Notable quotes from tech, AI sector speakers at Reuters NEXT conference

Dec 4 (Reuters) - Reuters is hosting a two-day Reuters NEXT conference in New York on Wednesday and Thursday, bringing together more than 700 international business leaders and policymakers to examine the biggest issues facing society, business and the world. The following are some notable quotes from speakers at the technology and AI sessions of the conference.

ROBBY STEIN, GOOGLE SEARCH VICE PRESIDENT

"It's (Google's workforce AI) a dramatic enhancement to productivity ... I think it's mostly an enhancement and amplifier on each individual's ability to do much more. And it's allowed us to generate more ideas faster. It's probably allowed us to execute and build things faster."  

AIDAN GOMEZ, COHERE CEO

"Don't believe a lot of these stories that have also fueled stories of terminators and doomsdays and these sort of sci-fi narratives that emerged, they've since become unpopular, because people have been faced with the reality of the technology. They get to watch and experience it themselves."

EVAN SMITH, ALTANA CEO

"We're starting to tie the Cursor or Claude code usage to compensation. We’re going to be doing exits in a couple months if adoption doesn't go up."

CHRISTIAN KLEIN, SAP CEO

"We have great talent in Munich, Paris and eastern Europe. We have strong industries — automotive, manufacturing — but they are under huge pressure from high energy and labor costs... Europe should focus on vertical use cases where we have expertise and data, not just building more data centers."

JEN GENNAI, T3 PARTNER AND THE HEAD OF RESPONSIBLE AI

"The risk is that we become over-dependent on AI. The risks of it is that we outsource ourselves, outsource our thinking to something like AI ... We should never assume that humans and AI should be this hybrid approach. AI is a tool, it should remain a tool that helps us do better, helps us address problems we've never been able to address before. But we shouldn't be AI."

"there's a huge difference between heavy regulation in the EU and then laissez-faire regulation, it's not a good place to be on either side. I definitely want responsible regulation, but not heavy-handed."

ARIEL HERBERT-VOSS, RUNSYBIL CEO AND CO-FOUNDER

"The technology for Neuralink is still a bit further out and most of the promise for that has been around clinical use cases, for people that like are paraplegic and other things like that. I don't know if I really think that it's a good idea to merge the two together. There's a lot of things that could go wrong, I'll say that."

MAY HABIB, AI STARTUP WRITER CEO

"The amount of business process reengineering that's required - most folks really underestimate how much work it is to get hundreds of people to change the way they do things."

"I think there are a ton of reasons why we have seen a slowdown, a pullback in some of this enterprise spending, because we're in this rut where so many enterprises have successful POCs (proofs of concept), but then don't really understand, right, or don't have a path to scaling."

JEFF SCHULTZ, CISCO SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT     

"Just the volumes of traffic and what's happening inside your networks is becoming so high that you can just no longer have security be a separate choke point.....in order to solve for this, you also need to start thinking about what's called AI safety and security, and that's specifically the fact that models that power applications and agents can be very non deterministic."

"One of the things we talk about with AI defense is not just seeing what's happening, but being able to prevent it at the network level, literally shut it down automatically." 

View the live broadcast of the World Stage here and read full coverage here. 

(Compiled by Kritika Lamba in Bengaluru; Editing by Krishna Chandra Eluri)