- At HumanX in Las Vegas tech leaders talked about on AI's impact on business.
- Speakers like Kamala Harris emphasized collaboration between the tech industry and government.
- AI enthusiasm ran high but many attendees were focused on practical ways to drive company revenue.
This week, I attended HumanX, where thousands of startup founders, investors, and tech industry executives gathered in Las Vegas to discuss AI's value proposition to their bottom lines — and the future.
The nearly four-day conference opened with remarks from former Vice President Kamala Harris. Harris, who served as "AI czar" during the Biden Administration, was one among a handful of lawmakers at the event who called for stronger cooperation between the tech industry and the federal government.
In the following days, attendees sat in on panels with veteran investors like Vinod Khosla and Tim Draper alongside rising stars of the AI boom like Hugging Face's Thomas Wolf and Mistral's Arthur Mensch. There was ample time to swerve between the booths on the convention floor where tech giants and startups alike had reps ready to woo customers.
AI conferences can feel a bit like a dance. People talk with excitement about the transformative power of this technology, but it's also clear they're gauging where the real value lies.
Here are my top takeaways:
1. Patience is a virtue when it comes to ROI
Conference speakers had some advice on making long-term gains with AI.
Glean CEO Arvind Jain cautioned companies to establish an "AI team" to create a roadmap for integrating the technology. "Make small bets. Don't try to actually immediately focus on ROI," he said. "Focus on education first, like, make your workforce trained with AI."
In the sales landscape, Conviction's Sarah Guo said companies have already made "high-fructose corn syrup" gains, reveling in their capacity to send mass emails or spam customers with calls.
"That actually drove a lot of traction," she said. However, "real customers actually churned off that pretty quickly because it doesn't serve a real need. Nobody wants the spam — which is what it is."
Still, it got people to start "buying the products" and she expects that to continue. "That's what I think we're going to see this year in terms of those real ROI use cases."
2. Vibes and valuations
AI startups are fetching wild valuations, but the question is whether they're caught in a bubble that's set to burst.
Investors are essentially "taking a bet" on the future cash flow of a business, said Tuhin Srivastava, CEO and cofounder of AI inference company Baseten. "I'm a beneficiary of that," he added.
Srivastava pointed to Anysphere, which makes the coding assistant Cursor, and was in talks to raise funding at a valuation of close to $10 billion earlier this month, after hitting $100 million in annualized recurring revenue in a span of 12 months, Bloomberg reported. Coding startup Codeium, is raising funding at a $2.85 billion valuation after hitting $40 million in ARR, TechCrunch reported.
At face value, these seem like massive valuations, but Srivastava says he thinks they're reasonable in the context of the venture landscape just a few years ago.
"Companies in 2021, during all that craze were like, you know, a million dollars of ARR, raising a billion dollars. Think about these AI companies, they all have a lot of revenue," he said.
He joked that valuations — to some extent — are being calculated on "vibes" but he believes they're grounded in real growth potential. "You know, we're probably at 0.1 percent adoption of AI in the enterprise. So we have a thousand x upside there."
For companies with little to no revenue, talent may be the value metric.
A few investors told BI they heard, to their surprise, that companies acquiring AI startups for a strategic advantage were valuing them on a "per engineer" basis.
If you have more thoughts on talent-based valuations contact me at [email protected].3. Here's at least one new job we'll see soon
Aside from prompt engineers and a beleaguered new set of "AI heads" at companies, many are still wondering what "new jobs" this technological shift will bring.
As AI makes it easier to code, and "vibe-code," we should expect to see a new wave of highly compensated "product engineers," Andrew Filev, CEO of AI coding platform Zencoder said. These are individuals who are versed in product management, a role that typically oversees new products from ideation to launch, and software engineering, which deals with the technical details of new products.
4. Governance is a pain point
AI governance is still a bit of a murky term.
"There's a little bit of a conflation of governance and regulation," said Navrina Singh, founder and CEO of AI governance platform Credo.
Singh told BI she defines governance with three questions:
- Do you have a handle or understanding of risk?
- How do you actually mitigate the risk of these technologies?
- How do you future-proof your AI investments for potential policy changes — not only at the company level, but at the government level?
The most misinformed opinion companies have is that governance will slow them down in adopting AI. Credo's data has shown the opposite. " We are finding that companies are getting better ROI," she said.
Dataiku's CEO Florian Douetteau observed a similar anxiety around governance at an "executive field trip" the company held for the CEOs of its customer base in September 2024. The company further investigated CEOs' top AI anxieties and published them in a survey. Governance ranked high on the list with 94% of about 500 CEOs surveyed saying they suspect employees are secretly using generative AI tools without official approval.
5. More people are sounding the alarm on deflation
Silicon Valley leaders from Khosla to Sam Altman have expressed concerns that AI will spur deflation. Those fears were echoed by a handful of attendees at HumanX.
To be clear, the US is still experiencing inflation with the consumer price index rising about 2.8% for the twelve month period ending in February 2025, according to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. However, technological shifts are often correlated with deflation, as they boost productivity and lower production costs.
"There is no denying that AI-based technologies are evolving rapidly and being adopted by people and enterprises," said Steve Berg, a partner at Lytical Ventures. "There are inflationary impacts happening as well, which offset the deflationary impacts of technology, but what happens when one side or the other becomes dominant?"
