Day two of TechEx North America has been more of a deeper, critical examination of AI in the enterprise, but with a optimistic bent. The AI and Big Data programme opened with reference to what was termed the “AI graveyard” – that is, AI projects that seem to perform well in pilot, but don’t seem to cut it in the real world. Despite the presence of what might be a negative term, multiple speakers and sessions addressed ways in which the forward-thinking business might not ever have to experience the technological cemetery.

The different show tracks of the second day of this event dived deeper into the pervasive issues that may be affecting AI deployments. Sessions in the Enterprise AI Implementation, ROI and Adoption tracks took stalled pilots as a starting point, and tried to ascertain the reasons behind faltering projects. There was a good deal of sound advice for organisations, with sessions on focusing agentic AI on specific business areas, building agent-ready data foundations (planning for success under the hood), and the realities of token-based AI charging on the business’s finances.

At an infra level, there were deeper discussions too on whether companies should buy or build physical infrastructure for their AI projects, and the best ways to create durable ROI on data and AI projects when all the many effecting factors are given due consideration..

In projects where AI roll-outs get stuck, the core issue could be epitomised by the concept of the ‘personal copilot’. This works well on a single worker’s desk and for their individual workflows, but doesn’t really scale to a whole department – never mind a whole business. Many companies report having the budget to start such AI experiments at the level of the single user, and there are usually great results. When said user is a C-suite executive, a personally-achieved efficiency tends to increase the levels of excitement around the company, which has to be considered a positive. But transitioning from this point to meaningful change across the business is where many organisations find their individual struggles and roadblocks. Here was the meat and gravy of day two’s activities on the show floor and the numerous stages at the San Jose McEnery Convention Center.

Cyber issues

Despite the use of terms like ‘stalled’ and ‘difficult to scale’, in the Cyber Security and Cloud Expo stage, speakers cited the the speed at which businesses and organisations adopt agentic AI systems as a cause of a ‘velocity gap’. Where AI deployments are successful, they gain traction fast! But security and governance issues crop up when business units adopt generative AI faster than the security team can govern and ensure the enterprise’s safety.

Like the proverbial double-edged sword, AI can be considered as a force that changes and can improve both attack and defence in the cybersecurity space. There are the issues created internally by unbounded agents and large language models, plus the addition to attackers’ arsenals of AI scanning tools that can identify potential exploits.

Also prevalent among the round-table discussions and keynote speeches was the older theme of shadow IT, now presenting in its new guise as shadow AI. If staff place sensitive material into unsanctioned tools for example, or if approved AI systems are poorly bounded and managed, then the attack surface can expand without the cybersecurity team even being aware of it happening. Therefore, data governance and system oversight are becoming more intertwined than before – this was the message from both cybersecurity strands of the show, and the Cloud and Big Data elements too.

For pure-play cybersecurity functions, zero trust was presented as one answer to the runaway adoption of AI outside the auspices of cybersecurity teams – the adoption the ‘denial by default’ position for humans and machines alike. Proof of identity and privilege levels need also to apply to services and agents; that way, automated workflows are subject to the same permission models as every other element in the IT stack.

The second day of TechEx North America was certainly not a rejection of decision-makers’ AI ambitions – the role of AI and even agents were things of accepted fact among speakers, thought-leaders, and delegates at the event. But there were details and considerations presented by representatives from different industries and business functions, each with positive and insightful things to contribute. Each placed their concerns and their enthusiasms on the table, adding to the discussions around AI implementation in 2026.

The march of the robots

And there was a great deal of excitement, still, in many areas of the conference floor. The humanoid robots on show were a source of much enthusiasm (everyone seems to love a lovable android!), but more pragmatically, the new Physical AI track drew some of the show’s biggest audiences. Multiple delegates away from the track cited software coding as the place that has first yielded positive results from the use of large language models in professional settings. And from many places too came the opinion that automated physical systems will be the next industry segment set to benefit from concerted work around new models and their practical harnesses.

The AI models at the heart of next-gen physical AI are unlikely to be LLMs (although these will be useful if the devices are designed to interact with humans), and as such models develop and emerge from their research stages, it’s the TechEx Events series that will be the first to showcase and present these, and how they can work viably in business contexts.

New learning strands to the event

This year’s event saw a welcome injection of pragmatic coding, with hands-on learning sessions that took attendees through spinning up their own AI agentic models, with lessons in how agents can improve themselves, right from interactive Google Colab instances. The TechEx Learning Hub also featured workshops from Nvidia and the ever-popular Google Hackathon, with learners ranging in abilities from those that needed introducing to an IDE through to those that came with software skills already well-tuned. Putting learnings into practice is what this event is all about, whether it’s C-suite decision makers taking on lessons on best strategic practices, or developers turning creative ideas into reality.

TechEx takes the cutting edge, and distils it through the business lens; pragmatic yet future facing. Catch the next leg of TechEx in Amsterdam this September – who knows how far we may have progressed in the space of four short months?

(Image source: TechEx Events)

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and co-located with other leading technology events. Click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

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Although visitors to an event like TechEx North America will always want to see the cutting edge front and centre stage, the nuance and detail brought to the show by the speakers and exhibitors mean that it’s sometimes the smaller considerations that need to play big – at least, in the minds of enterprise decision-makers.

Across the different tracks of Edge Computing, IoT, Data Centre Congress, and Cyber Security, the question was about what needs to be built around AI before it takes its place in the physical, business-oriented world?

