Recently we gathered CEOs helming the industry’s fastest-growing AI companies for the inaugural AI✦NY Summit—the next iteration of the CloudNY event we have held for the last nine years in partnership with VC firm FirstMark. This year, the focus was on unfiltered conversations on what it actually takes to build, scale and sell a business in the AI era. 

Here are four main takeaways from the discussion, which included insights from the leaders of companies including Databricks*, 1Mind*, Clay, Runway, Qatalyst Partners, Wells Fargo, ADP and KPMG. 

On innovation:

The founders pulling ahead aren’t reacting to the market; they’re making deliberate bets on where it’s heading and aligning their entire organization around that conviction, early.

Andy Kofoid, president of global field operations at Databricks, credits much of the company’s growth trajectory to founder-CEO Ali Ghodsi’s vision. He described how Ali consistently sees around corners that others can’t, citing internal AI enablement changes that Ali pushed six to nine months before they became mainstream. That willingness to act before the market validates a thesis, Andy said, is “what keeps us innovating [from] first principles and continuing to reinvent ourselves.”

Kareem Amin, co-founder and CEO of Clay, told a similar story about the decisions that fueled the company’s growth from $1 million in revenue to $100 million in ARR in two years—what he calls an “eight-year overnight success”. The breakthroughs, he said, were the result of a handful of early, principled choices: naming and targeting a new buyer category (“go-to-market engineers”), selling to rev ops instead of SDRs and opting to price on usage instead of seats. Everything that followed was a downstream consequence of those decisions.

On GTM:

If there’s anything Amanda Kahlow knows well, it’s GTM. As a two-time venture-backed GTM founder—first at 6sense, now at the helm of 1mind—Amanda observed how the traditional GTM org is collapsing into pods. Where SaaS was built around human limitations, AI-native companies should organize around the customer journey—first touch through upsell—not functional silos. Traditional handoffs between marketing, sales, and customer success (CS) are becoming a liability. 

AI is also democratizing access across the GTM org. Databricks unlocked Genie, its conversational AI interface, so that everyone on Andy’s GTM team can use natural language queries to get sales and customer information. Andy says: “Think about giving that access to the 8,000 people within GTM and the efficiency and the speed at which you’re able to operate.” 

The seller profile has also fundamentally changed. Technical fluency, industry knowledge, and a customer success mindset matter now more than deal-closing instincts. Databricks hires sellers with what Andy calls “clock speed” and a “chip on the shoulder”—people who are fast and scrappy, with something to prove. 

On selling to the enterprise:

Enterprises are raising the bar, too. Our enterprise panel—featuring Amin Venjara, chief data officer at ADP, Kunal Madhok, EVP of AI at Wells Fargo, and Thomas Haslam, principal of data, analytics and AI at KPMG—made it clear that pilots alone aren’t enough anymore; enterprises want to see proven ROI. For founders selling into large enterprises, architecture and flexibility matter as much as the product itself. They prefer to work with founders who lead with the business problem they solve and who build with the flexibility to adapt to an enterprise’s data constraints, security posture and existing platform investments.

On people and culture:

People still matter a lot in the AI era. Our panelists are increasingly hiring builders, not operators. Andy advised asking potential hires from big companies whether they actually built the machine or just learned to work inside it. Amanda hires for slope and curiosity over skill set, prioritizing people she’d “go to war with”. Kareem hires people who may have never done the job before but are exceptionally smart or bring something differentiated to the table, then gives them room to run. The common thread: Pedigree is no longer a strong signal for success, agency and drive are. 

Clay also sees opportunity in investing in human-centric areas like brand, content strategy and community events. “We’ve decided to over-invest in things other people are under-investing in,” said Kareem. “Others see these as ancillary support roles in a tech company, but I actually think if you treat them as primary roles, you will get way more benefit out of them and you’ll hire way better people.” When tools make execution frictionless, success comes down to great ideas and human creativity. As Cristóbal Valenzuela, co-CEO & co-founder of AI video generation tool Runway, noted: “If you are a marketing team, a brand team, a media company, story will always matter the most.”

Rob Chisholm, partner of Qatalyst Partners, remarked: “One of the things that may be underestimated or unappreciated, particularly by younger folks… is that products are not companies. Human beings make up companies. And so learning to be a manager, learning how to build a sales force…are just the basic old rules of building good companies with good cultures as well.” Rob also advocates for humility and learning from others during times of unprecedented change. “You can’t know everything in this world,” Rob observed. “You certainly don’t know what’s going to happen next week, let alone next year.” Learning is a collaborative skill that compounds exponentially to the team. 

What comes next

The SaaS-era playbook for building a durable company is a thing of the past, making this a rare and exciting moment, but also raising the stakes for getting the fundamentals right. AI✦NY gave us a chance to pool our experiences and best practices as a community while building lasting relationships across the industry.

We already can’t wait for next year’s session. Special thanks to our sponsors Fifth Third Bank, Golub Growth, KPMG, Cooley LLP, Google Cloud und Qatalyst Partners.

We’ll be sharing more insights from the event on LinkedIn und X—subscribe now if you haven’t already!