The Scaletech Conference is an invite-only gathering of growth-stage founders, business pioneers, analysts, and hard-core technologists that focuses on finding asymmetric advantage through technology.

“Scale-stage companies face significant challenges. On one front, they face entrenched incumbents with deep pockets and established channels; on the other, they’re beset by upstarts with nothing to lose and everything to gain, assailing them with the newest tools and muddying the marketing waters with confused messages and undercut pricing.

Handling this transition through scale means changing the organization while preserving the culture and technology that fueled the growth in the first place. Scaletech is about thriving while growing, but also about leveraging new technologies that can give the startup an unfair edge over competitors.

In 2020, we’re diving deep into one specific technology: Artificial Intelligence. AI, machine learning, and data science are a superpower for scale-stage companies, who have the data to train models and the customers to test them on. The best companies create feedback loops that improve as they’re used, creating unbeatable competitive moats.

But managing such products is fundamentally different from traditional software development: Rather than writing code and generating data, you’re feeding data to an algorithm that produces code. You don’t know in advance whether the results will be useful, and timelines are often unpredictable. What’s more, you may not have access to the data or resources needed to make good decisions in the first place.