A glimpse of what top CEOs are saying about AI behind closed doors

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At the Goldman Sachs Communacopia and Tech Conference in San Francisco, there's nothing AI can't solve or, at a minimum, improve.

This conference is truly a behind-closed-doors event. CEOs wander a hotel that smells like lavender and eucalyptus, Clif Bars are everywhere, and off-the-record talks abound. And if you're already in closed-off rooms, and you're a journalist, they will kick you out. I would know.

What I can tell you is this: More than anything else, AI has enabled tech to look to the future after a tumultuous pandemic boom and bust.

"I think the next five years will be more exciting than the last five years," one CEO said privately. And the reason why was simple: AI.

What are the major AI applications CEOs are talking about behind closed doors? You can imagine an elementary school blackboard, for a moment, as we count ways.

Cybersecurity.

When discussing CrowdStrike's (CRWD) AI assistant Charlotte, CEO George Kurtz framed the central question.

"How do we make money and provide value to the customer?" Kurtz said. "Where we see this going is what we call generative workflows, which is more of a conversation with Charlotte. You say, 'OK, Charlotte, what are the latest threats that CrowdStrike knows about from the last 24 hours?"

Shopping and business efficiency.

"We see [AI] as a tremendous opportunity," Visa (V) CEO Ryan McInerney said. "First, in terms of increased productivity, the efficiency and effectiveness of running our business. ... The second front is in terms of how we're serving clients putting generative AI to work to improve shopping, buying, and the commerce experience broadly around the world. We believe generative AI is going to meaningfully improve the shopping efficiency."

Video conferencing.

Zoom (ZM) CEO Eric Yuan said that the company is developing "good, scalable AI features."

"Down the road, AI will help you schedule meetings," Yuan added. "Essentially, we're looking at collaborative AI."

And then, everything else.

According to Nvidia (NVDA) vice president of enterprise computing Manuvir Das, customers of all sorts used to ask Nvidia what the AI use cases were. Now, they already know.

"This year, when customers come to see us, they already know the use cases," he told a standing-room-only crowd. "It’s the intelligent assistant helping the employee in a customer interaction, or what have you. The conversation is actually about: ‘OK, Nvidia, what do I need to know? What do you have? And how can it be implemented?'"

I don’t know what’s more interesting — if these transformative hopes are too high or if implementation in the real world will sand down the edges of these hopes.

It’s also worth considering that the audience for this conference is Wall Street heavy, so these CEOs are not talking to this audience the way they talk to reporters but in the way they talk to analysts who make Buy, Hold, or Sell calls.

In short, there is a lot more time in the weeds. It’s less rah-rah and more "we have a plan."

"Anyone who has big, unique data or data that's naturally tagged, I think they start to become a really interesting, unique asset," Nextdoor CEO Sarah Friar said.

Allie Garfinkle is a Senior Tech Reporter at Yahoo Finance. Follow her on Twitter at @agarfinks and on LinkedIn.

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