As I recently wrote, I attended the Summit AI New York last week (which, as the name suggests, was in New York City). Summit AI is a global conference and exhibition focused on the application of AI in business in general as opposed to legal in specific. The numbers from the 2-day Conference are impressive: more than 4000 attendees, 400 speakers across 11 different areas, and over 100 sponsors and exhibitors.
The Conference has been held for several years. Summit AI is a series of conferences that, in addition to New York, are held in London, Las Vegas, Singapore, and other locations. (There was one law firm with a booth by the way. Foley and Lardner, a full-service lawyer with some 26 offices, had a well-staffed booth and told me they are regular attendees).
I like attending nonlegal tech conferences because they often yield insights we don’t get in our legal tech cocoon. As one of my clients used to say, those of us in legal tech have to be careful lest we end up in a closet talking to ourselves too much. Indeed, as I wrote while at the Conference, I did get some new perspectives on how Gen AI can help tackle A2J problems.
So, after some time to reflect, what did I think of the Summit? There were certainly a lot of well-qualified speakers from well-known businesses.
The Conference tried to go too broad at the expense of not going deep
But the Conference tried to go too broad at the expense of not going deep. Different businesses have different perspectives on the use of AI and different ways of using it. These perspectives and uses are unique to each type of business. In trying to make sessions applicable to all kinds of