AI4 Neue Alchemy: Field report
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Ai4 Conference 2025 | Neue Alchemy: Field Report
Dispatch from the Signal Layer Last week was about perspective.
Geoffrey Hinton moved the AGI timeline to 5–20 years. Fei-Fei Li reframed AI as infrastructure for dignity. Two visions—same message: build wisely, build now.
This week? It was about pattern recognition.
Ai4 wasn’t just keynotes—it was signal in the hallways. GTM operators, CISOs, design leads, and AI officers trading playbooks in real-time. Behind the stages, people were stitching together the next-gen enterprise stack—not dreaming it. And the conversations weren’t “what if,” they were “what works.”
Neue Alchemy was in the rooms where AI’s not an experiment anymore—it’s policy, it’s infrastructure, it’s culture. Here’s what we saw, heard, and are already building toward.
Let's dig in:
Brand Reality Check:
Forget the decks, forget the sizzle reels.
Ai4 - Artificial Intelligence Conferences 2025 was walking the halls where AstraZeneca , U.S. Bank , Medtronic , JPMorganChase (Naresh Dulam), Cisco ( Jeetu Patel), Ford Motor Company ( Franziska Bell, PhD) and fellow Fortune 100s let down the airlock and talked shop: orchestration, scale, risk, reality.
Signal 01: Scale is Dead—Orchestration is Alive
Ai4’s headliners like Emmett Shear (former interim CEO of OpenAI ) and Google DeepMind's Praneet Dutta spent plenty of time on the next generation of AI models and their raw power. But here’s the reality—no matter how big the model, if it’s not tightly woven into your day-to-day operations, it’s just another demo. Wayne Filin-Matthews, B.Sc, M.Sc., F.BCs. ( AstraZeneca ):
“AI isn’t experimental here—it’s the fabric.” Prashant Mehrotra (U.S. Bank): “It’s not the chatbot pilots that last; it’s the agents who orchestrate and log every move.”
Tag your CTO, tag your ops lead—because “If your agents can’t explain the play, they don’t make the team.” (blue-chip SaaS CTO, panel)
Signal 02: Compliance as Crown, Not Chore
Prudential Financial (Omodunni Ayodele) and ModelOp ( Jennifer Myers Ward ): cut risk review from two weeks to one day—by making Responsible AI the operating system, not a compliance slide.
"Auditability is your new feature.” Andrew Reiskind, Mastercard
"No governance, no go-live—simple.” Policy architects: you are now product managers. Tag accordingly." Stephanie Franklin-Thomas PhD, MBA, BA, CISA, NACD.DC, Medtronic
Signal 03: “Shadow AI” is the Real Mainstream
No more AI “off the books" fear. CIOs from Target , Mercari, Inc. ( Max Frenzel, Ph.D. ), Walmart call out: the sharpest workflows are being built by teams using “unofficial” AI tools.
VP Ops at a major retailer: “Capture it, don’t squash it. Shadow AI is our edge.”
Tag product leads who run grassroots innovation—this is your new R&D arm.
Signal 04: Security Is Door Number One
Signal 04: Security Is Door Number One
Running defense just jumped to the top of the stack. This isn’t tabletop scenario planning—it’s live, in-the-moment resilience. The pace isn’t set by would-be attackers, it’s by how fast you can patch, segment, and audit—while you’re still shipping, not after you’ve patched the hole.
Last week, this came up in lots of our conversations—we call this LLME: Large Language Model Exploitability. "It's a new class of threat when models aren’t hacked through code, but manipulated at the narrative and prompt layer. Forget firewalls: now the risk vector is clever language, social-engineered prompts, and a model’s own willingness to believe what it reads. Purple Team is the new defense." Isaiah Steinfeld Neue Alchemy
Keysight Technologies (Ethan Hunt), Joel Stenson ): “Segment your data, patch like you breathe.” If your partnership stack can’t pass a red-team audit, your GTM roadshow stalls.
Bring your red and blue teams together for a talk on what you're doing to address this. The best in the field are moving from quarterly reviews to real-time choreography.
Signal 05: Culture Ships Harder Than Roadmaps
Amanda DeLuca ( Riley ), Angie Jones ( Block): hybrid roles are steering where classic titles once did.
