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Newsweek
9 hours ago
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Summit 2025: Photos From Day One of Newsweek's Sonoma Tech Event
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Under a big white tent on the pavilion of the Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn & Spa, dozens of AI leaders gathered on Monday to attend the first day of Newsweek's AI Impact Summit. "The lineup is fantastic," Christian Cavello, a senior manager of customer experience and strategy at consulting firm Navigate, told Newsweek during the networking reception. Suma Nallapati, the chief information officer for the city of Denver, agreed, emphatically telling Newsweek that she found industries and sectors alike "well-represented" on the stage. Nallapati herself will take the stage tomorrow for day two of the summit. Over the next two days, some of the most important industry voices are joining Newsweek to discuss how organizations can leverage new capabilities most effectively in the age of AI. Sonoma, CA - Navigate's Alex Bunda and Christian Cavello meet with Newsweek senior reporter Katherine Fung during Nexus Connect Meetings at the AI Impact Summit on Monday, June 23, 2025. Sonoma, CA - Navigate's Alex Bunda and Christian Cavello meet with Newsweek senior reporter Katherine Fung during Nexus Connect Meetings at the AI Impact Summit on Monday, June 23, 2025. NICK OTTO/NICK OTTO Monday was jam-packed with insightful conversations about whether organizations should build AI in-house or outsource it, how to re-skill employees in the age of AI and how to foster trust through responsible AI. The speaker list for the first day of the summit included Babak Hodjat, Cognizant's chief technology officer; Francis deSouza, Google Cloud's chief operating officer; and Sriram Thiagarajan, Ancestry's chief technology officer, among others. Ashley Britt, the vice president of finance at Octopus Energy, said she was most interested in deSouza's panel, "The New Era of AI: From Experimentation to Transformation," which explored how companies in every industry can successfully implement AI. Britt told Newsweek she liked "the way he framed that it's bigger than just the small, practical implications that we had originally took a lot of notes on, and going into how it's basically going to touch everybody." Sonoma, CA - Octopus Energy VP Ashley Britt speaks with Newsweek senior reporter Katherine Fung during Nexus Connect Meetings at the AI Impact Summit on Monday, June 23, 2025. Sonoma, CA - Octopus Energy VP Ashley Britt speaks with Newsweek senior reporter Katherine Fung during Nexus Connect Meetings at the AI Impact Summit on Monday, June 23, 2025. NICK OTTO/NICK OTTO "I come from a finance background, so technology is not usually deployed immediately," Britt said. At Octopus Energy, Britt uses machine learning to turn large swaths of data into a simplified model forecast that's critical to procurement decisions. During the end-of-day reception, Britt sat with Sunya Norman, the senior vice president of impact at Salesforce, under the big umbrellas on the breezeway lawn. Norman, who accepted Newsweek's AI Impact Award on behalf of Salesforce this year, said it was extremely valuable for her to hear directly from chief information officers at other companies to understand how Salesforce should market itself with AI. Sonoma, CA - Salesforce SVP Sunya Norman meets with Newsweek senior reporter Katherine Fung during Nexus Connect Meetings at the AI Impact Summit on Monday, June 23, 2025. Sonoma, CA - Salesforce SVP Sunya Norman meets with Newsweek senior reporter Katherine Fung during Nexus Connect Meetings at the AI Impact Summit on Monday, June 23, 2025. NICK OTTO/NICK OTTO "It's helpful to see where there was overlap in messaging and worldview and to hear how different people are thinking about it," Norman said. "The speakers were super articulate." This year, Salesforce was awarded Best Outcomes, General Learning for the education-focused accelerator that it launched in 2023. Norman said she found it poignant to hear that Thiagarajan himself had not been able to look into his own family history as the CTO of the world's largest for-profit genealogy company. During his panel session, Thiagarajan explained that he had not been able to discover