strategy designed to unlock global market reach through instant localization and data-driven camera placement. The conversation further emphasized a strategic pivot toward women's sports, where Ohanian argues that re-underwriting assets from first principles and leveraging digital-first storytelling will drive exponential valuation growth and reshape traditional league dynamics.

Jennifer Tejada, CEO&Chairperson, PagerDuty: Never Miss a Beat Building Reliable Experiences with AI

Jennifer Tejada, Tyson Singer

Spotify and PagerDuty are leveraging artificial intelligence and standardized infrastructure to address a 43% surge in major operational incidents that cost enterprises nearly $1 million each. By shifting from a pet-centric to a cattle-centric philosophy, Spotify enforced rigid "golden paths" through its Backstage platform, a move that enabled fleet-wide code transformations and the commercialization of its internal tools as the B2B "Portal" product. This evolution toward automated digital resilience and code remediation prioritizes predictability over developer autonomy, allowing Spotify to manage its massive codebase while transforming into a higher-margin infrastructure provider.

Fabricio Bloisi, CEO of Prosus Group at RAISE 2025

Fabricio Bloisi

On the one-year anniversary of his appointment as CEO, Fabricio outlined Prosus's strategy to transform its $130 billion valuation into a €1 trillion European tech giant through a $15 billion AI investment and aggressive expansion. The company is accelerating this vision by restructuring 40,000 employees, deploying 200 AI models at portfolio firm iFood, and seeking regulatory approval for a $4 billion acquisition of Just Eat Takeaway. With profitability increasing tenfold and $18 billion in reserves, Prosus plans to double its size and target fintech and e-commerce sectors to secure global leadership in AI-driven commerce execution.

Stephanie Cohen - CSO @ Cloudflare: Future of Content & Fair Compensation in the Age of AI

Stephanie Cohen

On July 1, Cloudflare implemented a permission-based default policy to block AI scrapers while launching a beta for micropayments via HTTP 402, aiming to transition the web into a value-based economy where content creators control data access. This strategic shift, supported by data showing a 65% surge in training crawler traffic, has drawn criticism from industry figures like BrightData's David Bossert but is defended by CEO Matthew Prince as necessary to repair the broken economic relationship between publishers and tech giants. Complementing this infrastructure, newly appointed Chief Strategy Officer Stephanie Cohen leverages her Wall Street background to guide Cloudflare's expansion into cybersecurity and AI financial services, predicting that high-value human judgment will remain essential even as automation transforms data-rich sectors.

Wes Cummins, Founder & CEO of Applied Digital: Ellendale’s Purpose Built AI Factory in North Dakota

Wes Cummins

Applied Digital is expanding its high-power density data center operations by securing a 400-megawatt contract with CoreWeave to construct a North Dakota campus utilizing stranded wind energy and designed for AI workloads. The company transitioned from Bitcoin mining to Tier 3 semiconductor-grade infrastructure after spending $5 billion on this project to ensure "five nines" reliability and extreme cooling standards for hyperscalers. With approximately 3% ownership by NVIDIA, the firm is capitalizing on the shortage of available power sites in the U.S. heartland while planning future phases that will integrate gas assets and explore nuclear options like small modular reactors.

RAISE 2025: Building AI for Security-Minded Enterprises

A French math PhD turned AI leader leveraged their academic background to build the Llama family at Meta before joining Cohere to prioritize business traction and secure, localized enterprise solutions. The speaker details a strategy where data quality and strategic partnerships, such as those with Fujitsu and RBC, drive the development of models optimized for specific languages and industries rather than pursuing Artificial General Intelligence. By focusing on grounded generation and flexible hosting options, the organization ensures data sovereignty and verifiable outputs for regulated sectors while avoiding the inherent risks of trying to mimic human cognition.

RAISE 2025 : Fireside Chat with Amit Bendov, CEO & Co Founder of Gong

Amit Bendov, Brian Bauman, Amit Bhandav

Founded by Amit Bhandav to solve CRM data gaps, Gong.io leverages autonomous AI to capture sales communication and transform enterprise productivity from manual entry to instant, context-aware insights. Operating on a maturity scale between assisted and near-autonomous levels, the platform currently handles high-volume administrative tasks while preserving human judgment for high-liability decisions. As enterprise leaders demand integrated AI for revenue generation, Gong drives adoption by eliminating briefing bottlenecks for Fortune 500 clients while fostering a unique culture that prioritizes employee personal branding and deep client relationships.

Or Lenchner - CEO of BrightData : The Data Awakening Defining the Future of AI

Or Lenchner, Larissa Holzki

Bright Data, the world's largest web data collection infrastructure provider, successfully defended its scraping practices in high-profile lawsuits against Meta and X, establishing a legal precedent that defines public data as information freely accessible without login barriers. Serving as the primary data source for major AI labs, the company supplies over 40 billion daily website interactions for training Large Language Models while maintaining strict standards against filtering private or paywalled content. Looking ahead, Bright Data predicts a "dual internet" architecture emerging within six to twelve months that accommodates both human users and autonomous AI agents, eventually evolving into a robotics-focused era where these foundational data models enable complex physical automation.