AI Impact Summit 2025: Photos From Day One of Newsweek’s Sonoma Tech Event

Under a large white tent on the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa pavilion, dozens of AI leaders gathered on Monday to attend the first day of NowsweekSummit on the impact.

“The programming is fantastic,” said Christian Cavello, principal director of customer experience and strategy at the consulting firm Nowsweek During networking.

Suma Nallapati, the information director of the city of Denver Nowsweek that it found industries and sectors “well represented” on stage. Nallapati herself will go on stage tomorrow for the second day of the summit.

Over the next two days, some of the most important voices in the industry join Nowsweek To discuss how organizations can take advantage of new capacities most effectively in the AI ​​era.

Monday was full of insightful conversations on the question of whether organizations should build an AI internally or outsource it, how re-skill employees in the AI ​​era and how to promote confidence through the intermediary responsible for AI.

The list of speakers for the first day of the summit included Babak Hodjat, Cognizant technology chief; Francis Desouza, Chief of the Google Cloud farm; And Sriram Thiagarajan, Ancestry technology director, among others.

Ashley Britt, vice-president of finance at Octopus Energy, said that she was most interested in the Desouza panel, “the new era of AI: from experimentation to transformation”, which explored how the companies in each industry can successfully implement AI.

Britt said Nowsweek She liked “the way he framed that she is greater than the small practical implications on which we had originally taken many notes, and in the way in which this will fundamentally touch everyone.”

“I come from a financial environment, so technology is generally not deployed immediately,” said Britt. At Octopus Energy, Britt uses automatic learning to transform large expanses of data into a simplified model forecast which is essential to supply decisions.

During the end of the day reception, Britt sat with Sunya Norman, main vice-president of the impact on Salesforce, under the big umbrellas on the Breezeway lawn. Norman, who accepted NowsweekThe AI ​​IA Impact Prize on behalf of Salesforce this year, said it was extremely precious for it to hear information directors directly in other companies to understand how Salesforce should market AI.

“It is useful to see where there was overlapping in messaging and world vision and to hear how different people think about it,” said Norman. “The speakers were super articulated.”

This year, Salesforce received the best results, a general learning for the accelerator focused on the education he launched in 2023.

Norman said that she had found poignant to hear that Thiagarajan himself had not been able to examine his own family history as the CTO of the largest for profit for the world. During his panel session, Thiagarajan explained that he had not been able to discover his own line due to a lag in data collection among Asian countries.

“Hearing the speaker of ancestry like” there are not really digital files “is a good reminder that not all countries are the same,” said Norman. “There are a lot of equity problems and there are many people who are.”

After seven sessions in the pavilion, plus a networking break which included Jumbo cookies and an IA piano whose keys played alone, the participants chose their own adventure, the selection between two round tables: “The IA paradox: technology moves quickly, but organizations do not do it” and “the future of the generative AI: what is beyond the discussions?”

Cavello and Alex Bunda of Navigation led the first in the Kenwood ballroom.

Under the California sun, Bunda said between the sips of his Sprit Aperol that he heard large “cathartic” conversations around “collective experience” with which many leaders are confronted in the AI ​​era.

“This is not a technological problem,” said Bunda, a senior manager at Navigation, said Nowsweek. “We see that technology continues very quickly – an exponential rate of change. This is a problem of people and adoption.”

“At my table was this doctor with a very small practice, a health care manager and a person in the electrical trade distribution industry,” said Bunda. “You would not suspect that you may have a conversation in these industries, but they all share the same challenge, whether you are dealing with a patient or the supply chain.”

In the next room, where the participants discussed the future of the generative AI, there have been debates on the question of whether an AI -free approach to the workplace could promote curiosity and innovation. A table – which consisted of an expert in product design, a representative of NASA and a technological framework – made the answer to a “non -hard”.

“With each interaction, there must be a kind of interrogation and understanding, and that does not really exist,” said one of the participants. “It has always been a [machine learning] issue. You build a black box, you shake the box and the things come out. It’s great when it works, but you say to yourself: “Why did he do this thing?” “”

At another table, the answer was “a combination of no and yes”.

“Use responsible AI, by ensuring that this is in the railings of corporate standards and architectural standards and things like that, but also to let people try with all these agents, and make them experiment and see where they go,” said another participant.

NowsweekThe IA IA IA summit will continue on Tuesday while additional speakers take the scene to discuss the role of AI in health care, consumer behavior, cinema, town planning, weather forecasts and more. Discover the full range here.