his own lineage because of lags in data collection among Asian countries. "Hearing the speaker from Ancestry being like, 'There's not really any digital records,' is a good reminder that not every country is the same," Norman said. "There's a lot of equity issues and there's a lot of people being left behind." Sonoma, CA - City and County of Denver CIO Suma Nallapati speaks with Newsweek senior reporter Katherine Fung during Nexus Connect Meetings at the AI Impact Summit on Monday, June 23, 2025. Sonoma, CA - City and County of Denver CIO Suma Nallapati speaks with Newsweek senior reporter Katherine Fung during Nexus Connect Meetings at the AI Impact Summit on Monday, June 23, 2025. NICK OTTO/NICK OTTO After seven sessions in the pavilion, plus a networking break that included jumbo cookies and an AI piano whose keys played on its own, attendees chose their own adventure, picking between two roundtables: "The AI Paradox: Tech Moves Fast, But Organizations Don't" and "The Future of Generative AI: What's Next Beyond Chatbots?" Navigate's Cavello and Alex Bunda led the former in the Kenwood Ballroom. Basking under the California sun, Bunda said between sips of his Aperol spritz that he heard great, "cathartic" conversations around the "collective experience" that many leaders are facing in the age of AI. "It's not a tech problem," Bunda, a senior manager at Navigate, told Newsweek. "We see the tech is continuing really fast—an exponential pace of change. It's a people and adoption problem." Sonoma, CA - AI Impact Summit attendees connect with other guests during Industry Knowledge Share Roundtables at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on June 23, 2025. Guests could choose between "The AI Paradox: Tech... Sonoma, CA - AI Impact Summit attendees connect with other guests during Industry Knowledge Share Roundtables at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on June 23, 2025. Guests could choose between "The AI Paradox: Tech Moves Fast, But Organizations Don't" led by Navigate, or "The Future of Generative AI: What's Next Beyond Chatbots?" led by Google Cloud. More NICK OTTO "At my table was this doctor from a very small practice, a health care executive and somebody from the electrical trade distribution industry," Bunda recalled. "You would not suspect you'd be able to have a conversation across those industries but they all share the same challenge, whether you're dealing with a patient or with the supply chain." In the room next door, where attendees discussed the future of generative AI, there were debates about whether a no-guardrails approach to AI in the workplace could promote curiosity and innovation. One table—which consisted of a product design expert, a NASA representative and a tech executive—felt the answer was a "pretty hard no." "With every interaction, there needs to be some sort of interrogation and understanding, and that just doesn't really exist," one of the attendees said. "That's always been an [machine learning] problem. You build a black box, you shake the box and stuff comes out. It's awesome when it works, but then you're like, 'why did it do this thing?'" Sonoma, CA - AI Impact Summit attendees connect with other guests during Industry Knowledge Share Roundtables at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on June 23, 2025. Guests could choose between "The AI Paradox: Tech... Sonoma, CA - AI Impact Summit attendees connect with other guests during Industry Knowledge Share Roundtables at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on June 23, 2025. Guests could choose between "The AI Paradox: Tech Moves Fast, But Organizations Don't" led by Navigate, or "The Future of Generative AI: What's Next Beyond Chatbots?" led by Google Cloud. More NICK OTTO At another table, the answer was "a combination of no and yes." "Using responsible AI, making sure that it's within the guardrails of the enterprise standards and architecture standards and things like that, but also letting people try with all these agents, and have them experiment and see where they go," another attendee said. Newsweek's AI Impact Summit will continue on Tuesday as additional speakers take the stage to discuss the role of AI in health care, consumer behaviors, filmmaking, urban planning, weather forecasts and more. Check out the full lineup here.
