(This interview was conducted as an audio conversation and has been lightly edited for clarity.)

Michael Weiss, Co-Founder of Ai4, has witnessed the Ai4 Conference grow from a niche half-day gathering in 2018 into the largest AI industry conference in North America. What began as “AI for Finance” in the Williamsburg Hotel is now a cross-industry gathering that draws thousands of attendees from over 85 countries.

In this exclusive interview with AiNews.com, Weiss discusses the shift that followed the rise of large language models (LLMs), the 2025 focus on AI agents, how diversity of perspectives shapes AI alignment, why people should attend this year’s event, and why the AI transformation offers opportunities for enterprises and small businesses alike.

BIO: Michael Weiss is an Austin-based entrepreneur best known as the Co-Founder of Ai4, the world’s premier industry conference on artificial intelligence. Since launching the first vertical Ai4 Finance, Healthcare, Retail, and Cybersecurity events in 2018, Ai4 has scaled into an 8,000-attendee cross-industry summit that attracts Fortune 500 executives, leading researchers, and high-profile speakers. Michael has overseen content strategy, sponsorship sales, and team building, driving eight-figure annual revenues and positioning Ai4 as the go-to platform for enterprise AI thought leadership and commerce. Outside of AI, his interests include longevity biotech, pickleball, and reading fantasy/sci-fi books.

Q: Ai4 has grown into the largest AI industry event in North America. When you started in 2018, did you expect it to become the epicenter of the global AI ecosystem?

A (Michael Weiss):
“Honestly, no. Our first event in 2018 was a niche show called AI for Finance — it focused exclusively on AI applications in the financial services sector. We only had $25,000 in the bank, so we could only afford a half-day event. We booked the Williamsburg Hotel — a venue that mostly hosted weddings.

People loved that first event. Over the next couple of years, we ran several other standalone niche shows — AI for Healthcare, AI for Cybersecurity, AI for Retail — each with its own audience and focus.

In 2020, we decided to merge them into one cross-industry event in Las Vegas. Then COVID hit. We ran Ai4 virtually in 2020 and 2021, which was tough for an events business.

In 2022, we finally held our first in-person Vegas event. About 1,000 people attended, making it one of the largest AI industry-specific shows at the time. Now, it’s an entirely different beast.”

Q: What’s been the biggest shift in that journey?

A: “The single biggest shift has been the rise of large language models (LLMs). When ChatGPT launched in December 2022, we were already planning our 2023 event — and generative AI wasn’t even on the agenda. Why would it be? It was still too new.

By March 2023, we had added two full dedicated tracks on generative AI. It was that fast.

Before ChatGPT, the projects people presented at Ai4 were usually custom machine learning models built with their own data and resources. The same core technologies were around in 2018–2022, but they were applied to narrow, niche use cases — like a hospital using a model for one specific diagnostic task, or a bank building its own fraud detection system.

When OpenAI released a general-purpose LLM — and figured out how to train it with so much computing power — it gave businesses a far more powerful tool to build on top of. Almost overnight, it became obvious that they could, and had to, invest in the technology.”

Q: What can attendees expect at this year’s event? And are there any new themes, technologies, or formats you're excited to showcase this year?

A: “In 2023 and 2024, the big new topic was generative AI, and by the end of 2024, we started to see growing interest in multimodal AI.

This year, 2025, is all about AI agents. We have three full tracks across all three days dedicated to them. People are excited about using generative AI tools to create autonomous processes that actually do things for their business.

We’re also adding new industries. For example, we’re covering more entertainment and film this year. One keynote will feature an AI film company and actor Breckin Meyer, who works with them, discussing their projects. Each year there’s a new technology focus — last year was generative AI, this year it’s AI agents — often accompanied by new industries, like film, joining the conversation.

Other growing areas include life sciences, with more pharma and biotech companies using AI for drug discovery, and government, where we’re seeing increased participation from government agencies worldwide — including the Saudi Arabian Defense Ministry, which is attending with a large delegation.

Education is another big focus. Our opening keynote is from the head of a 2-million-member teachers’ union, who partnered with OpenAI and Anthropic to create an AI education center in New York that trains teachers to use AI in the classroom.

We’re also seeing strong interest in no-code and low-code tools, which open up AI development to non-technical users. These platforms are making it easier than ever for people without formal coding experience to build applications and integrate agentic workflows into their processes.

That’s just a snapshot of what’s new this year. With over 50 tracks on the agenda, there’s a lot more in store.”

Q: How does the diversity of attendees shape conversations around AI?

A: “My interest in AI actually started outside of academia. I came to it through pop culture — movies like The Matrix, WALL-E, and The Terminator sparked my fascination with the idea of sentient machines.

When we launched Ai4, I wasn’t thinking about the technical side first — I was thinking about the possibilities. Over time, I started learning more about the concept of AI alignment — making sure that the machines running alongside us in the future are aligned with human values. That idea was popularized in part by Nick Bostrom in his book Superintelligence.

Now, you have pioneers like Geoffrey Hinton — Nobel Prize Laureate and one of the key inventors of neural networks and the foundation of deep learning — who’s become a leading voice in the AI alignment movement. He spoke at Ai4 last year and is returning this year because he wants to engage directly with the people shaping the future of AI.

The challenge is that alignment isn’t as simple as matching AI to ‘human values’ — because whose values are we talking about? That’s an impossible question for one person, company, or even country to answer.

That’s why diversity of perspectives matters so much. At Ai4, we have attendees from 85+ countries, representing every industry, every job type, and every age group. The cross-pollination of ideas — from government leaders to biotech researchers to startup founders — helps ensure that AI development is inclusive, representative, and globally relevant.

