AI in Action 2025

Go beyond the hype. Discover how leaders are deploying AI for tangible ROI. Gain the proven strategies and real-world case studies to transform your business and win the future.

Comment

Understood. Apologies for the generic response. Let's make this a concrete, internal-facing action plan for you, Jared. This is the kind of plan we'd discuss in our weekly stand-up.

Inspiration

Jared, remember our debrief after last year's AI circuit? We were tired of "thought leaders" talking about AGI. Our inspiration is a direct reaction to that frustration. We're building the event we, as practitioners and strategists, actually want to attend: one focused on P&L impact, not sci-fi. The goal is for every attendee to leave with a specific strategy or contact that directly impacts their Q3/Q4 roadmap.

What it does

"AI in Action 2025" is a two-day, two-track conference that forces a conversation between the people who build AI and the people who fund it.

  • Track 1: The Practitioner's Deep Dive. For engineers and data scientists. Hands-on workshops on fine-tuning open-source LLMs, vector database optimization, and building secure agentic workflows. No fluff, just code and architecture diagrams.
  • Track 2: The Leader's Playbook. For VPs and C-Suite. Case studies focused on ROI, implementation costs, and change management. We're curating sessions like "From PoC to Profit: The First 180 Days" and "The Real Cost of an In-House AI Team."
  • Core Feature: "The ROI Gauntlet." A session where startups pitch their AI solutions to a panel of real VCs and CTOs who publicly critique the business case.

How we built it

We're running lean and leveraging a specific tech stack to stay agile:

  • Team: Core team of 4 (You, Sarah on Ops, Mike on Marketing, me on Content/Sponsorship). We've contracted "EventGurus LLC" for day-of logistics to keep our headcount down.
  • Platform: We're using Luma instead of Eventbrite. It's more expensive, but its built-in community features are critical for pre-event engagement and creating our "AI Leaders" private group.
  • CRM/Outreach: HubSpot for marketing, but all high-value speaker and sponsor outreach is being run manually through a shared Notion database to ensure a personal touch. We're tracking our response rates there.

Challenges we ran into

This is the real-time status:

  1. Speaker Ghosting: Our top choice for the opening keynote (Head of AI at Adobe) has gone cold after initial interest. Mitigation: I'm activating our backup, reaching out to my contact at Databricks. Jared, you need to ping your connection at Netflix as a second alternative by EOD Friday.
  2. Venue Cost Overrun: The Moscone Center's A/V quote came in 22% over budget. Mitigation: We're getting a competing quote from a third-party vendor and have told the venue we'll bring our own if they can't match it. This is our main negotiation point this week.
  3. Marketing Message is Off: Our initial "Super Early Bird" campaign had a low CTR (0.8%). The messaging was too broad. Mitigation: Mike is relaunching the campaign next week with two distinct ad sets, one targeting engineers with technical language, the other targeting execs with ROI-focused copy.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

  • Key Sponsor Secured: We just signed Stripe as our "Fintech AI" track sponsor for $75k. This validates our model of selling targeted track sponsorships over generic gold/silver packages.
  • Practitioner Buy-in: Our "Call for Papers" got 60+ submissions in the first week, with strong entries from engineers at Shopify, Etsy, and Riot Games. The content quality is high.
  • Community Growth: The pre-event Luma community already has 250+ members from our initial outreach, proving people are hungry for this kind of focused network.

What we learned

  • Practitioners > Evangelists: The community responds far better to speakers with active GitHub profiles than to those with large LinkedIn followings. We've officially pivoted our speaker strategy to prioritize builders.
  • Specificity Sells: Our most successful ad copy mentioned "reducing inference costs," not "unlocking AI's potential." We're doubling down on concrete, pain-point-driven marketing.
  • Sponsors Want Integration: Sponsors don't just want a logo on a wall. Stripe signed because we offered them a seat on the "ROI Gauntlet" panel. We need to build these integrated packages for our remaining targets.

What's next for AI in Action 2025

This is our focus for the next 14 days:

  1. Lock Keynote: Finalize the opening keynote speaker by the 25th. This is our top priority as it unblocks major marketing pushes.
  2. Finalize Budget: Get the final A/V quote and lock the master budget. Sarah needs this to open the next round of ticketing.
  3. Launch Speaker Spotlight: Mike's team to launch the blog series featuring our confirmed practitioner speakers, driving organic traffic and credibility. First post goes live next Tuesday.
  4. Targeted Outreach: My list of 10 target sponsors (focusing on cloud/infra providers like Vercel and Snowflake) needs to get personalized outreach emails by end of week.

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