AI Forum Americas

VCs in the AI era - Moderator: Robert Maciejko (MBA'92J), INSEAD AI. Participants include: Deedy Das, Principal, Menlo Ventures; Geoff Ralston (MB'92D), Founder, SAIF.

A practical VC conversation on recent AI deals: what non-obvious insights drove investments, which early metrics matter, and how teams turn demos into real weekly usage and renewals. It also covers where defensibility comes from in 2025, go-to-market and enterprise adoption patterns, and the trust, data, and testing needed to go from pilot to rollout.

AI Creators - Moderator: Prof. Jason Davis. Participants include: Tingwei Huang (MBA'10J), Director of Product & Design, AI, Intuit; Mansi Maken (MBA'10D), Amazon - GM Alexa International team; Ricky Wong (MBA'10D), Lead Product Manager for Veo, Google DeepMind.

A fast, practical session where leaders from Google DeepMind, Amazon Alexa, and Intuit explain how they ship AI people actually use, what surprised them, and what really moved the metrics. Expect clear takeaways on generative video control, agentic voice assistants, and finance agents, plus how they reduce wrong answers, ground outputs in data, and measure impact.

Victory Hall: After Party

AI Innovators, a discussion led by Robert Maciejko (MBA'92J), INSEAD AI, INSEAD Alumni Association. Participants include: Sebastian Bak (MBA'14J), Global Co-Lead for AI, BCG X; Gemma Garriga (EMBA'21Jan), VP of Engineering, GitHub; Stephane Kasriel (MBA'04J), Meta FAIR VP FAIR Foundations. 

A practical session with leaders from GitHub, Meta FAIR, and BCG X on turning cutting-edge AI into products people use and scaling them across real enterprises. Expect takeaways on data advantage, model and infra choices, safety and evaluation, and the go-to-market and metrics that move efforts from demo to daily use.

AI Founders. Panellists/speakers will include: Julian Green (MBA'98J), Co-founder and CEO, Brightband; Mara Larson-Richard (EMBA'23Jan), Salesforce, VC and Startups; Olivier Debeugny (MBA'04D), Founder and CEO, Lingua Custodia; Shayak Mazumder (MBA'15J), CEO and CTO, Adya AI; Agentic AI.

A candid, practical conversation with founders building AI in weather and climate, enterprise agents, and finance, focused on data advantage and model choices, shipping safely in regulated or mission-critical settings, and the go-to-market and unit economics that actually work. it’s designed to leave attendees with 3–5 concrete takeaways via brief intros, deep-dive prompts, a lightning round, and audience Q&A.

Working with AI, a hands-on workshop by Blu co-founder Fabrice Fischer (MBA'03J)

This workshop uses real life examples to show how AI is really being used to achieve strategic benefits in businesses. Moving away from LLMs, we will explore the far more ubiquitous AI applications in business-relevant areas such as prediction, trend and anomaly detection, and decision making. This allows us to collectively imagine how business models can be transformed by harnessing the power of AI, possibly leaving you with ideas for your own business.

Launching Botipedia by Prof. Phil Parker

Wikipedia, the crowd-sourced encyclopaedia with 64 million articles, is a wonderful information source for many. Introducing Botipedia, an AI-powered encyclopaedia with over 400 billion articles, drawing on a content engine consisting of hundreds of archives, databases, the open internet and satellite feeds. The scale difference reflects the power of AI relative to human labor but the ingenuity of Botipedia lies in taming this awesome power with strong controls, resulting in a knowledge engine that does not hallucinate. Culmination of over three decades of AI and data engineering, INSEAD is launching Botipedia by its creator, Prof. Phil Parker. Phil holds a pioneering patent in year 2000 on Natural Language Generation; his early work was supported by the Gates Foundation to bring information to African farmers who otherwise have little access to knowledge.

"McKinsey in a Box": How AI will shape the future of Consulting  by Joao Filipe (MBA'22D), co-founder Xavier.ai 

Previously, 99.9% of businesses could never afford a top-tier consulting firm like McKinsey, BCG, Bain, Deloitte and others. Now AI is democratizing strategic advice and enabling the disintermediation of business expertise in real time. Xavier AI, is one of the first movers in the AI Consulting space. The Xavier AI platform allows the world's smallest firms, down to the cafe owner or farmer, to get strategic consulting advice. In this session, we will discuss future scenarios for the consulting industry, how consulting firms can adapt, and how AI will fundamentally change not only consulting, but the way we think about business.

Navigating the AI Event Horizon: Strategic Responses to the Rise of AGI and ASI by Prof. Jason Davis

Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) represent the ultimate "event horizon" — powerful, transformative, yet shrouded in deep uncertainty. Drawing from his recent book, Event Horizon Strategy, INSEAD Professor Jason Davis will discuss practical frameworks that organisations and leaders can employ to strategically engage with the profound uncertainty surrounding AGI and ASI. This session explores flexible experimentation, strategic agility, and real-world insights from AI pioneers such as Tesla and Palantir, emphasising the importance of preparing for multiple scenarios regarding AGI / ASI timelines and different impacts from AI diffusion.

Using Psychological Science to Understand and Improve the Impact of AI by Assistant Prof. Johannes Eichstaedt, Visiting Assistant Professor, INSEAD and Faculty Fellow and Assistant Professor, Stanford HAI

AI and large language models are being woven into our social and professional fabric. This shift presents an opportunity to integrate psychological wisdom into these AI systems, enabling interactions that benefit our mental health and well-being. Eichstaedt will present research on how LLMs can advocate for policy positions and contribute to happiness and meaning in life. In mental health specifically, LLMs may substantially expand access to care, assisting in therapist training and therapy delivery. Beyond LLMs helping our psychology, tools from psychology can also be used to better understand LLMs – such as their tendency to appear more likeable. Finally, Eichstaedt will discuss how we need to think harder and with greater specificity about the impacts of AI on people and organisations, and attempt to escape the simplistic narratives presented by Silicon Valley.