Innovation Summit 2018 - Chicago | The Economist Newspaper Limited | 22 March 2018 | The Westin Chicago River North, 320 N Dearborn Street, Chicago, USA

Artificial intelligence and machine learning has become one of the hottest topics in business. An army of startups has been funded to pursue the commercial opportunities, whilst the bosses of big companies increasingly look to implement AI strategies at scale. This has encouraged hopes of massive efficiency gains as machines learn to get ever better in their crunching of increasing volumes of data to understand what works. Yet at the same time, there have also been darker predictions, from machines taking all the jobs once done by humans (Bill Gates even wants to tax robots to slow down this shift) to possible existential threats to humanity.

Executives urgently need to develop a strategy to make their firm into a truly intelligent company. That means breaking through what now seems to be Peak Hype around AI to get to the still considerable reality.

• Where is AI poised to make the biggest impacts soonest?
• Where can it create significant new value?
• Where will it mostly undermine existing business models?
• What can be done to equip the company’s existing workforce to be able to make the most of those opportunities that are there, rather than merely see AI as a threat?

The Economist Events’ Innovation Summit will gather leading thinkers and practitioners to explore these opportunities and challenges. Editors from The Economist will ask the searching questions as Fortune 500 CEOs, policymakers, academics and disruptive entrepreneurs share their insights and strategies for successfully embracing AI and machine learning to build a truly intelligent company.

2018 Speakers

Alexandra Suich Bass
Technology editor, The Economist

Vijay Vaitheeswaran
US business editor, The Economist

Fei-Fei Li
Chief scientist, Google Cloud AI

Fiona Tan
Head of AI and customer technology, Walmart

Jim Swanson
Chief Information Officer, Monsanto

Jim Fowler
Chief information officer, GE

Bask Iyer
Chief information officer, VMware, Dell

Soma Somasegar
Managing director, Madrona Venture Group

Mike Beebe
Chief executive, Mayfield Robotics

Jaykumar Menon
Chair and co-founder, Open Source Pharma Foundation and research fellow, McGill University

Naveen Jain
Chief executive, Viome

Kristen Hamilton
Chief executive and co-founder, Koru

Tenzin Priyadarshi
Director, Ethics Initiative, MIT Media Lab

Jacob Mullins
Partner, Shasta Ventures

Pedro Domingos
Author, 'The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World'

Tolga Kurtoglu
Chief executive, PARC

Avi Goldfarb
Professor, University of Toronto and co-author, Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence

Chris Urmson
Co-founder and chief executive, Aurora

Esther Dyson
Executive founder, Way to Wellville

Alex Salkever
Futurist and co-author 'The Driver in the Driverless Car'

Danielle DuMerer
Chief information officer, department of innovation and technology, City of Chicago

Busy Burr
Head of healthcare innovation and trend, Humana

Jennifer Wortman Vaughan
Senior researcher, Microsoft Research

Laurie Tolson
Chief digital officer, GE Transportation

Bastian Lehmann
Chief executive, Postmates

Caleb Harper
Principal investigator and director, Open Agriculture Initiative, MIT Media Lab

Aija Leiponen
Associate professor, Innovation Strategy, Cornell SC Johnson College of Business

Billy Bosworth
Chief executive, DataStax

Tom Bianculli
Chief technology officer, Zebra Technologies

Tim Baxter
President and chief executive, Samsung Electronics, North America

Brenna Berman
Executive director, City Tech Collaborative

Jeff Burnstein
President, Association for Advancing Automation

Kevin Sterneckert
Group vice-president, Innovation Strategy and Solutions Marketing, JDA Software

Daniel Castro
Vice-president, Information Technology and Innovation Society

RJ Pittman
Chief product officer, eBay

Nicolas Economou
Senior advisor, The Future Society, Harvard Kennedy School

Debra Lam
Managing director, Smart Cities and Inclusive innovation, Georgia Tech

Chris Mansi
Chief executive and co-founder, Viz.ai

Kirk Bresniker
Chief architect, Hewlett Packard Labs and HPE Fellow

Anupam Datta
Associate professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering, Carnegie Mellon University

2018 Sponsors

DIAMOND SPONSORS
• Postmates
• Datastrax
• Hewlett Packard Enterprise

PLATINUM SPONSOR
• Zebra

SILVER SPONSOR
• Looker