“If your AI culture doesn’t match your goals, your product’s already at risk.” Randi Weingarten AFT
Tag your L&D, HR, ops, and culture warriors—margins happen where creativity and compliance hold hands.
Signal 06: Vibe Coding & the Rise of the Non-Technical Builder
One of the strongest sidebar conversations at Ai4 wasn’t on stage—it was in the hallways, over coffee, between CISOs and heads of L&D:
“How do we enable our non-technical teams to actually build?”
The answer we’re deploying: Vibe Coding, in a safe, sandboxed environment.
Not just no-code. Not just enablement.
But giving cross-functional teams the power to prototype, translate, and ship their ideas—inside a system that accelerates innovation and respects security.
“Showing leaders how to translate their ideas and business needs is magic,” one exec told us. “Not to be so on the nose… but it’s literally Neue Alchemy.”
This is where platforms like Supabase shine—developer-loved infrastructure, zero lock-in, and the perfect launchpad for internal tool creation without red tape.
Our Favorite Vibe Coding Stacks (Remixed by Team):
Product Managers & Devs → Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Windsurf, Replit
(AI-native code & app workspaces—move fast, build for real.)
Design Teams → Figma (with AI)
(AI-native code & app workspaces—move fast, build for real.)
Business, Marketing, Sales, Ops → Lovable , bolt.new
(Prompt-to-app, automate, launch—no code, just vision.)
Infra / Full Stack → Supabase , Vercel
(Data, auth, push to prod—scale without blockers.)
How to Kickstart It?
Neue Alchemy Hackathons are the on-ramp.
Scoped. Safe. Practical.
Designed to test-drive Magic (our internal tooling layer) and unlock the hidden builders already inside your company.
We used to say: “Tag your HR, L&D, or Innovation leads.”
But this is the democratization of coding.
Marketing. Sales. Ops. Legal. Finance.
You’ve got ideas. We’ll show you how to build them.
Shoot us a DM. We’ll meet you in the sandbox.
AI4 Sector Roll Call: AI in Action Across the Enterprise
AI4 Sector Roll Call: AI in Action—What Actually Shipped, What Actually Changed
Enterprise: AstraZeneca , Ford Motor Company , Cisco , ISS A/S aren’t just piloting—they’ve put AI into every unseen process: regulatory audits, compliance logs, and the workflows nobody wants to talk about.
SaaS: At Dice (DHI Group, Inc.), AI went from feature to factory floor—devs upskilled because they had to, delivery times got cut, and “AI as a slide” was replaced with “AI in production.”
Retail: Mercari, Inc. deleted friction—users snap, list, sell. Target and Walmart : live, daily demand forecasts aren’t “in a lab”; AI now shapes every shelf price and promo.
Finance: J.P. Morgan , BMO , Scotiabank —no one’s demoing doc processing or KYC/fraud anymore; it’s on, it’s logged, it’s saving hours, not months.
Healthcare: Medtronic , Sanofi , Adventist Health didn’t talk “AI for good”—they linked risk and speed so hard that “no governance, no go-live” is a punchline now.
Industry: UPS , Keysight: Real-time ops, model in the loop—not a revolution, just more stuff actually running on time.
Media/Sports: Arcana, Xgames , Owlai Studio : AI isn’t just powering the halftime show—it’s calling the shots and editing the highlights.
Takeaway: “Shipping” isn’t demo day—it’s overnight change, logged results, auditors and users finally seeing the same dashboard.
Meta Patterns: Who You Should Notice From AI4
These are the builders, orchestrators, and culture-shapers who stood out on stage, in sessions, and in hallway conversations at AI4—field report, not an industry census. Want a broader picture or a shout-out to other game-changers? Tag them below and let’s map the rest of the field.
AI orchestration: Workato (Adam Seligman), Pinecone, Weaviate (vector DB backbone), Tray.ai, Skanai.
Foundational Shapers: OpenAI , Google DeepMind , NVIDIA ( Dave Salvator ), Microsoft Azure Anthropic, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud, Vertex AI, Hugging Face, Pinecone, Supabase, Weaviate, Chroma, MongoDB Atlas , Databricks, Snowflake, CoreWeave.
Culture Shapers: Fei-Fei Li (World Labs), Geoffrey Hinton, Amanda DeLuca, Angie Jones, Isaiah Steinfeld
Mentioned? Let’s build. Missing? Drop your org. The map’s still unfolding.
