September 29, 2025
On Saturday, September 27, 2025, I attended the IIT Alumni Association of North Texas (IITNT) Conference in Frisco. The conference, called L.E.T.S. Talk, is an annual gathering of Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) alumni to network and discuss developments in technology.
You may be wondering why I was there. Last year I was invited by Raj Menon to speak about the benefits of higher education. This year Sanjeev Kumar invited and registered me to attend. I was interested because the speakers last year were strong and this year’s focus on AI promised the same.
For context, IIT is a group of technical institutes in India established to provide education in engineering and science. The schools were established in the mid-20th century to support the country’s growth in technology education. Competition to attend one of the 23 IIT schools is tough and graduates are found in leadership roles in industry and academia around the world. Alumni chapters are active across the globe. The IIT Alumni chapter in North Texas is one of them and this year’s conference drew about 500 attendees. The group also supports higher education locally with a $30,000 endowment for Collin College scholarships and a $100,000 fund for the University of Texas at Dallas.
This year’s speakers covered a lot of ground. Below is my attempt to capture the key points.
The Human Side of AI – Shar Dubey , former CEO of Match Group, compared the AI revolution to the Industrial Revolution. She asked the audience to rethink what it means to be smart and focused on reflection, relationships, and engaged action. She also warned that social isolation is increasing and drew on Robert Putnam’s work on social capital as a call to strengthen community. More on social capital by Robert Putnam: https://muse.jhu.edu/article/16643
Bubble or Platform Shift? – Arun Chandrasekaran raised the question of whether AI is a bubble or a platform shift. He pointed to signs of a bubble such as proof-of-concept projects that never scale, startup offerings that lack durability, and rising costs. He balanced that with signs of transformation. Seventy four percent of CEOs rank AI as the most impactful force in business strategy and ninety percent of companies are increasing spend. His Tulipmania example showed that even bubbles can leave lasting systems behind.
Technology Lens – A panel on AI in Technology featured Rama Akkiraju of Nvidia, Karthik Krishnan of Concentric AI, and Gokul Rajaram , a venture capitalist. Akkiraju spoke about GPUs built for AI workflows and how natural language interfaces can change processes. Krishnan emphasized starting with the business problem and pointed to the efficiency of smaller focused models. Rajaram said startups must prove measurable ROI, often through labor replacement, and he encouraged professionals to reskill with a beginner’s mindset.
Business Lens – The AI in Business panel included Gurmeet Singh, PhD , Kishor Gummaraju, and Nitin Chaturvedi. Singh described how AI is boosting productivity, service, and operations, including a $500M improvement at 7-Eleven through inventory optimization. Gummaraju showed how AI is being used to reimagine processes in contract management, quick service restaurant pricing, and building distribution. Chaturvedi described the future of work with humans as conductors, guardians, and creative sparks, while AI takes on transactional work. He advised companies to focus on a few initiatives and lead through people.
Trust as the Foundation – Cortnie Abercrombie of AI Truth positioned trust as a driver of business results. Customers reward trusted companies with loyalty and advocacy, but executives often overestimate how much they are trusted. She presented her 12 Tenets of Trust including humane, explainable, fair, accountable, and governed, and emphasized the need to put them into practice with lifecycle governance.
Healthcare as the Test Bed – The AI in Health panel showed applications where the stakes are highest. Ravi Narayanan of CorroHealth explained how AI is used in revenue cycle management with ambient voice, automated coding, and summarization of long records, saving doctors’ time. Sanat Mohanty of Pienominal described the drug development pipeline where 40,000 trials produce only 40 approvals and where AI can help with prioritization, population targeting, and acceleration while meeting strict traceability requirements. He also described agent-to-agent AI where bots representing providers and insurers resolved claim denials. Abhay Singhal of Intuitive.Cloud shared examples of AI in surgery and personalized medicine and raised cautions about compounding errors in multi-step agentic AI and over-reliance on LLMs. He argued that AI should also integrate heuristics and first principles.
How this relates to Public Safety – The public safety market is small so ROI on tech investing takes a long time or may not exist. Venture capitalists are hesitant to fund projects so government investment will be the driver to AI growth in public safety. Public safety can adopt innovation from other industries like healthcare and the military. That is why it is important to be familiar with AI growth in other areas to see what can be a force multiplier for public safety.
New public safety employees are using AI even if the organization is not. Ask them how they use it and see if it can be adopted more broadly.
There are real limitations in AI that will slow development. Humans rely on balance, vision, reading social cues, gut feelings, imagination, and hunches to make decisions. AI struggles with all of these. However there may be opportunity because AI can manage what humans find difficult like analyzing conflicting data, chaos, and stress. I wrote more about it here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/artificial-intelligence-what-means-fire-service-jonathan-boyd-ne5hc
Agentic AI is the best opportunity for public safety. It can be a force multiplier but to adopt it we must trust it. Combining AI with simulation is the path to building trust. Running agents through thousands of simulations will be the key to adoption. More on those thoughts here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/agentic-ai-ooda-loop-how-could-support-fire-service-jonathan-boyd-gjihc
All of this connects back to the challenge of time. I have written a series on that topic here: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/responding-time-part-1-jonathan-boyd-mqurc/?trackingId=cyRbhQMiQFOT4%2BE0dq7BCg%3D%3D
Overall the conference was valuable and I am grateful for the opportunity to listen to the speakers and meet the attendees. Thank you to everyone with the IIT Alumni group for putting it together.