State of the industry: What we heard about AI at Ai4

AI is everywhere—and despite warnings around capacity and a potential bubble, the industry appears to be continuing to grow.

But how do actual IT pros feel about AI? At this year’s Ai4 conference, we asked around, on the floor and one on one. What we heard was optimism marked by caution from industry vets.

Kevin Tran, a demo engineer for Notion, told IT Brew that people at the conference, much like Notion customers, are thinking about how to automate more efficiently and deploy AI agents. For someone looking to make it all make sense, he added, it’s a matter of consolidation and locking in solutions in one place, along with better governance.

“We’re trying to glue it all together for AI to work,” Tran said. “The trend I’m seeing and trying to solve with customers is the main issue of our fragmented brain by having everything in one system rather than trying to have AI be this Band-Aid solution to poor governance.”

Indeed CIO and CSO Anthony Moisant, unsurprisingly looking at AI in the context of hiring, told IT Brew that when it comes to employers looking for staff, AI knowledge is essential. The industry’s expectations for the technology, and how their teams will deploy it, can run up against the reality of who’s available. But the overall trend is for more AI jobs, not fewer.

“We get questions around future work all the time—‘Is AI disrupting roles? Is it going to eliminate jobs?’ What we’re seeing in the data is it’s not eliminating jobs, it’s creating more jobs,” Moisant said. “It is automating tasks away, but as we do deeper inspection in this, what we’re seeing is…automation of low-level tasks that, quite honestly, nobody really wants to do in the first place.”

Panoramic view. Customers across the economy are looking for more AI solutions, and companies like Caterpillar are happy to provide technological integration. When it comes to industrial AI, Caterpillar CTO Jaime Mineart told IT Brew, it’s a bull market, but there are differing levels of enthusiasm and risk tolerance.

“There are some customers that are more interested in the technology and a little bit more tech forward, and there are other customers that are really comfortable [without AI] and want to see it proven at scale before they’re willing to incorporate it and trust it and put it into their job site,” Mineart said.

“There’s a lot of variation,” Mineart added. “Some of them really want to go on the journey so that they’re ready as more sophisticated technology becomes available.”

Here’s more of what we heard on the show floor:

• “We’ve met so many people, and everyone is extremely enthusiastic about AI. At the same time, there are conversations—good conversations—being had about the risks of AI.”—Robert Corwin, CEO of Austin AI
• “There are always people that are going to be ahead and always people that are going to be behind, but there is an appetite for it. There are people that want to leverage new technology in production and stay ahead of this wave.”—Chaani Rao, technical marketing leadership development program memeber at Siemens
• “We’ve been talking about MCP tools and AI skills, and that has helped a ton of customers on our side to get started faster and understand everything easier; it’s a much larger lift now when you need to build out applications.”—Laura Zhukas, product manager at MongoDB
• “We’re starting to see what these tools are really capable of. They’re getting more useful by the day; we’re starting to see coding and software development accelerate more.”—Matt Stierhoff, senior solutions engineer at Okta