On May 29th, 2024, GIC’s Technology Investment Group held a Bridge Forum Sessions event in San Francisco, California. The Bridge Forum is GIC’s platform for connecting the world’s most exciting early-stage technology companies with our network of global partners. The event, themed “AI in Action,” brought together the world’s foremost thinkers on artificial intelligence for a deep exploration of the current, most actionable use cases for generative AI across applications and infrastructure.

Event attendees included nearly 100 C-suite executives from GIC’s Private Equity portfolio and broader network, as well as more than 75 Founders and CEOs from highly innovative technology companies. Leading speakers included:

• Ali Ghodsi, Co-Founder & CEO at Databricks
• Aravind Srinivas, Co-Founder & CEO at Perplexity
• Arvind Jain, Co-Founder & CEO at Glean
• Atte Lahtiranta, CTO at Goldman Sachs
• Dave DeWalt, Founder & CEO at NightDragon
• Emily Sands, Head of Information at Stripe
• Eric Glyman, Co-Founder & CEO at Ramp
• Harrison Chase, Co-Founder & CEO at LangChain
• Jarek Kutylowski, Co-Founder & CEO at DeepL
• Kris Rasmussen, CTO at Figma
• Lukas Biewald, Co-Founder & CEO at Weights & Biases
• Nikesh Arora, Chairman & CEO at Palo Alto Networks
• Peter Chen, Co-Founder & CEO at Covariant
• Prukalpa Sankar, Co-Founder & CEO at Atlan
• Roelof Botha, Managing Partner & Senior Steward at Sequoia
• Scott Wu, Co-Founder & CEO at Cognition

AI has the promise to transform businesses of all types through building new efficiencies, harnessing the power of previously underutilized data, and deriving thoughtful conclusions and analyses from an array of information sources. It also raises important ethical and cybersecurity-focused considerations for both business leaders and investors. At GIC, we anticipate significant near-term advancements in AI’s foundational model layer, including image, audio, text and video models and beyond. Long term, we believe the possibilities are endless. GIC is committed to deploying long-term capital into innovative AI opportunities that create new applications for this technology and continue to advance the space.

Key Highlights from Bridge Forum Sessions 2024:

• The future of Al is still evolving, but technology leaders and engineers are focused on developing Al’s intellectual understanding of enterprise data, predictive analytics, and how Al can contribute both tactically and administratively to building operational efficiencies.
• To build and use Al efficiently, enterprises must remain focused on bringing in top talents who exhibit fierce curiosity and understand the overarching strategies and needs of their organization. Effective Al cannot be built without a strong plan, high quality training data, and appreciation for experimentation.
• Starting in 2022, most enterprises relied on a small number of major players in the foundation model space to begin using Al. Over the past two quarters, there has been significant migration towards open-source models, which provide much more variability in Al solutions.
• Some of the most valuable and unique data in the world belongs to enterprises, not the public domain. Organizations that strategically utilize their own proprietary information will emerge as leaders in harnessing the full power of Al.
• Privacy remains top of mind for corporations utilizing Al technology, as they are more sensitive to data leakage and governance issues. Some Al tools such as Glean, are proactively scanning documents to ensure that information does not end up in the wrong hands, redacting information that is not meant to be seen.

In addition to the day’s insights, GIC organized nearly 160 one-on-one meetings between emerging technology startups and technology buyers, forging connections and driving immeasurable value by giving corporate partners an up-close look at groundbreaking technology and strategies that can help to future-proof their businesses.

The event wrapped up with networking over dinner and drinks, before a closing fireside chat with Roelof Botha, Managing Partner and Senior Steward, Sequoia Capital, moderated by Chris Emanuel, Head of GIC’s Technology Investment Group.

Thank you to our panelists and attendees for helping make Bridge Forum a key destination for the world’s most thoughtful tech luminaries and business leaders. GIC is committed to fostering discussions that help future-proof businesses, and building meaningful connections for our network for years to come.