Enterprise AI roadblocks and roadmaps, security and physical AI: Day two at TechEx

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)

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