AIPCon5 Reflections

AIPCon 5 was my third AIPCon, and imo the best yet. A couple of thoughts a week later.

The maturity of the platform and customers’ use of it was very much on display this time around, and it was motivating to see a lot of the long term benefit to using Foundry that we often talk to new customers about made manifest at the organizations presenting at AIPCon. Some themes that really stood out:

1. Level playing field: High-vision + Foundry > a big war chest / industry entrenchment

In an older world, the biggest players with the most entrenched positions were likely to stay that way. With Foundry the paradigm is shifting to reward the people and organizations going after ambitious ideas - you can do so much, so quickly, with so few people that ideas and execution are taking primacy.?

This is a time-honored path to success in the startup world, but Foundry is bringing this to the rest of industry too.?

Some of the most exciting demos at AIPCon are coming from smaller and mid-market companies building on Foundry, who are outcompeting because they have big ideas and product leverage, not because they have more capital or legacy relationships.?

Equally exciting demos are coming from very large companies, but they are winning in the same way - serially delivering valuable use cases across their business while their competitors wait 5 more years for the next ERP integration cycle to complete.

2. Giant startups: Organizational thinking is changing because of Foundry

I had an impromptu conversation with leaders from three household name industrial companies, all of whom have been building in the Foundry platform for a few years.

All of them have people across their entire organizations autonomously building their own workflows and products on top of the ontology, democratizing the power of the platform out to the critical points of contact where the business actually functions.

Hundreds of use cases built by thousands of users on the front line.

Because of Foundry, very large orgs are acting more like startups - Foundry is changing how they operate. We talk a lot about this at Northslope as a “velocity mindset”, the power of which is underappreciated. It gets us really excited for where institutions of all sizes can go.

3. In-Crowd: Foundry-people are finding each other.

The organizations at AIPCon get both 1 and 2 above. They’ve bought in and are investing, and they’re starting to compound their competitive advantage.?

But that group is still relatively small, and the secret of Foundry still isn't really out. Everyone I talked to at AIPCon recognized this, and there is a special atmosphere of being among peers who get it, before everyone else.

Engineers who invest in becoming excellent at Foundry have some very exciting career opportunities ahead of them but it’s not just true for engineers.

Executive leaders are realizing that Foundry can help them create differential value for their organizations - it’s a secret weapon that can make them 10x more effective within their organization and their industry.?

These teams are coming together within their own organizations and collaboratively across institutions at events like AIPCon - it is a special club to be part of and at Northslope we’re excited to see what this high-vision, contrarian, rebellious group goes on to do.

It's a great time in history to be building - in any context, in any industry. You can get an awful lot accomplished. At Northslope we feel privileged to get to be a part of that.