By Lauren Giella
Senior Reporter
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Industry leaders and experts are gathered in Sonoma, California, for Newsweek's AI Impact Summit from June 23 to 25. The three-day event, sponsored by Cognizant and Google Cloud, included panels, fireside chats, roundtable discussions and networking sessions with leaders in health care, tech, policymaking, media, finance and more.
- The final day of the summit had a short program, including panel discussions about integrating AI into workflows, measuring the success of AI tools and AI governance, privacy and cybersecurity.
- Newsweek's Gabriel Snyder and Marcus Weldon shared their five takeaways from the summit
- Panelists on the first day spoke about the value and impact of AI tools, provided tips for implementing and scaling AI innovations and emphasized the importance of listening to all stakeholders.
- Day two featured discussions with AI leaders in health care and filmmaking, as well as executives from Instacart and officials from Denver, Colorado, and Charlotte, North Carolina.
- This summit comes days after Newsweek announced its inaugural AI Impact Winners. The 38 companies across 13 categories demonstrated practical solutions and measurable impacts AI tools had for their internal operations as well as external partners and customers.
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The live updates from the summit have ended.
Jun 26, 2025 at 01:46 PM EDT
Check out our coverage of the AI Impact Summit
The coverage of the AI Impact Summit has ended.
Check out our coverage of the best on-stage and off-stage moments in Sonoma.
Jun 25, 2025 at 01:49 PM EDT
5 main take aways from AI Summit
The close out the summit, Newsweek Editorial Director of Nexus Gabriel Snyder and contributing editor Marcus Weldon shared the five main takeaways from the event.
- AI puts a premium on curiosity and automates the mundane
- AI has to humanize healthcare and personalize engagement in general
- AI has the power to democratize expertise and also value unique human expertise
- AI adoption should focus on the end-to-end value created (in time, quality, service) efficiency and cost savings are byproducts
- Responsible AI is about transparency and privacy but also continuous validation and verification
Jun 25, 2025 at 01:42 PM EDT
Panelist says he likes to “jump in” on latest tech
The final panel of the day—with Rob Teel, the CTO of the state of Oklahoma, and Benjamin Maxim, the chief innovation officer at Michigan State University Federal Credit Union—tackled the regulatory maze of AI adoption, with a focus on governance, privacy and cybersecurity.
Teel said he is excited to partner with stakeholders from various industries when implementing AI.
"Every director is waiting at the gates to innovate with you and that's exactly the kind of culture that you want to create," he said. "That's part of our role as tech leaders."
He adds that there are many similarities between fintech and government because the constituency is so broad.
"You can have someone that's opening their new checking account at [age] 17 or 15, and you have someone that's 80 years old that's using their credit. So a lot of these tools that we're creating that involve people are creating efficiencies. This allows the person that's working at the credit union, more time with the person who needs more time."
In terms of regulation, Maxim said he liked to "jump in" on new tech "before it becomes not okay."
"Then you can start to sway the narrative in a direction, because you actually can talk about it intelligently and we've gone through this with things," he said.
"So everyone was terrified to have all of our banking information on these devices we carry around. We weren't allowed to do any of that while we started pushing and we pushed our regulators to be like, 'this is what we're doing, here's all the privacy we're doing, we're following these guidelines that they started to put out as well.' So we were fast into it. We do go cautiously and make sure we're doing the things that we think will become the guardrails and the guidelines that are coming."
Teel added that the technology department in Oklahoma has to work with a variety of regulators, including law enforcement, infrastructure and finance.
He said ensuring cross-sector compliance "can be quite a nightmare."
Jun 25, 2025 at 01:11 PM EDT
Mount Sinai doctor says AI can help retention and bottom line in health care
Dr. Girish N. Nadkarni of Mount Sinai joined Newsweek's Gabriel Snyder on stage to talk about how to measure return on investment (ROI) with the implementation of AI tools.
"If patients have a good experience with the health system at the time of booking their appointment or taking a follow-up visit, they're more likely to come back to the health system for follow up care [and] they're more likely to refer their friends and their colleagues and their family to that particular health system," he said. "And even if you can't see your quarterly bottom line or your early bottom line, that will accrue over time."
