How companies are scaling and securing AI

OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor dove deeper into why his artificial intelligence startup Sierra uses outcomes-based pricing, in a conversation with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin and Wells Fargo’s Saul Van Beurden Thursday.

“People are willing to spend more the more they know it converts into a sale,” Taylor said. “So, the closer you get to an outcome that’s economically valuable, the easier it is for companies to understand that value.”

Taylor said that getting paid only when the products work is riskier, but that the new model would be a “really healthy thing” for businesses.

“AI agents can perform jobs autonomously. You should pay for a job well done, and I think it is a new era of software,” he said.

— CJ Haddad

Wells Fargo Co-CEO of Consumer Banking & Head of AI Saul Van Beurden said the financial services firm is keeping “optionality” when it comes to what AI models, agents and vendors it is striking deals with so that it can “make the right choices.”

“Nobody can predict what happens in six months from now, a year from now; nobody can predict which model will be winning or not,” Van Beurden told CNBC’s Julia Boorstin. “You see us doing multiple deals with multiple companies for shorter terms than would normally be the case, given that we’re in an environment that nobody can predict what is going to happen in six months from now.”

Van Beurden, who appeared on stage alongside OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor, said OpenAI is “one of the two horses in a race that we have around agents,” but keeping that optionality is “super important.”

“That means that we disappoint sometimes people where they want to have a big deal with us and a commitment for three years and an exclusive deal,” he said. “But that means we have multiple horses in the race all the time, because in this era you cannot say, ‘Okay, we go for you, and we go for you.'”

—Ian Thomas

In addition to OpenAI’s Bret Taylor and Wells Fargo’s Saul Van Beurden, CNBC has convened several executives, thought leaders, entrepreneurs, and researchers to talk about the wide-ranging impact of AI.

That includes:

• Andy Markus, chief data & AI officer at AT&T, who will join CNBC’s Contessa Brewer for a conversation about the economics of AI, managing token usage and how companies can spend strategically on the technology.   
• John Arnold, co-founder & co-chair of Arnold Ventures, who will speak with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin about Texas’ statewide AI boom, the massive infrastructure required to power that boom and how data centers have become a lightning rod topic ahead of the midterm elections.   
• Mike Fey, Island co-founder, and Navrina Singh, Credo AI founder & CEO, who will join CNBC’s Contessa Brewer for a conversation about the challenges of keeping pace with AI risks and ways to safeguard against threats in the age of rogue agents and AI-powered human hackers.  
• Kyle Bass, Rochefort Asset Management founder & co-CEO, who is talking with CNBC’s Scott Wapner about the threat of China gaining a technological and military advantage with AI and whether America can afford to hit the brakes.  
• Ben Lamm, Colossal Biosciences co-founder & CEO, who will talk to CNBC’s Julia Boorstin about the science of de-extinction, the possibility of AI bringing back long-extinct creatures like the woolly mammoth and the debate surrounding the science.  

—Colleen McKown

OpenAI Chairman Bret Taylor is one of the most anticipated speakers at the CNBC AI Forum in Dallas.

Taylor, the co-founder of AI startup Sierra, will be joined on stage by Saul Van Beurden, Wells Fargo co-CEO of consumer banking & head of AI, for a conversation with CNBC’s Julia Boorstin about how organizations can scale AI to create value.  

It’s been a big week for OpenAI: the company held its annual DevDay developer conference Tuesday, where the AI company unveiled a number of new products and developer tools.

This year’s DevDay took place amid intense pressure on OpenAI to address safety concerns after it disclosed several incidents where models behaved in unintended ways.  

—Colleen McKown

At the CNBC AI Forum last year in Nashville, Senator Marsha Blackburn kicked off the event, pushing for federal regulation of AI, saying that her constituents were growing increasingly concerned about safety and privacy.

However, now a year later, no such federal regulation has emerged, even as concerns have escalated over the rapid pace of AI development as cases of agent-driven attacks grow and major researchers have raised warning signs about the serious consequences for humanity.

The White House hosted several tech leaders this week, and U.S. President Donald Trump told reporters that he’s “seeing tremendous self-policing” from the AI industry. Trump also continued to maintain that the government would not halt AI development.

“There’s a belief that there should be tremendous self-regulation, and we automatically have regulation with the Department of Justice, the FBI, all of that,” he told reporters after the afternoon luncheon, flanked by CEOs. “But the self-regulation is very important.”

—Ian Thomas

CNBC is hosting its second annual AI Forum today in Dallas, Texas — highlighting that Dallas has become a hub for enterprise-minded AI development.

Dallas now boasts one of the country’s largest tech workforces, driven by local universities’ focus on expanding AI and engineering programs and by Texas’s lower cost of living, which has been drawing talent away from Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, key industries, from telecom to healthcare to financial services, are embedding AI into existing infrastructure in Dallas or setting down new roots to build AI systems that can solve real-world problems for their customers.

—Ian Thomas