Newsweek
9 hours ago
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Summit 2025: Google Cloud COO Says AI Puts a Premium on Curiosity
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. The first day of Newsweek's AI Impact Summit brought together 130 experts and industry leaders to discuss how organizations can implement, scale and govern AI. The overarching goal of these discussions was to demonstrate the value of AI and the practical impact AI tools have on organizations across industries. Newsweek Contributing Editor Marcus Weldon opened the summit with a presentation about what he has learned from Newsweek's AI interview series. He explained how the conversations about AI seem to be exclusively on one side of the extreme – it's either going to save humanity or end it. "The whole goal of the series is to find rational value," he said. "We're not skeptical, but we're not overly optimistic." Sonoma, CA - Cognizant Chief Technology Officer of AI Babak Hodjat shares a demo of Cognizant's AI product during the AI Impact Summit at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on Monday, June 23, 2025. Sonoma, CA - Cognizant Chief Technology Officer of AI Babak Hodjat shares a demo of Cognizant's AI product during the AI Impact Summit at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on Monday, June 23, 2025. NICK OTTO/NICK OTTO Babak Hodjat, Cognizant's chief technology officer of AI, also gave a presentation on the company's use of agentic AI. Cognizant, the sponsor of the event, also had demonstrations of its multi-agent AI both on and off stage that enabled attendees to build a custom system to take home. At the first panel, leaders from Toyota Motor North America, Scahill Law Group and Google Cloud discussed AI use cases at their respective companies. They all explained that AI tools help boost efficiency and productivity by handling more routine tasks, thereby freeing up time for employees to focus on more meaningful, strategic work. Sonoma, CA. - Raj Pai, Melody Ayeli and Vikram Kooblall speak with Marcus Weldon during the "Two Worlds of AI: To Buy Or Build" panel during the AI Impact Summit at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn... Sonoma, CA. - Raj Pai, Melody Ayeli and Vikram Kooblall speak with Marcus Weldon during the "Two Worlds of AI: To Buy Or Build" panel during the AI Impact Summit at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on Monday, June 23, 2025. More NICK OTTO/NICK OTTO While AI has many benefits, Melody Ayeli, the senior director of enterprise AI at Toyota Motor North America, said that they are not rushing into AI implementation without proper regulations and testing. "We're a company that's very conservative because we put safety and quality first, and so that extends to AI," she said. "Anything that we put in the car is rigorously tested, and as you know, [AI] is not always correct, so there's a lot of work to be done to make sure that it's accurate and for us, it's very serious." In addition to human speakers, there was also a sidewalk delivery robot from Serve Robotics at the "AI in Motion: Designing for Driving the Future" panel. Both speakers from Designworks, a BMW Company, and Serve Robotics spoke about how they are using AI to design the best products. Sonoma, CA - Serve Robotics Co-founder MJ Chun and DesignWorks Director of Strategy and Partnering Paul Ferraiolo speak with Newsweek Contributor Chuck Martin during the "AI in Motion: Designing for Driving the Future" panel at... Sonoma, CA - Serve Robotics Co-founder MJ Chun and DesignWorks Director of Strategy and Partnering Paul Ferraiolo speak with Newsweek Contributor Chuck Martin during the "AI in Motion: Designing for Driving the Future" panel at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on Monday, June 23, 2025. More NICK OTTO/NICK OTTO During each of their one-on-one conversations, leaders from Zoom, and Kaiser Permanente all shared how their organizations are using AI to continue to innovate and improve the experience for all stakeholders. All of the speakers emphasized how listening to the wants and challenges of customers, users, clinicians and patients is the most important place to start when deciding if and how to implement AI. Sonoma, CA - Zoom Chief Technology Officer Xuedong Huang speaks during a 1:1 panel conversation in Newsweek's AI Impact Summit at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on Monday, June 23, 2025. Sonoma, CA - Zoom Chief Technology Officer Xuedong Huang speaks during a 1:1 panel conversation in Newsweek's AI Impact Summit at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on Monday, June 23, 2025. NICK OTTO/NICK OTTO Google COO Francis deSouza told Newsweek's Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Cunningham that "every part of a company is going to be touched by AI," so executives need a strategy. "A successful employee in any company will be viable in every function, plus AI," he said. "And so companies need to create sort of skilling programs and training to make sure that their employees are comfortable with what's out there. It will also place a premium on skills like curiosity [and] willingness to experiment, because things change so quickly that we need a workforce that is willing to be curious about what's out there. It also plays a premium on making sure that employees are responsible about how AI can be used." Sonoma, CA - Google Cloud COO Francis deSouza speaks with Newsweek Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Cunningham during "The New Era of AI" panel in Newsweek's AI Impact Summit at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on Monday,... Sonoma, CA - Google Cloud COO Francis deSouza speaks with Newsweek Editor-in-Chief Jennifer Cunningham during "The New Era of AI" panel in Newsweek's AI Impact Summit at Fairmont Sonoma Mission Inn and Spa on Monday, June 23, 2025. More NICK OTTO/NICK OTTO To read more about the live coverage of day one and to follow along for the rest of the summit, check out Newsweek's AI Impact Summit live blog. Live coverage will resume on Tuesday at 9:00 am PST.