But on the flip side, he said, "Employee retention is a big problem in health care and is related to the burnout that health care workers experience."
This burnout is related to the amount of documentation clinicians have to do, and implementing AI agents to help with automation can help cut down time spent on those tasks and decrease burnout, he said.
"I truly believe we are going to get to a point in health care where AI is going to become a part of the care team and not using AI will open up liability," he said. "I think there is something to be said about the health system that wants to use AI in a safe, effective, ethical and responsible manner."
Nadkarni said that health systems need a more rigorous way to measure ROI for both clinical and economic benefits. He said there are evidence-based literature that exists for these measures and testing, but systems need a comparison group to serve as a benchmark.
"AI is an arbitrage of knowledge for time because, by compressing this knowledge and by providing actionable insight, it helps give us back time in our daily workflow to spend more time with our families, but also gives us more time before any bad things happen and to try to intervene," he said.
He adds that it is critical to keep humans in the loop when using AI, especially in high-risk industries like health care, to monitor models and make decisions in real time.
AI tools can broaden profit margins, generate more revenue and free people up to do more high-value tasks.
Nadkarni said most of the reasons why AI models fail in implementation and adoption are because "no one asked for this — It doesn't help me."
"So I think that we need to flip the paradigm on its head and start with the why and not with the how," he said.
Jun 25, 2025 at 12:40 PM EDT
Panelists discuss AI automation vs. augmentation
At the day's first panel, Sachi Desai, VP of AI at Climate, and Srini Kandala, CEO of Sears KAIros, spoke about AI implementation and how they are using it to completely automate or augment the workforce.
Kandala leads the Sears Deep Learning Center, which develop retail-specific products based on convolutional neural networks, generative adversarial networks and deep reinforcement learning. He said his company's call centers operate without humans.
Previously, he said there were different call centers with people who spoke different languages and provided different services. Now, multi-agents can speak every language and provide all functions.
If a customer wants to talk to a real human, they are referred to another AI agent that can do more than a regular agent can do. He said this AI agent comes in with expertise "whenever somebody needs a human intervention expertise beyond what a normal AI agent is handling."
"'What does a human give that I can I can give you?" he said of the advanced agent. "'I can read all the systems, I can give the manuals.'"
At Bayer, the company is more focused on augmentation. Desai is part of Bayer Crop Science's Strategy and Sustainability Organization, which focuses on digital farming. He helps farmers to improve crop production in a sustainable way.
"What we're doing with that information is we're basically figuring out the different workflows and job activities of our individual employees to start to automate those tasks," he said. "So like contact creation, marketing materials and so forth. That's all now unlocked them to engage growers much more."
The automation these AI agents provide allows employees to unlock new use cases and opportunities, while still keeping people in the loop.
Jun 25, 2025 at 11:26 AM EDT
Day three panels talk AI ethics, workflow and security
The Newsweek AI Impact Summit concludes Wednesday with a brief schedule of panels in the morning.
After opening remarks from Newsweek's Editor in Chief Jennifer Cunningham, Sachi Desai, the VP of AI at Climate (part of Bayer Crop Science division) and Srini Kandala, the CEO of Kairos Sears, will talk about how to ethically integrate AI into the workflow and assure AI agents are focused on return of investment.
The second discussion will focus on the practical measurements of AI success with Dr. Girish N. Nadkarni, the systems chair of the Windreich Department of Artificial Intelligence and Human Health and director of The Hasso Plattner Institute for Digital Health at Mount Sinai.
Finally, Benjamin Maxim, the chief innovation officer at Michigan State University Federal Credit Union, and Oklahoma's CTO Rob Teel will talk about how to ensure proper governance and ethics of AI implementation to ensure privacy safegaurds for cybersecurity.
The summit will end with closing remarks from Newsweek's Gabriel Snyder and Marcus Weldson. The pair will offer key takeaways from the summit to inspire the audience to make meaningful AI impacts at their organizations.
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Jun 24, 2025 at 06:12 PM EDT
Day two coverage has concluded
The live coverage has ended for day two of the summit.