The Edge Computing track, with its roots in traditional industries, looked at latency, deployment discipline, and cybersecurity for IIoT/IT amalgams. The day-one programme positioned edge computing as a place where companies can reassess the value of their data assets, look at how decisions are made by autonomous equipment, and the required speed of processing.

Sessions looked at scaling edge deployments (in multi-site businesses, for example), agentic network operations, distributed inference – on-prem, in-cloud or hybrid – immutable edge infrastructure, and how zero-trust cybersecurity lessons can be applied to control systems.

Ed Doran of the Edge AI Foundation chaired a programme that had as its starting point that the edge is a demanding place in which to operate. The track included reps from Akamai, Spectro Cloud, Scylos, TÜV Rheinland, the OPC Foundation, and Germany’s Schneider Electric. Discussions covered issues in manufacturing and IoT, and delved into industrial automation and connected control and attenuation devices.

Moving intelligence closer to the machine changes risk profiles (in which direction was a matter for debate), and faster local decisions may reduce latency and dependence on central cloud services, but where do observability and control in decision-makers’ minds?

The IoT Tech Expo day-one track on Industrial IoT and Digital Twins looked at manufacturing, with sessions covering smart factory trends, AI beyond Industry 4.0, asset management, practical road-maps for escaping pilot purgatory (more on that below), physical AI in everyday ops, and digital twins.

Similar to debates on AI deployment in the knowledge sector, it was the gap between demo and deployment that was the area subject to most scrutiny. Industrial and back office AI both might work well in a presentation, but can stall when they meet old machines (or legacy software).

The alliterative pilot purgatory held considerable weight in several sessions on the various presentation stages and on the show floor, day one. The Rockwell Automation and Ford session on physical AI and connected asset intelligence looked especially hard at scaling projects that seem to work well in concept, but may fail when hitting the real world. How does intelligence enter daily operations without becoming another dashboard that nobody owns?

Digital twins received similar appraisal. The better version of the digital twin isn’t a visual replica used for demons – although they do have their uses. Instead, several speakers called for, and presented, operational models that can actually help a factory, city, or municipal facility. In addition to pre-testing decisions and improving maintenance, what should the modern digital twin be designed to achieve?

The TechEx programme linked ideas between speakers from Siemens, Korea’s LG CNS, Boston Dynamics, and others across the different show strands. The takehome everywhere was that smart systems, be they deeply embedded in engineering sites or the back office, need to be designed in concord with the people or machines that they’re designed to benefit.

Day-one sessions at the Data Centre Congress track looked at the big issues facing the sector today: construction, power, procurement, cooling, water, and the network spine needed for AI DCs. Keynote speakers and round-table discussion guests talked about construction chaos and power issues, with the event’s early visitors hearing from TechEx’s host city, Santa Clara, about its own data centre journey.

The DC issue remains central to the wider AI debate. As a technology, AI depends on compute, and dense compute at that. This in turn depends on power, cooling, land, and permits. A recurring theme in the infrastructure-focused talks was how AI economics affects the infrastructure stack, with the former rapidly changing, the latter taking years to mature.

In many ways, the TechEx event is unique, in that it brings the issues affecting a whole industry under one roof; a place where the bigger picture can be visualised. In the Data Center Congress, we learned that water and power constraints can cut through the rhetoric around the scale of AI. Sessions under the AI and Big Data roof helped temper the idea of a ‘stampede’ to AI productivity, citing their own reasons why unplanned and disorganised implementations of technology don’t fit the modern enterprise. The data centre is now one of the places where AI strategy becomes physical; the enterprise board room’s considerations are practical.

The Cyber Security and Cloud Expo track put its own take on deployment forward. Here, the day-one programme dealt with security culture, compliance, speed, ransomware, shadow AI, data exfiltration, legacy systems, open-source dependency issues, and the CISO relationship with the C-suite. There was a general consensus around AI adoption increasing a company’s attack surface, and a much-repeated message that existing security weaknesses don’t diminish when the business wants faster, smarter tools.

Sessions on shadow AI and data exfiltration were especially relevant to the wider event. Many companies’ staff use AI services inside business workflows, sometimes without approval, and usually with no facility for logging their activities. That makes data governance and cyber governance effectively the same conversation.

The benefits of one conference playing host to complementary tracks were manifest in several cases. For instance, the cybersecurity track’s concerns around legacy systems were echoed on the IoT and Edge stages, where issues were raised about modern, smart intelligence meeting older plant systems. Security in any context can sometimes become an afterthought, but critical infrastructure in the form of transport or energy means that cybersecurity has to play a central role.

The TechEx North America day-one tracks that were concerned with infrastructure gave the conference a dose of reality, at least in some respects. AI may be discussed in terms of agentic automation, but deployments depend on networks, data centre capacity, and cybersecurity. Edge and IoT sessions showed how intelligence reaches machines, and how carefully and considerately it needs to be applied. The data centre-focused sessions showed the material limits of physical construction, while the cybersecurity sessions showed how a desire for speed can be the enemy.

The day showed the thousands of attendees that putting AI in production isn’t a case of switching the software on. There’s a reliance on the mundane matters of buildings and grids, networks, and security. Companies that understand these issues are more likely to deploy the latest in technology successfully. Getting the bigger picture is what this event is all about.

(Image source: TechForge)

 

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and co-located with other leading technology events. Click here for more information.

AI News is powered by TechForge Media. Explore other upcoming enterprise technology events and webinars here.

The post AI is a matter of power, infrastructure and security: TechEx North America appeared first on AI News.