Yoav Naveh sits down with Amin Mrini, Group Chief Commercial AI Officer at Informa, for a conversation that starts in an unlikely place: an industry built on getting people in a room together, in an era obsessed with digital disruption. Amin explains why the events business is oddly well positioned for the AI moment, and why that's no excuse to stand still. From there the conversation moves into sharper territory: the gap between what companies say about AI on earnings calls and what they can actually prove, why Amin built a tool to measure that gap, and why he doesn't buy the argument that vertical AI software is doomed to be commoditized. Along the way, Yoav and Amin dig into what actually makes a company's presence at an event valuable versus forgettable, and why "you can build it" is no longer the hard part of building anything.

Takeaways:

• The physical experience is AI-proof, the wrapper around it isn't. Amin argues the core product of an event, people together in a room, doesn't live in the digital world and can't be automated away. But everything around it: personalization, agenda planning, and making the most of attendees' time and budget, is fair game for AI to improve.
• The real work starts after the high wears off. Events create a rare kind of momentum, people who'd normally ignore a cold outreach suddenly want to meet. Amin sees AI's biggest opportunity in what happens next: personalized summaries, automated follow-up, and helping people act on connections before the moment fades and the noise of "what's next" takes over.
• Advertising is a losing strategy, value-add isn't. Amin's take on what separates vendors that get remembered from ones that get tuned out has nothing to do with technology. It's whether a company shows up talking about itself or shows up helping the audience make sense of a trend or solve a problem.
• Enterprise AI transformation is still in its infancy. Amin built a tool tracking S&P 500 companies' AI claims against their disclosed results. The finding: fewer than a third can point to a quantified P&L impact from AI, even though 70 to 80 percent are running an average of six AI initiatives at once.
• Building is commoditized. Mattering isn't. Anyone can now spin up an app or a service without writing a line of code, but Amin points to data showing app submissions have exploded while the number of apps anyone actually rates well has stayed flat. The bar has moved from "can you build it" to "does it matter to anyone."

Quote of the Show:

• "The fact that you can build stuff doesn't mean that you're building stuff that matters to anyone." - Amin Mrini

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/amin-mrini/
• Website: https://www.informa.com/

On this episode of Ahead of the Herd, Yair Weinberger sits down with Lior Ron, COO of Waabi, to explore what happens when AI moves beyond the screen and into the physical world. Lior has spent his career building and scaling technology across some of the most transformative companies in the industry, from Israeli Army intelligence and Google Maps to Otto and Uber Freight. Now at Waabi, he is focused on physical AI and autonomous trucking, but the conversation quickly expands into a much bigger question: how does AI fundamentally change the way entire industries operate? Lior and Yair explore autonomous vehicles, simulation, AI-native organizations, the parts of the AI stack that may become commoditized, and what happens to companies and workers as AI takes on more of the work.

Takeaways:

• Physical AI Is the Next Frontier
  Lior sees autonomous trucking as an opportunity to address the deeper capacity, labor, and efficiency problems involved in moving goods around the world, not simply automate the act of driving.
• Simulation Changes What AI Can Learn
  Waabi World gives Waabi a way to recreate the physical world and test difficult edge cases that would be difficult to encounter through real-world miles alone. Lior sees this as a critical piece of scaling autonomous systems.
• AI Should Rebuild the Workflow
  Lior argues that AI-native companies should not simply reproduce the processes humans already use. As AI becomes more capable, organizations can rethink workflows from the ground up and potentially collapse entire chains of manual work.
• The AI Moat Is Moving Up the Stack
  Lior expects areas such as models and hardware to become increasingly commoditized. He believes specialized research, proprietary systems, simulation, data, and deep expertise in specific physical problems can remain meaningful sources of differentiation.
• Smaller Teams, Bigger Leverage
  Lior expects AI to change the structure of organizations, with fewer people, greater leverage per employee, and traditional roles evolving or disappearing. He also emphasizes the continuing importance of collaboration and people skills in an increasingly automated world.

Quote of the Show:

“ I do think we will see a sea change in terms of employment and I do think we all need to get ready to that”- Lior Ron

Links:

• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/lioron
• Website: https://www.waabi.ai/

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Welcome back to Ahead of the Herd. This time, Yoav Naveh sits down with Frank Slootman, the executive who took not one but three companies public, including Snowflake's record-setting IPO, and spent six years before that as CEO of ServiceNow. Slootman isn't running a company right now, which puts him in a rare spot: nothing to sell, nothing to defend, just a front-row view of where AI is actually headed. The conversation moves fast, from the "candy store" of AI use cases across every industry, to why enterprises are quietly stacking GPUs for on-prem AI, to the uncomfortable question sitting underneath all of it: as companies go from experimenting with a couple of AI agents to running hundreds of them, who actually owns that? Slootman's answer draws on decades of watching incumbents get blindsided by technology they thought they understood, and it says as much about the future of work as it does about the future of software.

Takeaways:

• AI's real opportunity isn't automation, it's obsolescence of the old swim lanes. Slootman says the technology has outpaced most companies' ability to use it. The winners won't be the ones who digitize existing workflows faster, they'll be the ones who notice their entire category is dissolving and move before it's obvious.
• The agent army needs a general. Managing one or two AI agents is manageable, like everyone keeping an eye on a single kid. Managing a thousand agents is a different problem entirely. Slootman and Naveh agree that enterprises are going to need something like a "center of excellence" for AI agents, a real owner accountable for their lifecycle, not just a side project bolted onto someone's existing job.
• Consumption pricing is coming for industries that don't want it. Cybersecurity still sells on seats and devices, not usage. Slootman predicts that model won't survive AI's shift toward paying for what you actually consume, and incumbents built on predictable licensing revenue are going to feel that shift as a threat, not an upgrade.
• On-prem AI is getting a second life. Cloud adoption never fully finished, and AI isn't necessarily pushing laggards there faster. Slootman points to enterprises suddenly discovering they have thousands of GPUs sitting around, betting that on-prem sticks around longer than expected because companies want guardrails around their AI.
• Bet on the elevator, not your resume. Slootman's career advice, distilled from watching a smokestack manufacturing business die in front of him as a young man: get as close to the technology that's ascending as you can. Talent matters less than picking an elevator that's actually going up.

Quote of the Show:

• “You wanna step into an elevator that's going up, not one that's going down or one that's sitting still." - Frank Slootman

Links:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/frankslootman/
• Website: https://www.snowflake.com/en/