Discussions today centered on AI use cases and transparency in health care, the future of AI in film and how AI is being used in the public sector.
Tune in tomorrow when coverage resumes at 9:00 a.m. PST.
Jun 24, 2025 at 06:03 PM EDT
WATCH: Highlights from day one of the summit
Jun 24, 2025 at 05:35 PM EDT
Attendee take a well-deserved break to enjoy the afternoon in Sonoma
After a great morning of panels, roundtable discussions and networking, attendees are enjoying a nice break.
Some people are relaxing by the pool, others are off to a local vineyard, but either way, people are enjoying the sunny Sonoma weather.
Everyone will be back later this evening for another networking reception.
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Jun 24, 2025 at 05:08 PM EDT
Learn more about the AI Impact Award 2025 winners at the summit
Among the 130 attendees at the summit, there were many representing Newsweek's AI Impact Award winners.
Every Cure—the overall winner of the AI Impact Awards—is finding hidden disease cures on dusty drugstore shelves. The nonprofit is working to reveal the untapped potential of existing medications. Grant Mitchell, co-founder of Every Cure, is at the summit. Read more about the company here.
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Beebly Clark+Meyler (BCM) is the winner of the winner of Best Outcomes, Consumer Targeting and Personalization for the AI Marketing category. Max Cammarota, director of performance media, is at the event. Read more about BCM's AI uses here.
Maher Hanafi, SVP of engineering, is representing Betterworks, which is the winner of Best Outcomes, HR for AI Workplace. Read more about the company here.
Mitch Isetta, the director of customer success at Coursera, and Salesforce SVP of Impact Sunya Norman were both at the summit. Coursera and Salesforce are both winners of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards for Education. Read more about the companies here.
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Xsolis—winner of Newsweek's AI Impact Award for AI Health Care, Best Outcomes, Care Coordination—has created a suite of AI solutions to better connect health care providers with payer organizations and health plans. The company's chief medical officer, Heather Bassett, is at the summit. Read more about the company here.
Phare Bio CEO Akhila Kosaraju is here. Her company is the winner of Newsweek's AI Impact Award for Most Innovative AI Technology or Service, Extraordinary Impact in AI Innovation. Read more about the company here.
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ABBYY CFO Brian Unruh is at the summit. The company is one of the finance winners for Best Outcomes, Accounting.
Perfect Corp, the AI Brand & Retail winner of Best Outcomes, Consumer Experience, is represented at the summit by Deputy Director of Development Rebecca Silberbush.
EY's global innovation AI leader Rodrigo Madanes is also at the summit. The company won Best of - Extraordinary Impact in AI Transparency or Responsibility.
Xuedong Huang, the chief technology officer of Zoom, was one of the speakers during day one. Zoom is the AI Workplace winner for Best Outcomes, Digital Workplaces. Read more about the company here.
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Nishith Khandwala, co-founder and CEO of Bunkerhill Health, is at the summit. Her company won Newsweek's AI Impact Award for AI Health Care, Best Outcomes, Health Equity and uses AI to identify clinically significant findings that are hidden in patient records. Read more about the company here.
Jun 24, 2025 at 04:05 PM EDT
Companies showcase AI uses during networking break
Earlier today, attendees took a break from the panels to connect with each other during demonstrations at the AI intel networking break.
The session allowed attendees to meet each other, talk about what they've heard from speakers and witness real-world applications of AI in various sectors.
Representatives from Cognizant, Google Cloud, Stagwell, the city of Denver and EVOM AI Piano showcased their products on the lawn.
Jun 24, 2025 at 03:41 PM EDT
The Weather Company president says AI is improving forecasting in disasters
The final on-stage discussion of the day featured Sheri Bachstein, the president of The Weather Company.
Bachstein said the company is using AI to improve forecasting and save lives. AI tools can narrow down the "cone of uncertainty" during hurricane season to provide better forecasting at a hyper-local level.
As climate change continues to bring more frequent and intense natural disasters, The Weather Company is collaborating with emergency response teams to provide the best forecasting information to help build the right infrastructure and plans for emergency evacuations.
