Features, friends, coffee, & HR Transformation
I want to be upfront about something. I did not leave these conferences with a tidy list of top AI trends or a hot take about which vendor is about to blow up. That is not what I was looking for.
What I was looking for was people. And I found them.
The most valuable thing in the room was rarely on the main stage. It was in the hallway conversations, the coffee line, the dinner where someone finally said the thing they had been thinking all year but had not said out loud yet.
The innovation matters. The demos matter. But I have started to see all of it through a different lens. Not what is next, but who is building it, who is trying to keep up with it, and whether the people behind it actually understand the humans it is meant to serve.
That distinction is everything right now.
The room that stayed with me
The moment I keep coming back to is sitting in with the Human-Centric AI Council in year two, as we started shaping where this work goes next.
What stood out was not just the conversation, but who was driving it and how they were showing up to it.
This was a group of practitioners already deep in the work, not waiting for the market to hand them a roadmap or a cleaner set of answers. They are building their way through it in real time, using their own organizations as the proving ground, and then bringing that experience back into the room to compare, challenge, and refine.
You could see how the value was actually created. Someone would share what they tried, where it held up, where it did not, and what they would do differently. Someone else would layer in their own context, pressure test the thinking, or push on an assumption. Over time, something more useful started to take shape. Not a framework for the sake of having one, but a clearer understanding of what actually works when you are the one responsible for making it work.
The conversation kept pulling in a direction we do not spend enough time on. Not just how to use AI, but what remains fundamentally human in this work. What decisions should still sit with people, where judgment matters, and what accountability actually looks like when outcomes are not always predictable.
That is what made the dynamic in that room feel different.
This was not practitioners reacting to what vendors are building. It was practitioners working through their own reality, sharing it openly, and in many ways setting the terms for what they actually need. From there, the question shifts naturally. Given this, where do you actually help?
From a marketing perspective, it is hard to ignore what that does to how most of us show up in this space. We spend a lot of time trying to shape narratives, differentiate, and get in front of buyers earlier. But sitting in that room, it was clear that a lot of the real direction is being set somewhere else entirely. Not in campaigns or on stage, but in conversations where practitioners are working through what actually holds up and what does not.
It does not make marketing irrelevant, but it does raise the bar. If the people we are trying to reach are already forming their own point of view based on real experience and shared context, then showing up with a strong message is not enough. You have to be close enough to the work to understand where you actually fit inside it.
The work happening inside the HCAIC is not about defining AI. It is about defining what is human. Those are not questions technology can answer on its own.
If you are a solution provider and you are not close to this work yet, it is worth understanding what is being shaped here. The leaders inside the HCAIC are working through what responsible adoption actually looks like in practice. That conversation is worth being in, not to sell into it, but to learn from it and contribute to it.
[Explore the work the Human-Centric AI Council is doing]
What both shows got right
Unleash was smaller this year and people noticed. But that made it easier to actually take things in. Conversations felt slower and more deliberate, less transactional. I spent a lot of time with other marketers and kept hearing the same question. How do you stand out when buyers are exhausted and everything sounds the same?
There are no clean answers yet, but being in a room where people were willing to sit with that honestly was more useful than any panel.
Transform is its own thing entirely. What Samara Jaffe and her team have built is a community first and a conference second, and it shows in every interaction.
I left both events with the same takeaway. Less about what I learned, more about who I trust.
What I am carrying forward
What stayed with me is not a trend or a prediction. It is a shift in where the real work is happening and who is shaping it.
Practitioners are not waiting for the industry to define this for them. They are doing the work, comparing it in the open, and deciding what actually holds up. That is where the standard is getting set.
Everything else will have to catch up to that.
See you all in the fall.