“Ive been going to random AI events for the last year or so. Big conferences, meetups, some online groups. They all kinda blur together after a while honestly. Last week I went to one of the Open Future Forum dinners that Murray Newlands hosts. It’s more of a recurring peer group than a one-off event — mostly CFOs, CISOs, and senior operators comparing notes in a small room. Smaller group, maybe 20 people. I almost didnt go because I expected the usual thing. People pitching their copilot startup. Arguments about whether AGI is 2 years or 10 years away. The same model benchmarks over and over. It wasnt that at all. Most people there were operators from mid to large companies. Not founders of AI startups. People trying to figure out how AI actually gets deployed inside real orgs without everything breaking. The conversation kept circling around the same things: Who actually owns AI decisions inside a company. Like is it IT, is it the business unit, is it a new role nobody has yet. Different companies had different answers but nobody seemed happy with theirs. How security teams are reacting to agents specifically. A couple people mentioned their infosec team just flat out blocked certain tools. One guy said his company banned all AI coding assistants for 6 months then unbanned them after a review. That got some laughs around the table. Why procurement is slowing everything down. This came up a lot. Enterprise sales cycles for AI tools are apparently longer than expected because procurement doesnt know how to evaluate them. What happens when marketing picks one AI tool, engineering picks another, and HR picks a third. Nobody is coordinating it. The word sprawl came up multiple times. NVIDIA, Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic, Palantir kept getting mentioned. Not in a hype way though. More like what are enterprises actually comfortable deploying from these vendors. The thing I kept thinking about after was that enterprise AI adoption seems way more social than technical. Execs were comparing notes on what other companies are doing internally. Half the discussion was basically we tried this, that failed, legal blocked this, security approved that, finance hated this workflow. It felt like trust spreading between peer networks more than traditional buying. Anyway I didnt expect to get much out of a random dinner but it genuinely changed how I think about the gap between public AI conversation and whats actually happening inside companies. Theres a much bigger gap than I realized. Happy to answer questions in the thread if anyone is curious about specifics.” submitted by /u/prishaaaah
Originally posted by u/prishaaaah on r/ArtificialInteligence