"Emergency management has a tough job and AI can help them make the best decisions," she said.
Part of that job is getting people to evacuate – a serious but difficult task when dealing with stubborn residents.
"People have to hear something seven times before they consider taking action," she said. "I'm not sure how AI will improve that, but if cities are prepared with more warnings, there is a hope and chance that people will take heed and make the right decision."
Beyond disasters, she said there is no industry that is not impacted by weather, from health care and retail to agriculture and military and defense.
With the newest advances in AI, Bachstein ensures that humans are still in the loop. The Weather Company's "secret sauce," she said, is the ability to combine data, science and human expertise to create the most accurate forecasts.
"Weather is about patterns," she said, "and AI excels at recognizing patterns and change, something the human eye can't do."
She added that the AI is accompanied by critical oversight from meteorologists, especially for high-impact local events.
Jun 24, 2025 at 02:48 PM EDT
City officials share how AI is helping public sector improve residents’ lives
Suma Nallapati, the chief innovation officer from the city and country of Denver, Colorado, and Charlitta Hatch, the chief data and analytics officer for the city of Charlotte, North Carolina, spoke onstage about how their cities are using AI to improve local government operations.
Both leaders said AI is helping the public sector, which typically struggles with low resources, to better address the specific needs of their community and improve the lives of residents through data collection and partnership.
Nallapati spoke about Denver's newest AI chatbot, Sunny, who is being used to help address the city's biggest problems. She said there is a lot of homelessness in her city and people need help, so Sunny can help residents feel less embarrassed about asking for what they need.
"We've seen so many cases of people saying, 'I'm hungry, I need help.' Think about the humane aspects of that," she said.
Charlotte is the 14th largest city in the country. Hatch said smart cities improve how residents feel about their local government.
She adds that companies that want to build their operations and attract top-tier talent to the city from places like New York, Seattle or San Antonio should make sure these people want to move to Charlotte.
"Investment in the city is an investment in your employees," she said.
Hatch said data privacy is a major issue Charlotte is focused on when using AI, noting that "we know how much you flush the toilet, but I'm not going to put that on social media."
She said designing AI tools with multiple people in mind and establishing an ethics review board helps officials think through potential outcomes and implications.
Jun 24, 2025 at 02:25 PM EDT
Gilead Sciences hopes AI will advance “health equity” in health care industry
Another health care panel brought together Dr. Ashis Barad, the chief digital and technology officer at the Hospital for Special Surgery (HSS) and Joydeep Ganguly, the SVP of corporate operations at Gilead Sciences.
Barad said HSS is democratizing AI across the health care system, particularly to empower patients to better care for themselves post-op. He said the hospital is using AI to help patients navigate their care journey outside of the hospital walls.
When patients are discharged, they are given a 20-plus-page packet of next steps. With AI, Barad said that information can be put into an LMM to create an AI agent that can answer patient questions about their recovery.
AI is also found inside the hospital—where robots and augmented navigation in the operating room are commonplace.
As AI advances with more impactful use cases, Ganguly said Gilead is focusing on quality assurance measures to boost trust in AI tools in medicine.
So how do health care organizations drive adoption amid deep skepticism?
Barad said transparency and communication is key. HSS is not in a position to replace jobs but augment them.
By automating mundane tasks like electronic health record management and ambient listening devices for doctors, Barad said clinicians can take back more time.
"We have our highest-paid workers in health care doing the most administrative tasks," Barad said.
Ganguly adds, "We can't be a company that hires the brightest people in the world and get them preoccupied with an ecosystem of tasks that don't have value right now."
He said creating automated tasks that add value to the entire ecosystem "will create more ingenuity for the future."
"I hope AI creates a more democratized state of affairs in health care, things like health equity, allows us to scale health care ecosystems such that ZIP code is less of a focus on determinants of health," Ganguly said.
Jun 24, 2025 at 01:30 PM EDT
Studio execs say AI will help make more movies
At one of the most anticipated panels of the summit, two executives from AI film studios shared their visions for the future of the industry.
