Only possible with AI: The discussions and topics shaping the ScaleUp:AI 2026 agenda

“[…] In 2026, a new kind of intelligence is being willed into the world by a remarkably small number of people. Each of them is driven by a particular mix of curiosity and hubris, vanity and avarice, idealism and craving, and the sobering reality is that, for better or worse, the quality of their characters will affect society.”

— From The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence by ScaleUp:AI 2026 speaker, Sebastian Mallaby.

Last year, ScaleUp:AI keynote Ethan Mollick discussed the jagged frontier — the uneven, surprising edges of what AI could and couldn’t accomplish. This conversation has shifted considerably in the last year. AI performance on coding benchmarks rose from 60% to near 100%, frontier models gained 30 percentage points on Ph.D.-level reasoning tests, and Google’s Gemini won a gold medal at the International Mathematical Olympiad.

AI will soon be better than humans at nearly every task. Whether you’re pursuing the development of AI for profit, for research, or for practical reasons, the trajectory is the same. We are quickly approaching a future that is only possible with AI.

Agenda highlights

We’ll be navigating this new future at ScaleUp:AI across a dozen conversations throughout the day.

What does this AI moment actually mean — for investors, for society, for national security?

Two conversations this year put the AI moment in the widest possible context.

• Sebastian Mallaby, author and senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, brings the perspective of a journalist who has spent decades tracking how transformative technology reshapes wealth and power. From his most recent book (quoted above), he makes the case that the choices being made right now by AI builders will define the next century of innovation.
• General Timothy Haugh, former director of the NSA and U.S. Cyber Command, offers a firsthand view from the front lines of national security. He’ll discuss what it means to protect a nation when adversaries and allies alike have access to the same powerful tools.
• Insight Partners’ Managing Director Lonne Jaffe will offer an investor’s perspective on the current AI landscape, including areas of recent innovation and learnings from the past year.

How do you turn AI from a promise into actual enterprise value?

Enterprise investment in AI has never been higher, and businesses are navigating the distance between “AI is transforming business” and “here is how AI is transforming my business.”

• Hear from Bobby Yerramilli-Rao, chief strategy officer at Microsoft, who has a front-row seat to the highest strategic priorities in a dominant tech and AI player. 
• In another fireside, Ron Gabrisko, chief revenue officer at Databricks, has helped grow the company from a $1M startup to a multi-billion-dollar AI leader, which today serves more than 70% of the Fortune 500.

How do you build AI that earns trust?

As AI moves from research to production at scale, many of the most difficult questions are distinctly human. They’re about accountability, trust, and what responsibility looks like when the stakes are real.

• Sarah Yager is the first human rights and responsible deployment lead at OpenAI, bringing decades of human rights and government work to her perspective on what this means in AI.
• We’ll have enterprise leaders from Adobe, SAP, Oracle alongside innovative startup and ScaleUp CEOs discussing how AI is changing the nature of trust in reaching customers and addressing new go-to-market with increasingly AI-savvy customers.

What happens when AI runs at the core of critical infrastructure?

• Ryan New, chief information officer at ICE and NYSE, discusses what it means to deploy AI inside the world’s most critical financial systems: the opportunities, the constraints, and what the markets of tomorrow might look like when machine intelligence runs at their core.
• On security, Gregor Stewart, most recently chief AI officer at SentinelOne, will lead a discussion with CEOs and cybersecurity leaders on where the real vulnerabilities are, what’s hype, and where the biggest differentiation opportunities for security-focused companies now lie.

What happens when AI unlocks software’s true potential for business?

Several panels this year dig into how AI is enabling software companies to move faster and reach further than ever before.

• On the future of the development stack, several startup and ScaleUp CEOs will have a candid conversation about how AI is reshaping the way software gets built, tested, and shipped, and what it means to build products for engineering teams today.

Keep up with all our speaker and agenda announcements on the ScaleUp:AI website. We’re announcing new speakers regularly.

Why attend

Make a new connection

Join a curated in-person audience of over 350 in-person guests that represent a cross-section of Insight’s influential networks in AI.

• AI builders, founders, CEOs
• Enterprise executives and CxOs
• Academics and researchers
• Agency partners and other investors
• Other influential thought leaders in the NYC tech and finance community

Build with us in the AI Lab

Visit the AI Lab to get a hands-on perspective from the Insight Partners’ Onsite advisory team working with our portfolio on AI and agentic strategy. Our team will share live demonstrations on what they’re learning and building with AI and agents alongside our portfolio companies. 

Meet our partners

We’re joined this year by over 30 partners who are innovating in the AI space. Thank you to:

Presenting Partners: Adobe, NYSE, Oracle, SAP, SVB, Willkie

Industry Partners: A.Team, Anjuna, Apiphani, Brinqa, Devicie, Discern, E2B, Fastino Labs, Fiddler AI, Finout, FloQast, GitGuardian, Golden Analytics, Lakeside, Litmus, Modus, NexusOne, Optimizely, Postman, Quantum Metric, Rocketlane, Sonar, Tricentis, Zone & Co

There’s still time to join us in person and online

Whether you’re a founder, builder, executive, academic, investor, or someone who just can’t wait to hear what’s next, you don’t want to miss ScaleUp:AI this year. And if you’re not in NYC, we offer a livestream of the day and on-demand sessions if you register for a virtual ticket.

You can still register to join us. 

• Insight portfolio companies can claim free virtual tickets using your work email address on the “All-Access Virtual Pass – Insight Portfolio” ticket type.
• All other ticket types are available for purchase here.

We’re looking forward to discussing the once-impossible future with you all.

Editor’s note: Insight has invested in OpenAI, Databricks, SentinelOne, A.Team, Anjuna, Apiphani, Brinqa, Devicie, Discern, E2B, Fastino Labs, Fiddler AI, Finout, FloQast, GitGuardian, Golden Analytics, Lakeside, Litmus, Modus, NexusOne, Optimizely, Postman, Quantum Metric, Rocketlane, Sonar, Tricentis, Zone & Co