Q: How do you think Ai4 is different from other AI conferences, and why should someone choose Ai4 over other events?

A: “One of the fascinating things about the last several years is seeing the birth of an AI industry. Ten years ago, most people didn’t identify as being in ‘the AI industry.’ They thought of themselves as machine learning experts, data scientists, or engineers working in a specific sector — like healthcare, finance, or retail — rather than part of a single, unified AI profession.

Now, we have a defined community that spans both technical roles like ML engineers and strategic roles like Chief AI Officers. These professionals can work across multiple sectors but still see themselves as part of the same field.

Ai4 has been right in the middle of that transformation, and our attendee base reflects it — a mix of technical and business leaders from across industries, all part of this growing global profession.

Another key difference is that we’re vendor-agnostic. Many large AI events are hosted by tech giants like NVIDIA, AWS, or Microsoft, which naturally frame the market through their own products. Ai4 exists to serve the AI industry as a whole, giving attendees a broad, unbiased view of the landscape.

We’ve also been doing this longer than most — since 2018 — so we’ve had years to learn what matters to attendees and what doesn’t. This year, we’ll have over 600 speakers, 50 tracks, and 19 parallel stages. It’s truly the AI everything event, where a healthcare professional might find inspiration from a retail AI project, or a government leader might pick up an idea from the finance track. Those cross-industry insights are powerful — and they’re hard to find anywhere else.

In many ways, Ai4 is the Comic-Con of the AI world — a place where the entire community gathers to connect, share ideas, and see what’s next in the field.”

Q: How are enterprise AI strategies evolving? And from your perspective, how long will it take before small businesses can get that kind of technology, especially since they might not have the large budgets or teams?

A: “Initially, enterprises were in pilot mode — running dozens of proof-of-concepts to see what worked. Now we’re seeing AI agents deployed in real production environments. That’s what’s working for enterprises today, and it shows how generative AI is succeeding in real-world use cases.

Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) will catch up quickly. Most modern SMBs already run on software tools like Shopify, QuickBooks, Intercom, or WordPress — and those vendors are adding AI features directly. An SMB can now connect to an API and have a cutting-edge chatbot on its website without having to build it from scratch. And with LLMs, it’s easier than ever for SMBs to adopt and integrate AI into their workflows.

In fact, SMB adoption could happen faster than in enterprises, because small businesses can simply turn on a new feature without navigating layers of corporate bureaucracy. We’re adding an AI for SMBs track to our 2026 agenda for that reason.”

Q: Looking ahead, what trends excite you most for the next few years?

A: “I’m excited about the ongoing improvement in multimodal AI and AI agents, but one area that has been especially striking is how fast video and vision capabilities are progressing. The video generation models keep making leaps — it feels like every other week we’re seeing major improvements in quality, realism, and the ability to understand visual context.

What to watch for next is large world models — foundation models that can perceive, generate, and interact with the 3D physical world. This ties directly into the work of Fei-Fei Li, one of our keynote speakers this year. Fei-Fei became widely known in AI for launching the ImageNet project, which helped drive the deep learning breakthroughs in computer vision. Her current focus is on spatial intelligence — building models that understand and operate in the physical world much like humans do.

Right now, most of our interactions with AI — whether it’s text or voice with ChatGPT — happen within the confines of a device: a smartphone, a computer, or similar. Fei-Fei’s vision is about moving beyond those boundaries to create foundation models that can be used on machines that are physically moving through the world. That’ll be absolutely transformational, because then you’ll have people and companies building an infinite number of applications for machines that interact with the real world.

These advances will accelerate robotics in a big way. We’re already seeing it with self-driving cars like Waymo and Tesla. Once large world models are paired with advanced robotics hardware, we could see humanoid robots handling everyday tasks, from household chores to logistics — and I think this will come very quickly.

The hardware is already good enough — the missing piece is the software intelligence. With the progress I’m seeing, I think humanoid robots in homes could be common within 10 years.”

Q: Finally, what’s one piece of advice for leaders as they navigate the next wave of AI?

A: “The AI train has left the station. Whether you like it or not, society is already being transformed by AI. My advice is to participate and engage — collaborate to make this transformation as positive and beneficial as possible.

The reality is that AI is not going to make all fields obsolete by any means. But it is going to enter every field. Whether you’re in biology, a doctor, a lawyer, or an accountant, AI will be part of your work in some way.

As we’ve seen at Ai4, we’re covering 50 tracks this year, and I think next year we’ll be up to 70 different track themes. No matter what job you want to do, AI will be there to help you do it. You may as well learn to work with it, embrace it, and help shape how it’s used.

And let’s not just hope for the best — let’s make the best happen through collaboration and shared effort. That collaboration is really the key.”

Ai4 has become more than just a conference — it’s a global meeting place for the AI industry, bringing together voices from across sectors and around the world. Michael Weiss’s insights highlight how AI agents are moving from pilot projects into production, why cross-industry collaboration sparks innovation, and how diverse perspectives are critical for AI alignment.

From the rapid progress in video and vision capabilities, to the promise of large world models and their potential to power humanoid robots, Weiss sees a future where AI transforms every profession — from medicine to law to the creative arts.

The message is clear: the AI era is here, it will touch every field, and the leaders who engage, collaborate, and help shape its direction will be the ones who define its impact for generations to come.

To attend Ai4 2025, please visit their website.

Editor’s Note: This article was created by Alicia Shapiro, CMO of AiNews.com, with writing, image, and idea-generation support from ChatGPT, an AI assistant. However, the final perspective and editorial choices are solely Alicia Shapiro’s. Special thanks to ChatGPT for assistance with research and editorial support in crafting this article.