Ben Lock, the director of production strategy at AI film studio Asteria, said making films today is high risk because it takes a lot of time and money and you "don't know what you're going to get."
AI, he said, removes the friction of the filmmaking process to get ideas and visions onto the screen more easily by breaking down traditional barriers.
"The rigidity is frustrating," he said, "Using AI tools allows for more fluidity, more experimentation and to change your mind."
AI also allows the creative teams to get aligned earlier and ideate in real time, Lock said.
"We can actually create high production value at a much lower cost, which means we can make more movies," he said.
Lock noted that AI will also change the look of films. He said this new technology will usher in a new genre of film and storytelling that is more imaginative and fantasy-driven – meaning more "psychedelic" than Lord of the Rings.
"A lot of what's happening on screen is representing emotions, so the environment is changing in response to how the characters are feeling," he said.
Secret Level CEO Eric Shamlin said there will soon be a time when you can't tell an AI film from a non-AI film as the technology improves. He hopes AI will bring about a "rebirth" in film that the industry hasn't seen since the mid-budget film boom of the 1990s.
He said AI will enable studios to make a $100 million film for $20 million.
Read more about Shamlin's vision for filmmaking's AI future here.
Jun 24, 2025 at 01:04 PM EDT
Instacart’s AI agent is learning specific grocery needs of each household
Daniel Danker, the chief product officer at Instacart, started his fireside chat by asking the crowd who uses Instacart for their grocery shopping. Even as many people raised their hands, he said people might be using Instacart without actually realizing it.
Because the company "built the use case for online grocery delivery," he said many supermarkets use Instacart and there are 600,000 shoppers already in stores across the country – so when you're shopping online at Costco, you're really shopping at Instacart.
Danker said Instacart has expanded upon typical machine learning by building an advanced AI agent to better understand users' specific needs.
"We build an AI agent that understands your grocery and household needs at such a precise level that you can hand over your needs to Instacart to make [shopping] decisions for you," he said.
The next level of this includes collaboration with health care to understand the makeup, habits and dietary needs of each member of the household.
He said Instacart is also starting to work with insurance providers to understand a patient's health plan coming out of surgery so they are able to use fresh funds from providers to purchase items that adhere to their specific health plan.
Jun 24, 2025 at 12:35 PM EDT
UMass Medical physician says AI benefits are difficult to measure in health care
At the day's first panel, health care leaders spoke about how they are using AI to help patients and improve efficiency for clinicians.
Cognizant Americas President Surya Gummadi said health care organizations that ask for Cognizant's help usually have three main problems: reducing costs, improving quality of care and enhancing patient experience.
Dr. Allen Chang from UMass Medical said that the return on investment of AI tools is not just on the administration side.
"I think ultimately what compels an organization in health care is having to show benefits in terms of clinical outcomes, so am I able to help my patients live longer or have a better quality of life?" he said. "And believe it or not, that's actually very difficult to show and we actually haven't really proven that yet."
He doesn't mean the industry won't get there, but it's difficult to measure.
In many industries, there is a concern that AI will take the jobs of humans. Chang said he has a complicated relationship with the notion that "AI will not replace us, people using AI will."
"A lot of us say that we're not going to be replaced by AI, we want to believe that, but in medicine, we can't just invoke this and expect that to address the underlying drivers as to why people are asking about this," Chang said.
He mentioned the recent strike by the California Nurses Association, when AI was a major concern. Chang said nurses are probably more informed than physicians on these issues and admitted that it is likely easier to replace him, an internal medicine doctor, rather than a nurse changing IVs on the hospital floor.
"We need to be transparent about the strategy around what AI means to them, and we need to communicate with our colleagues and our employees," he said.
Jun 24, 2025 at 12:00 PM EDT
Day two features panels on AI in health care, filmmaking, city planning
We are back for Day Two of Newsweek's AI Impact Summit. Opening remarks will begin at 9:00 am PST.
