- AI conferences are sprouting up worldwide as global leaders and entrepreneurs rally around the tech.
- HumanX, a major AI conference, is set to take place in Las Vegas this month.
- Organizers expect 330 speakers and over 3,00 attendees, including Kamala Harris and OpenAI execs.
It’s three months into 2025, and the AI conference circuit is in full swing.
In January, world leaders, big-name executives, and academics gathered at the World Economic Forum in Davos, where a key theme was “Industries in the Intelligent Age.” Attendees discussed topics ranging from AI’s impact on manufacturing to whether artificial general intelligence will be a force for good.
In February, more heads of state, AI researchers, and regulators flocked to Paris for the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit. French President Emmanuel Macron — who co-hosted the conference with Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi — promised that France would cut back the red tape on AI.
US Vice President JD Vance told the summit’s attendees that “massive” regulations could constrict the progress of the technology. AI leaders, like DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, stressed the need for international cooperation on regulation.
And now, this month, thousands of startup founders, investors, and technologists are expected to descend upon Las Vegas for HumanX — an event that bills itself as the “most important AI conference of the year.”
Executives from companies like OpenAI, Meta, and Anthropic, investors from Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures, and politicians like former Vice President Kamala Harris will gather from March 9-13 at the Fontainebleau to talk about topics ranging from compliance in the AI age to using the technology to unlock new forms of creativity.
The event will feature about 330 speakers and organizers expect over 3,000 attendees. Tickets cost about $3,200 for general admission.
HumanX was co-founded by event veteran Jonathan Weiner — who has launched large-scale conferences like HLTH, Shoptalk, and Money20/20 — and Stefan Weitz, an alum of Microsoft and an entrepreneur and investor. The pair raised $6.2 million in funding for the event in a round led by New York-based Primary Ventures, along with Foundation Capital and FPV Ventures.
Weitz told Business Insider that fundraising wasn't hard. The firms — which back dozens of AI companies — saw the conference as another vehicle to build momentum for their investments.
"You could even look at it as almost promoting their own book, right? They need these AI companies to be successful, which they need to have enterprises purchasing those solutions, and not churning after a year when the SaaS contract is up," Weitz said. "So, it's imperative to the whole ecosystem that we get out of the pilot purgatory that we've been sitting in for a while and actually start moving forward."
Pilot purgatory, as defined by McKinsey, is a state in which companies have "significant activity underway, but are not yet seeing meaningful bottom-line benefits from this."
Dizzying levels of funding have fueled the AI industry. In 2024, over $100 billion went to AI startups, accounting for a third of all global startup funding, according to a report that HumanX released in partnership with Crunchbase.
While established players like OpenAI and Anthropic collected almost a third of last year's AI funding and companies in the Bay Area landed the majority (about 60%), more money also flowed to sectors deeper in the AI ecosystem — from companies building the hardware and software that supports large language models to applications built on top of them.
AI is also giving Wall Street a wake-up call as it braces itself for a wave of AI-related mergers and acquisitions. Of the 153 private AI companies appearing at HumanX, 29% are targeted for acquisitions.
HumanX's panels will largely focus on propelling growth across all parts of the AI ecosystem.
As Weitz describes it, HumanX will highlight "the great stuff," the "new stuff," and "what companies are doing with that new stuff."
There will also be discussions on how to regulate all this stuff.
As part of that, Harris, the former vice president who served as the AI czar during the Biden Administration, will make an appearance to share her vision for responsibly developing the technology. Harris, who previously described the technology as "kind of a fancy thing," has largely been seen as a moderate, dismissing the idea of choosing between AI regulation and innovation as a false binary.
AI has catalyzed a wave of global change, and Weitz said his team has already been approached about setting up HumanX events in other regions, including Europe and the Middle East. For now, though, he's just hoping the inaugural conference goes smoothly.
"It's one of those things where we're one foot in front of the other. Let's deliver the best thing we can, and then we'll move on from there," he said. "These things take no less than nine months and preferably a year to pull off."