Marking its 10th anniversary, the event returns to Manhattan’s massive Javits Convention Center on December 10–11, bringing together a pretty remarkable lineup of technologists, policymakers, enterprise leaders and the people actually building and deploying AI in the real world. The tone this year feels different—not speculative, not breathless hype, but confident, scaled, operational. AI has shifted from labs and experiments into boardrooms, budgets and whole-company transformations, and you can feel that maturity in the speaker list.
The roster reads like someone intentionally gathered the minds shaping urban digital infrastructure, commerce, public policy, medicine, enterprise platforms and frontier research—and put them under one roof for two days. Among those taking the stage: Matthew C. Fraser, CTO of the City of New York, Cecilia Kushner of the NYC Economic Development Corporation, Nitzan Mekel-Bobrov from eBay, UNICC’s Anusha Dandapani, and AstraZeneca’s Jorge Reis-Filho, who sits at the intersection of oncology and AI. Adding to that mix, Terry Doyle of TELUS Global Ventures rounds out what feels like a lineup engineered to reflect AI’s reach into both industry and society.
Caroline Hicks, Senior Director for The AI Summit Series, framed it well: this anniversary isn’t just a marker—it’s a checkpoint. Ten years ago, many companies were still trying to define what machine learning even meant to them. Now, it’s woven into procurement, content production, logistics, cybersecurity, product design, healthcare workflows, sustainability modeling—you name it. There’s a quiet acknowledgement running beneath this year’s agenda: AI isn’t the future tense anymore; it’s the operating system of modern industry.
The conference structure mirrors that ambition. The Headliners Stage is designed for the decision-makers who are past experimentation and now wrestling with scale, policy risk, security models, regulation and the human implications of deploying autonomous systems at the enterprise level. Presentations will stretch from strategy and governance to deeply technical insights and live enterprise case studies—basically the stuff executive teams have been privately wrestling with behind closed doors.
Some highlights already generating buzz include Aaron Rajan of Unilever exploring leadership and humanity in an age where software decisions increasingly shape human experiences, Ritika Gunnar from IBM digging into agentic AI frameworks and safe scaling, Yao Morin of JLL examining the future of commercial real estate under intelligent automation, Northwell Health’s Sven Gierlinger reflecting on applied lessons in healthcare AI, and Paramount Global CIO Lakshman Nathan tackling the entertainment industry’s evolving relationship with AI—creatively, ethically, and economically.
And of course, no major AI event happens without heavyweight sponsors. The floor will be powered by a dense ecosystem of leading companies pushing infrastructure, models, tooling and deployment frameworks: EY, IBM, NVIDIA, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud, HPE, SAP, Neo4j, MongoDB, DigitalOcean, Boomi, Crusoe, Lightricks, Splunk, Dell Technologies, SAS and a long list of emerging players—pretty much the entire industrial stack, from compute to compliance.
There’s a sense that this edition isn’t about announcing the next shiny breakthrough or speculating about what might arrive someday. Instead, it feels like a gathering meant to define standards, ambition and responsibility before the next phase begins. Because the next phase isn’t simply innovation—it’s accountability, scaling, governance and integration with the messy, complicated world humans live in.
If there was ever a moment where AI shifted from revolution to infrastructure, from promise to expectation, it’s probably now—and The AI Summit New York is positioning itself as the place to acknowledge that shift and shape what follows.