Here's a preview of today's schedule:
- After a networking breakfast, Newsweek's editorial director of Nexus, Gabriel Snyder, will deliver brief opening remarks
- Health care leaders from UMass Medical, Cognizant Americas, AdventHealth and Carna Health will speak about AI governance and regulation
- Instacart's chief product officer will talk about how the company is using AI to help improve customer experience
- Two pioneers in AI filmmaking will share how emerging technology is transforming the industry
- The chief digital and technology officer from the Hospital for Special Surgery and the SVP of corporate operations at Gilead Sciences will discuss strategies for adopting AI in the workplace
- Leaders from the cities of Denver and Charlotte will share how AI is helping solve challenges in their communities
- The president of The Weather Company will speak with Newsweek's editor in chief
- Attendees will gather for roundtable discussions about navigating rapidly evolving AI technology and the decision-making process of building internal AI tools or outsourcing them
- The rest of the day will include opportunities for networking with speakers and attendees and a trip to a local winery
The full schedule can be found here.
Jun 23, 2025 at 08:58 PM EDT
Day one ends with networking reception
Day one of the summit concludes with a networking reception on the lawn, as speakers and attendees enjoy wine and great conversation.
Tune in tomorrow for day two. Live coverage will resume at 9:00 am PST.
Panels tomorrow include an industry spotlight on AI in healthcare, conversations with Instacart and The Weather Company, a look at the future of AI in filmmaking and discussions of AI-powered cities and AI adoption in a reluctant workforce.
Jun 23, 2025 at 08:05 PM EDT
Roundtable discussions are underway
After a packed afternoon of insightful panels, attendees are now gathering for industry roundtables.
They can choose from two options. The first, "The AI Paradox: Tech Moves Fast, But Organizations Don't," will help identify assumptions that slow down decisions, governance and execution. Leaders from all backgrounds will leave with clear insights and practical steps to rethink their approach to AI, driving meaningful and lasting change. It is led by Sonal Naik of Navigate Corp.
The second, "The Future of Generative AI: What's Next Beyond Chatbots?," will have participants dive into real-world use cases that go beyond conversation, discuss the evolving role of AI in decision-making and examine the ethical, technical and business challenges ahead. This is led by Newsweek's Gabriel Snyder and Raj Pai of Google Cloud.
Jun 23, 2025 at 07:44 PM EDT
Kaiser Permanente’s AI tool allows doctors to look at patients again
To close out the panels, Dr. Andrew Bindman, the executive vice president and chief medical officer at Kaiser Permanente, talked about building trust through responsible AI implementation.
Bindman said Kaiser Permanente evaluates the usefulness of an AI tool by thinking about how it fits into the existing workflow of clinicians, whether the tool will make sense and if people are excited about it.
An AI-driven ambient listening device is reviewed by clinicians for accuracy. This device allows physicians to be more engaged with patients instead of looking at screens during consultations and appointments. Bindman said the tool was "releasing some of the burden of trying to remember all 10 patients I just saw in the last three hours and documenting all the information."
Patients were also happy that their doctors were looking at them, "creating a more robust experience on both the clinician and on the patient side."
"It's absolutely critical to be learning from the different key stakeholders and what their experience is and also any challenges that are coming up with it," he said.
However, this tech also came with problems. Early on, the AI would sometimes report that a patient should see the doctor more frequently than the physician actually suggested. He believes this was because the AI was trained at an organization that incentivized future service, but Kaiser Permanente doesn't charge patients at every visit because dues are paid upfront by employers.
Kaiser Permanente was able to identify these discrepancies and correct them, he said, resulting in a decrease in these "hallucinations."
Jun 23, 2025 at 07:14 PM EDT
People who are “bilingual” in AI tools will be the most successful: Google Cloud COO
Newsweek Editor in Chief Jennifer Cunningham sat down with Google Cloud's Chief Operating Officer Francis deSouza to talk about how companies can successfully implement AI.
DeSouza said AI has been the fastest he's ever seen any technology move from pilot to production. He said over 30 percent of the production code at Google has been generated by genAI, noting that "it's moved much more quickly than I would have expected."
"Even though the broad conversation on AI started about a couple of years ago, today it's deeply embedded in production, even in some of the largest companies in the world," he said.
