AI is so overhyped. VB Summit will sort through the noise

AI is so hot, it’s all people are talking about — at least in Silicon Valley. The big companies like Facebook, Google, and Apple are in an all-out war trying to hire the best talent or acquire the smartest companies in this new area. You can’t sit in a SF Bay Area coffee shop these days without hearing someone dropping the word “AI” in pitches. And as with all major trends, there’s a lot of snake oil being sold, so filtering out the noise from the real stuff is important.

Because despite the hype, AI is very real. Its potential impact on the market is in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Which is why we’re proud to announce VentureBeat Summit on June 5 and 6 in Berkeley, CA — the first senior executive-level conference focused exclusively on how companies are applying artificial intelligence to get real results.


Register today for 50% off with early-bird pricing — a savings of $1,100!

Reserve your ticket here


This invite-only event, which takes place at the historic Claremont Hotel in Berkeley for VP-level execs and above, will showcase technologies and use cases that are transforming business now — from digital applications in marketing and advertising to cyber security and the collaborative workplace.

Explaining technology disruption is VentureBeat’s specialty, and it’s why I’m personally excited that we’re leading the charge in this fascinating area of AI. We’re working hard to find the most compelling cases to showcase at the Summit. For example, we’ll be hearing from VPs of marketing and other business units about how they’re using AI, and make sure to feature the hottest up-and-coming AI technologies and providers in the process.

Why now and why so wide ranging?

Progress in AI and machine learning has unleashed a new wave of product innovation. It’s spawned exciting large platforms like Facebook’s Bots for Messenger, Amazon’s Alexa/Echo and Microsoft’s Cortana. But AI and machine learning have also empowered smaller developers and product managers who are building smarter apps of all kinds. Photo-sharing apps like Prisma exploded onto the scene last year, offering inspiring imagery created by neural nets.

This shows that harnessing AI isn’t just in reach of the largest IT companies, but open to business executives everywhere.

And over the course of 2016, and entering 2017, a number of forces converged to allow astonishing breakthroughs in applications. They include availability of big data spurred by the mobile phone revolution, breakthroughs in science of neural networks and NLP, and reduced cost of powerful computing hardware machines, like that of Nvidia’s, to around $1,000.

The VB Summit will focus, in particular, on the digital industries where large amounts of data make AI technologies profitable. Companies applying this technology span industry verticals including consumer services, retail brands, and B2B enterprise.

We’ll dig beneath the hype, and bring to the surface those real technologies and strategies allowing executives to tap these forces for competitive advantage.

We’ll be announcing the first speakers shortly, but you’ll want to book this one early, because we expect to be sold out again. We do have a few spots available for those wanting to apply for admission. Take advantage of our early bird pricing (save $1,100) which will last until March 10.

As a point of clarification, the event represents the metamorphosis of our Mobile Summit event, where we have featured leading speakers such as Sundar Pichai, now the CEO of Google, to explain the unfolding mobile revolution. That event, which we’ve done for six years, emerged to address the mobile revolution of the past decade. This year, however, we dropped “Mobile” from the name. It’s now the VB Summit, and this year it’s all about AI.

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