BrXnd NYC 2024: Speakers & Sponsors // BrXnd Dispatch vol. 38
First round of speaker announcements for 5/8/24.
You’re getting this email as a subscriber to the BrXnd Dispatch, a (roughly) weekly email at the intersection of brands and AI. BrXnd NYC 2024 is coming on May 8, and there are still a few tickets left.
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to get this email out, but one exciting thing after another kept happening, and it got pushed back bit by bit. I’ve finally locked down enough of the pieces that I’m excited to make my first set of announcements around speakers (and a pretty exciting title sponsor).
First, here's a quick reminder about what I’m after for this event. I’ve got these memorialized on my programming tenets page, but my hope for this event (and really any event I do) is to push past the baseline conversations/hype around AI and marketing and help open people’s minds to the amazing things that are possible today. To that end, after last year’s event, I wrote down these five tenets:
Doers > Speculators: We want BrXnd to be about doing and learning, not talking and speculating. We are too early in this journey, and the technology is too different from what we’ve seen before to get stuck speculating about its future impact.
Curiosity > Overconfidence: We embrace the unintuitive nature of AI and its future implications. We're all learners in this new era of technology.
Conversations > Panels: Whenever possible, it’s better to have just two people on stage talking to one another rather than a whole set of speakers competing for time and attention. Go deeper with fewer people so that the audience can learn from their thinking and experience more than just their opinions.
Show > Tell: It’s always better to show people something than to tell them about it. While other conferences try to urge people away from showing specific products, we think it’s most useful for people to see what’s real and possible.
Process > Perfection: Take your audience on a journey, even if it’s something that didn’t work out. This is an audience of doers and experimenters, and understanding the journey is often more important than just seeing the outcome.
I’m doing everything possible to ensure this year’s edition lives up to those same ideas. To that end, I’m super excited with the folks who will be joining us in May:
Airtable CEO & Co-Founder Howie Liu will be talking about building new kinds of interfaces for AI.
Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine will talk to Tech:NYC president Julie Samuels about AI, policy, tech, NYC, and everything surrounding it.
KPMG Americas CMO Lauren Boyman will discuss integrating AI into large marketing organizations with Drew Neisser from CMO Huddles.
Colgate-Palmolive Director of Experience Design David Cole will showcase some of the ways his team has been integrating AI into the design process.
Langchain’s Lance Martin will discuss the power of building RAG systems.
Fred & Farid founder/creative director Frédéric Raillard will be talking about his creative experiments with AI.
Brandtech Group General Counsel Betty Louie will be talking with Toolkits.com’s Shareen Pathak about AI, the law, and marketing.
Queen of Swords founder/ECD Jenny Nicholson will show off some bots she’s built to solve creative problems.
Capsule.video CEO/Co-Founder Champ Bennet will show what’s possible with AI and video.
Last year’s favorite speaker, Tim Hwang, will talk about whatever he wants because that’s just how he rolls.
Plus, lots more. I still have a few spots for fun and interesting demos, so if you’re at a tech company doing something interesting, be in touch!
There are still about 20 tickets left, so if you’d like to join, get yours today.
Now, let’s talk about sponsors. I’m incredibly excited to announce that Airtable has come on as the event’s title sponsor. If you’re new around here, I wrote about my love for Airtable as an AI tool almost exactly a year ago:
Airtable is one of my very favorite ways to prototype ideas and works particularly well for playing with APIs as they have a built-in Typescript editor. For those unfamiliar, Airtable is basically a database not unlike PostgreSQL or MySQL, but it has a simple frontend resemblant to Excel or Google Sheets. The real power comes when combined with Automations, which, if you’re on the $20-per-month pro plan, includes the ability to write almost any Javascript/Typescript that interacts with your base. The magic of Airtable as a prototyping tool is that your database and code can all live in the same place, and thanks to Automations, Views, and some other niceties, you can build some pretty complex stuff with very little code and no worries about setting up your environment—which is the bane of the amateur coder's existence. (For context, most of my BrXnd Collabs tool runs on Airtable to this day.)
Airtable is incredible, and I’m not just saying that because they’re sponsoring. Like last year, I am running my whole event on it, and it’s the place I start most projects. As I began to talk to Howie, Airtable’s co-founder and CEO, about some of the stuff they were doing with AI, particularly for marketing teams, it was an obvious match.
And, of course, a big thank you to all our 2024 sponsors, without whom I couldn’t pull this thing off. Airtable enables any team, regardless of technical skill, to create apps on top of shared data and power their most critical and unique workflows. Brandguard is the world’s #1 AI-powered brand governance platform, Focaldata is combining LLMs with qualitative research in fascinating ways, and Redscout is a strategy and design consultancy that partners with founders, CEOs, and CMOs at moments of inflection for their organizations. Plus, big thanks to McKinney, Inuvo, Dstillery, and Persistent Productions. If you’re interested in sponsoring the 2024 event, please be in touch.
That’s it for now. Get your tickets before they’re gone. There is lots of other stuff happening in the world of AI and marketing that I will get back to in the next week or two. Thanks for reading, subscribing, and supporting.
If you have any questions, please be in touch. If you are interested in sponsoring, reach out, and I’ll send you the details.
Thanks for reading,
Noah