When implementing AI, organizations have to move both top-down and bottom-up, deSouza said.
Executives play an important role in making it safe for companies to use AI and making sure controls are in place to use AI in a responsible way, he said. There also has to be a bottom-up element to allow people to experiment with emerging technology.
"The truth is, every function of the company is going to be changed by AI, so executives have to play an important role in encouraging their teams' experiments to embrace and use it safely," he said.
DeSouza added that people who are comfortable with AI tools will be the most successful in AI-led enterprises.
"People who succeed in the future are likely to be bilingual, meaning they are domain experts, marketing experts, sales experts, but they are also fluent in AI or at least conversant in AI," he said.
Jun 23, 2025 at 06:44 PM EDT
Sidewalk delivery robot joins speakers on stage for panel about product design
After the networking break, Newsweek contributor Chuck Martin was joined on stage by Paul Ferraiolo, the director of strategy and partnering at BMW's DesignWorks; MJ Chun, the co-founder and VP of product design at Serve Robotics; and a sidewalk delivery robot.
AI enables the robot to be more independent through sensors that study its environment and take cues from the people around it, all while improving the efficiency of delivery and mitigating environmental impact, compared to cars. Serve Robotics has these robots in several major U.S. cities, including Los Angeles, Miami and Dallas.
Chun said being in the physical space in neighborhoods is a key contributor to the design of the robots.
"More people will walk next to this robot or see it cross an intersection while driving than will ever get a burrito from that robot," she said. "And for us, bringing in some joy or adding to the environment that elevates communities is another key piece of [design]."
She added that the company wanted to give each robot a personality with a unique name. AI helped the company find names that didn't sound too similar and names that are popular in certain cities as not to confuse the robots.
There are also specific design measures to ensure the robot is most efficient, including running sounds to let people know the robot is nearby and making the robot compact enough to fit on sidewalks with people, scooters and wheelchairs. And these factors are all dependent on the city where the robot moves.
"To be a successful delivery robot and a good sidewalk citizen, there are differences to how [the robot] moves in the world," Chun said.
Jun 23, 2025 at 06:18 PM EDT
Attendees break for networking
After the first few panels, attendees take a brief networking break, with refreshments courtesy of Cognizant.
Jun 23, 2025 at 06:15 PM EDT
Ancestry.com exec explains company’s “culture of experimentation” in the AI age
Sriram Thiagarajan, chief technology officer and executive vice president of product & technology, explained how the company has a "culture of experimentation"
Even prior to deploying machine learning, the company's philosophy was to start with a small effort and see where it goes, what problem it solves.
"Don't worry about being perfect," he said. "Once you see that it's leading to somewhere, iterate on it more frequently."
Thiagarajan said the company runs experiments on product domains and let the customers choose what they like.
"Once we know what clicks with customers, then you double down on a select few that will add value for customers," he said.
This type of culture allows the team at Ancestry to embrace exploration within the responsible AI policy that prioritizes privacy and data security.
"Early on, even before we started building our first feature on AI, we came up with a responsible AI policy, knowing that it will evolve, because the space is advancing so rapidly," Thiagarajan said. "Beyond that, you're free to experiment, but within the framework of who we are and what will appeal to our customers."
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Jun 23, 2025 at 05:59 PM EDT
Zoom CTO said AI adoption is happening “whether you like it or not”
Nexus Editorial Director Gabriel Snyder used Zoom's AI prediction tools to write the questions for his one-on-one chat with Zoom's Chief Technology Officer, Xuedong Huang.
Huang said AI adoption is happening "whether you like it or not," and Zoom's AI models help organizations improve decision-making.
Jun 23, 2025 at 05:39 PM EDT
Toyota exec said AI won’t take jobs – people who use AI will
Newsweek's Marcus Weldon led the first panel: "Two Worlds of AI – To Buy or Build."
The panelists include Melody Ayeli, Senior Director, Enterprise AI, Toyota Motor North America; Vickram Kooblall, CIO and Chief Information Security Officer, Scahill Law Group; and Raj Pai, VP, AI Product, Google Cloud.
