“If someone walks away with a plan and has met the three people who are going to change their career or company, that’s going to drive people back again and again and again.”
Stefan Weitz sees potential where others see uncertainty. As co-founder and CEO of HumanX, his mission has been to channel the chaotic energy surrounding artificial intelligence into clarity, collaboration and conviction.
What began as a vision to make AI comprehensible and actionable for businesses has grown into one of the most influential forums in the global AI ecosystem. The HumanX conference is not just another conference — it is a hub where thought leaders, innovators and skeptics converge to shape the future of human–machine symbiosis.
Origins built on early machines
Weitz’s fascination with technology began long before his 18-year tenure at Microsoft, rooted in the neon glow of 1980s science fiction. Watching C-3PO on “Star Wars” and K.I.T.T. from “Knight Rider,” a young Weitz became transfixed by the possibility of machines that could think alongside humans.
At eight years old, he built rudimentary programs and early “AI bots,” more for curiosity than capability, but they ignited a lifelong pursuit to understand how intelligence — human or synthetic — could evolve.
“When I got my first computer, I remember asking my father, ‘How long will it wait for me to do something?’” Weitz said. “I couldn’t understand that there was like an infinite amount of time. It was literally my tool to use however I wanted.”
At Microsoft, Weitz was on the founding team of Bing.com and helped to build and promote the company’s search technologies. He was experimenting with machine learning at scale, yet even then, he sensed the limitations of early AI approaches.
When the modern version of the transformer emerged in 2017, Weitz recognized something seismic had shifted.
“I didn’t know how transformational it would be, but I knew this was different,” he said.
And what once belonged to childhood dreams and science fiction, from conversation with machines to intelligent ecosystems, suddenly seemed achievable.
The birth of HumanX
That realization became the spark for HumanX. For Weitz, the problem wasn’t whether AI would change business; it was whether the people building and using AI would be ready to do it wisely.
“I saw friends running large companies who had no real plan, conviction or understanding how to use AI,” he said. “To me, as both a venture capitalist and tech nerd, this is going to end badly for the industry, especially if we’re relying on enterprises to go figure out how to deploy this, and they themselves are unclear.”
If AI were to remain unclear, it would ultimately fail after being deployed, which would then cause revenue stream problems for startups and future investing, Weitz explained. The industry needed a space where the entire ecosystem — startups, enterprises, investors and academics — could come together to build clarity and confidence.
Except that kind of forum or ecosystem didn’t exist. Weitz decided to do something about it, joining with business partner Jonathan Weiner, a venture partner at Oak HC/FT and former head of global business development for Google Wallet and Payments. Weiner is also one of the visionaries behind large industry conferences, including HLTH: The Future of Healthcare Conference and Money20/20.
The result was HumanX, a conference that sought to ground AI transformation in evidence, collaboration and shared experience. Together, Weitz and Weiner set out to build something that would feel as substantive as it was inspiring.
“We wanted a place for meeting people, meeting connections that are like them, meeting vendors that are actually solving problems — and have case studies to show it — or be inspired by someone on stage to get you thinking about AI differently,” Weitz said.
Lessons from the first HumanX Conference
The inaugural HumanX conference took place March 10-13, 2025 at The Fontainebleau Resort in Las Vegas.
The conference exceeded expectations by every metric, according to Weitz. There were 330 speakers and over 3,000 attendees, including executives from major technology firms. No speaker paid to be on stage and each was editorially vetted.
“This was high-content, high-impact and no sales pitches,” he said.
The event’s highlight wasn’t the powerful keynotes or polished showcases, but it was the intimacy of its interactive sessions, which Weitz called “master classes.”
Industry leaders who typically skip out on more intimate networking, stayed and met in these small groups, putting people in rooms with the likes of Kevin Weil, CPO of OpenAI and Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures.
“That was really special for both the speakers, who told me that it was the best part of their day, and for attendees who were like, ‘Wow, I actually got to go and talk to Kevin Weil for five minutes’ about their XYZ system,” Weitz said.
Themes and challenges in AI
Feedback from HumanX’s inaugural event shaped what would come next. While attendees praised the content and production, Weitz noticed gaps in the audience mix. Some sessions felt too skewed toward startups; others leaned too corporate.
The next iteration, he promised, would be “10 times better” and more finely tuned to professional roles, challenges and use cases. The 2026 conference, he said, would group content not by industry buzzwords but by function: HR, finance, marketing, operations and beyond.
