In recent years, the AI community has witnessed an exciting acceleration in innovation across foundation models, deep learning, new AI applications across numerous verticals, and more. In addition, AI innovations driven by both academic and industry research labs have rapidly been adopted by big tech companies and startups to deliver value-differentiated products and services.

For many machine learning researchers looking at commercializing their work, one of the frequently wondered questions is - “How do I kickstart a startup that can commercialize my research innovations?”. For many ML practitioners in the KDD community, there is always curiosity on how big tech and startups take AI research and innovations, and scale it to be used by millions of users. With the rapid advances in generative AI algorithms just this past year, the landscape is rapidly evolving around both the opportunities and challenges of building robust and scalable generative solutions.

The second edition of this interactive workshop aims to build on this discourse focusing on two aspects: First, the workshop will bring together invited AI thought leaders working in academia, big tech as well as startups to share their perspective on realizing the opportunities of GenAI in various business verticals via. use-case themes, challenges and risks. Second, the workshop will invite startup founders (from both academia and industry) focused on verticalized GenAI offerings to share their journey on product (commercializing their research into successful enterprises; novel risks and challenges in GenAI productization landscape) and commercial fronts (acquiring customers, building a team, pitching for initial funding) .

Topics of interest in this workshop include but are not limited to:

- Commercializing AI research innovationsn

-Scaling AI startups

- Acquiring customers in challenging market conditions

- Building successful teams

- Pitching for initial funding

- Developing and executing go-to-market strategies

- Best practices for AI innovation

If you have valuable insights and experiences to share in any of these areas, we encourage you to submit a proposal to speak at the I2S workshop. We welcome submissions from AI thought leaders, startup founders, and other professionals with relevant expertise.

Call for Papers:

- Papers that highlight the use of gen AI in any vertical from health to manufacturing and finance that highlights the challenges to scale foundation model based verticalized solutions and how the research described manages to circumvent these challenges and resulted in scaling the innovation.

- Papers should be in ACM KDD conf format but we will accept shorter length papers.

Call for Panel proposals:

- Proposer name and affiliation.

- LinkedIn profile link. Email address

- Role on the panel: Moderator or Panelist or Panel Organizer

- Proposed Panel Title (10 words max)

- Proposed panel Abstract /summary (100 workds max)

- Names of Potential Panelists and their affiliation (Proposer should make an attempt to ensure these folks are available and ready to be at KDD in person to be on the panel).

- Sample questions for the panel to address

Submission DeadLine: The submission for both of Proposal and Panel proposal is due by 15 May. Please submit through easychair AI2S