Ai strategy

State of Startups and AI 2025 - Sarah Guo, Conviction

State of Startups and AI 2025 - Sarah Guo, Conviction

Sarah Goa from the AI-native venture fund Conviction discusses the state of AI, arguing that despite the hype, building valuable AI products is challenging. She covers the rapid advancement in AI capabilities like reasoning and multimodality, the increasingly competitive model market, and provides a playbook for building successful applications, using "Cursor for X" as a framework. The key takeaway is that defensibility in AI comes from superior execution and deep workflow integration, not just the underlying model.

Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam

Pricing your AI product: Lessons from 400+ companies and 50 unicorns | Madhavan Ramanujam

Madhavan Ramanujam, a leading expert on monetization, shares a framework for pricing and scaling AI products. He discusses why AI companies can capture 25-50% of the value they create, how to choose the optimal pricing model using a 2x2 of attribution and autonomy, and provides advanced tactics for negotiation and reframing POCs as business case creation.

Winning & Attracting AI Researchers in the Age of $100M Bounties | Babak Hodjat | CTO AI Cognizant

Winning & Attracting AI Researchers in the Age of $100M Bounties | Babak Hodjat | CTO AI Cognizant

Babak Hodjat, CTO of AI at Cognizant and a co-inventor of the technology behind Siri, discusses the strategic shift from generative AI to autonomous, multi-agent systems. He explores how these agentic systems will redefine enterprise operations, the intense "arms race" for AI talent, and the critical need for a decentralized, secure framework for agent collaboration.