Ai4 2025: Agents, RAG, and the Enterprise AI Reality Check
The Ai4 conference kicked off today at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, drawing an expected 8,000+ attendees for three days of keynotes, 600+ speakers across 50 tracks, and a 250-plus-vendor expo aimed squarely at applied, enterprise AI. Organizers touted a sharpened focus on agentic systems, governance, and real-world deployments.
Opening day set the tone with two back-to-back arena sessions: a fireside chat on AI’s impact on classrooms and childhood with AFT president Randi Weingarten, followed by Tengyu Ma, Chief AI Scientist at MongoDB, on “RAG in 2025: State of the Art and the Road Forward.”
What’s new this year
Ai4’s program stretches across 19 stages and 50 themed tracks, including Generative AI, Agentic Systems, AI Policy, a reimagined AI Research Summit, and a “Beginner’s Summit” to onboard first-timers. Exhibit-hall action will formally begin Tuesday morning and run alongside daily receptions.
Tuesday’s opening main stage will feature Shirin Ghaffery of Bloomberg News moderating a fireside chat with Geoffrey Hinton on AI, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. The event will highlight a slate of sector tracks, live demos across the show floor, and a social-impact spotlight with Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm discussing de-extinction and AI in a fireside format.
Wednesday’s keynotes will lean into the future of perception and agents. Fei-Fei Li will dive into world models, spatial intelligence, and human-centered AI, followed by a Cisco fireside where President & CPO Jeetu Patel will explore what it will take to safely catalyze an “agentic AI revolution.”
For buyers: where the rubber meets the road
If you’re attending Ai4 to evaluate products, the expo floor is positioned as more than a showcase. Expect hands-on demos spanning AI applications & agents, data platforms, security/governance, and cloud infrastructure—plus brand activations.
Signals to watch
With launches and briefings from governance vendors and platform players, expect concrete approaches to policy, observability, and controls for autonomous workflows.
Ma’s keynote framed how retrieval augments, rather than competes with, fine-tuning and long-context—important for enterprises balancing cost, latency, and source-of-truth requirements.
With Fei-Fei Li headlining, spatial intelligence and world modeling will continue to pick up steam as the path beyond text-only systems—especially for robotics and simulation-heavy industries.
The TechArena Take
Ai4’s program reads like a referendum on agentic AI at enterprise scale. Three practical threads stand out for IT and cloud architects:
- Control planes for agents will define winners. The next six months won’t be about flashiest copilots—it’ll be about who ships the cleanest hooks for policy, identity, data-scope, and human-in-the-loop stops across multi-agent workflows. If you can’t prove guardrails, you won’t get production sign-off.
- Data gravity beats model gravity. Ma’s framing of RAG vs. finetune vs. long-context mirrors what we’re hearing from large shops: push reasoning to the edge of your governed data layer; keep PII and contracts in-bounds; and reserve heavyweight finetunes for workloads that truly demand it.
- Infra is the quiet story. As agents expand from chat to autonomous task execution, winning stacks will hinge on event-driven integration, vector/search performance, observability, and low-latency networking—plus storage patterns that keep embeddings and history auditable.
The Ai4 conference kicked off today at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, drawing an expected 8,000+ attendees for three days of keynotes, 600+ speakers across 50 tracks, and a 250-plus-vendor expo aimed squarely at applied, enterprise AI. Organizers touted a sharpened focus on agentic systems, governance, and real-world deployments.
Opening day set the tone with two back-to-back arena sessions: a fireside chat on AI’s impact on classrooms and childhood with AFT president Randi Weingarten, followed by Tengyu Ma, Chief AI Scientist at MongoDB, on “RAG in 2025: State of the Art and the Road Forward.”
What’s new this year
Ai4’s program stretches across 19 stages and 50 themed tracks, including Generative AI, Agentic Systems, AI Policy, a reimagined AI Research Summit, and a “Beginner’s Summit” to onboard first-timers. Exhibit-hall action will formally begin Tuesday morning and run alongside daily receptions.
Tuesday’s opening main stage will feature Shirin Ghaffery of Bloomberg News moderating a fireside chat with Geoffrey Hinton on AI, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity. The event will highlight a slate of sector tracks, live demos across the show floor, and a social-impact spotlight with Colossal Biosciences’ Ben Lamm discussing de-extinction and AI in a fireside format.
Wednesday’s keynotes will lean into the future of perception and agents. Fei-Fei Li will dive into world models, spatial intelligence, and human-centered AI, followed by a Cisco fireside where President & CPO Jeetu Patel will explore what it will take to safely catalyze an “agentic AI revolution.”
For buyers: where the rubber meets the road
If you’re attending Ai4 to evaluate products, the expo floor is positioned as more than a showcase. Expect hands-on demos spanning AI applications & agents, data platforms, security/governance, and cloud infrastructure—plus brand activations.
Signals to watch
With launches and briefings from governance vendors and platform players, expect concrete approaches to policy, observability, and controls for autonomous workflows.
Ma’s keynote framed how retrieval augments, rather than competes with, fine-tuning and long-context—important for enterprises balancing cost, latency, and source-of-truth requirements.
With Fei-Fei Li headlining, spatial intelligence and world modeling will continue to pick up steam as the path beyond text-only systems—especially for robotics and simulation-heavy industries.
The TechArena Take
Ai4’s program reads like a referendum on agentic AI at enterprise scale. Three practical threads stand out for IT and cloud architects:
- Control planes for agents will define winners. The next six months won’t be about flashiest copilots—it’ll be about who ships the cleanest hooks for policy, identity, data-scope, and human-in-the-loop stops across multi-agent workflows. If you can’t prove guardrails, you won’t get production sign-off.
- Data gravity beats model gravity. Ma’s framing of RAG vs. finetune vs. long-context mirrors what we’re hearing from large shops: push reasoning to the edge of your governed data layer; keep PII and contracts in-bounds; and reserve heavyweight finetunes for workloads that truly demand it.
- Infra is the quiet story. As agents expand from chat to autonomous task execution, winning stacks will hinge on event-driven integration, vector/search performance, observability, and low-latency networking—plus storage patterns that keep embeddings and history auditable.
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