The panelists explained the AI use cases at their respective companies. Some of these applications include analyzing data, like transcripts and medical records at Scahill, helping humans make repairs at Toyota and inference time reasoning to build a chain of reasoning and execute a plan with better, more factual results at Google.
When creating an AI solution, Ayeli said safety quality is "top of mind" while deciding what would enhance customer experience. She said AI tools have made people more productive, faster and more efficient by freeing up time for strategic, higher-level work that they weren't able to do before.
Weldon then asked the panelists whether they are developing their AI models in-house or are outsourcing to a third party.
Kooblall said Scahill Law Group built its own model in 2022, but quickly learned it did not have the means or capabilities to maintain it. The company now works with trusted partners, like Westlaw, who it building agents trained on its wealth of data. Toyota has a hybrid strategy, while Google is using its own models.
Looking ahead, Ayeli said AI is just going to keep getting better. "I don't think AI will take jobs, I think people who use AI will take jobs," she said.
For Google, Pai said "the future is coming quick."
"Our vision is that every employee will be a 10x employee, every team will be a 10x team," he said, meaning they will see more capabilities, more productivity and more output.
"That is the future we are striving for and I expect we will get there very quickly," he said.
Jun 23, 2025 at 05:06 PM EDT
Cognizant CTO demonstrates the future of agentic AI
Babak Hodjat, Chief Technology Officer, Artificial Intelligence at Cognizant, gave a presentation about the work the company is doing in AI.
"Our AI studio [is] where we do core AI research to push the envelope on AI," he said. "A lot of the innovations ended up in various different platforms and I'm proud to say that this lab is the world's foremost lab when it comes to multi-agent systems and AI decision making, which I think is going to be the engine around this next phase of AI adoption in the enterprise."
Hodjat explained the difference between AI models and agents; with the former taking some input and transforming it in some way to produce an output, "so it doesn't really do anything." An agent, on the other hand, has enabled the power "to actually do something."
"After we move into a world of agents from a world of models, we're moving from a one size fits all system that will do everything to a system that does give us, as humans, some engineering responsibility," he said. "We have to decide what is the job description of this agent ... And when are we comfortable allowing it to operate autonomously, and when we're not."
He added that when taking an AI agent that has been empowered to run the code performs better on most benchmarks than a large language model system.
After a brief demonstration of a multi-agent system, he noted that we are moving rapidly into a world where AI agents are able to spawn and merge different agents on the fly, dynamically and be able to adapt as the business requirements come through.
Jun 23, 2025 at 04:49 PM EDT
Newsweek’s interview series aims to find “rational value” of AI tools
Marcus Weldon, Newsweek contributing editor for AI, opened the summit by welcoming the attendees and outlining the core of Newsweek's AI coverage.
He said the interview series he leads aims to find real value in areas impacted by AI, such as human cognition, entertainment, productivity and geo-politics.
"We're not skeptical, but we're not overly optimistic," he said. "We try to find rational value."
Read the profiles from the AI Impact Interview series here.
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Jun 23, 2025 at 04:01 PM EDT
Day one kicks off with a full slate of industry experts in Sonoma
It's day one of Newsweek's AI Impact Summit in Sonoma, California, sponsored by Cognizant and Google Cloud. Attendees from various industries are gathering to hear discussions about best practices for AI implementation, governance and expansion from experts and leaders of AI adoption.
Here's a preview of today's schedule:
- Toyota and Scahill Law Group will discuss best practices for organizations deciding whether to create AI implementation in house or outsource it
- A fireside chat with the CTO of Zoom
- A one-on-one conversation with the CTO of Ancestry.com about how the world's largest family history collection is delivering cutting-edge generative AI experiences directly to customers
- A panel with creative leaders from DesignWorks, a BMW company, and Serve Robotics about AI design for driving
- A discussion with Google Cloud's Chief Operating Officer about successful deployment of AI across industries
- Kaiser Permanente-led fireside chat about building trust through responsible AI implementation
- Industry roundtable discussions about AI governance and the future of generative AI beyond chatbots
- The day will conclude with a networking reception among attendees
The full schedule and list of speakers can be found here.
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