That philosophy now drives HumanX’s next evolution: a sophisticated AI-powered networking platform.
“We’re building something that truly understands who should meet whom and why,” Weitz said. “It’s creepy in a good way. We’re creating opportunities for interaction and spontaneity. These kinds of chaotic moments of serendipity allow people to bridge potential different gaps of knowledge or bridge different skill sets.”
As a curator, Weitz approaches conference themes with both scientific curiosity and sober realism, noting that AI moves too fast for static programming, so HumanX has to often “forecast where the puck is going.”
He and his team are organizing the next conference’s agenda around practical questions rather than hype, focusing on the intersection of technology, regulation and human decision-making. The next HumanX conference is in San Francisco from April 6-9, 2026, and will expand this formula of uniting inspiration with action.
The lineup is already formidable: former Vice President Al Gore; AWS CEO Matt Garman; May Habib, co-founder and CEO of Writer; futurist Ray Kurzweil; Sierra co-founder and OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor — to name a few.
But Weitz emphasizes that star power is a means, not an end.
“My goal is to give enterprises conviction and confidence in their AI journey,” he said. “It’s also that attendees leave with a plan of action. If someone walks away with that plan and has met the three people who are going to change their career or company, that’s going to drive people back again and again and again. That’s what we’re excited about.”
AI and the prospect of a bubble
Weitz loves talking about AI, but he is a realist. When asked about warnings, including a September 25 Wall Street Journal article, that AI might be overhyped or even heading toward a bubble, his answer is nuanced.
“I said that last year on stage at HumanX — are we in a bubble? Is it bad? And the answer is yes, and probably not,” he said. “It’s hard to tell a bubble. However, there’s a reason people keep putting money in here, because they still believe there’s an upside. That could be a delusion. It could be based on false promises. There could be lots of things. That’s the ‘but’ no one knows until it’s over.”
Referring to that WSJ article by Eliot Brown and Robbie Whelan, Weitz said that the fundamentals of revenue growth, infrastructure spend and returns still show AI is in “the green.”
He went on to say that some froth is inevitable. Consolidation is bound to happen. And it wouldn’t take but a few things to change the AI industry dramatically. For example, if a hyperscaler pulls back a ton of spending.
However, Weitz points to the difference between speculative tech trends and tangible breakthroughs in fields like medicine, agriculture and drug discovery as evidence that AI’s impact is real.
“These are things that simply couldn’t have happened three years ago, and now they’re happening because we funded these massive capital expenditures,” he said.
Still, he warns that the industry’s expansion must be tempered with governance and responsibility. That conviction inspired the formation of the AI Coalition, a newly launched nonprofit advocacy group jointly founded by HumanX and Humanrace Capital to give early-stage AI companies a voice in Washington D.C., a counterweight to tech incumbents dominating regulatory discussions.
“As you think about regulations and what’s coming out of the state and federal levels, we are ensuring that earlier stage companies aren’t caught off guard by rules that could impact them dramatically, nor are they pushed out of the race,” Weitz said.
Europe: A new frontier
Meanwhile, as HumanX continues to scale, its next major step is international. The conference will head to Europe in September 2026.
The decision wasn’t about global branding, but about bridging perspectives. As Weitz put it, the focus won’t be about telling regulators how to think, but on how European innovators can use regulations as a competitive advantage and leverage rules for progress rather than resist them.
He also views Europe’s slower approach as a valuable counterbalance to the sprint often seen in America around new technology.
“Europe faces a different set of challenges,” Weitz said. “Its regulatory frameworks are stricter, its cultures more diverse and its pace more cautious. We want to help bring clarity there, too.”
For Weitz, the future of AI isn’t just about acceleration; it’s about the alignment of people, purpose, and action.
“If someone walks away with a plan and has met the three people who are going to change their career or company, that’s going to drive people back again and again and again.” Stefan Weitz sees potential where others see uncertainty. As co-founder and CEO of HumanX, his mission has been to channel the chaotic energy surrounding artificial intelligence into clarity, collaboration and conviction. What began as a vision to make AI comprehensible and actionable for businesses has grown into AI, Home, News, Popular, AI conferences, AI industry trends 2025-2026, AI networking platforms, AI regulation, artificial intelligence leadership, HumanX, Jonathan Weiner, OpenAI, Stefan Weitz, venture capital in AI
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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