AI Engineer NYC 2026 Opening & closing · 5 min

Welcome Back - Featured Keynotes

Alex LiebermanTenex

Alex Lieberman returns to the adoption gap: distributing an LLM is much more common than putting agents to work across a business.

The talks start the conversation

Alex Lieberman has been listening from the back of the room and talking with attendees between sessions. The talks give those conversations a useful starting point: something a team actually built, with details another team can question or try.

A conversation with swyx turns to the enterprise AI diffusion gap. The systems discussed onstage can be far ahead of everyday work inside a large company.

Four milestones of adoption

Lieberman describes four milestones, using rough estimates from the enterprises Tenex has worked with or spoken to:

Make an LLM available: about 90% have rolled out a general-purpose model.
Teach people to use it: about 60% have trained employees to apply the tools to their work.
Put coding agents to work: about 50% use agents in engineering and product workflows.
Extend agents beyond engineering: about 5% use them in other business workflows.

These are observations from Tenex’s conversations, not a representative survey. They still explain the gap Lieberman is talking about. A rollout can be widespread while the changes to how people work remain small.

Other conversations have ranged from open-source and fine-tuned models to the difficulty of hiring AI engineers. His request for the rest of the conference is to keep comparing those experiences with other people in the room. Frank Long’s next talk, on a hedge fund as a function, supplies another starting point.

Full transcript

Timestamps follow the original livestream. Select a time to watch that moment. Transcripts are machine-generated with reviewed name and terminology corrections; occasional recognition errors may remain.

How's it going?

Who is the most energized in the room?

Whoever that was, most energized.

Well, welcome back for the closing keynote block here at AI Engineer New York 2026.

I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder, co-managing partner at Tenex, applied AI partner for Fortune 500 businesses.

And we are most of the way through the first session today.

and hopefully it's been filled with incredible conversation,

which I'm going to share a little bit about some of the conversations I've had offstage in a minute.

But hopefully the

mix of the programming, the conversation you've had amongst everyone has been really fruitful today.

Now, before we hop into the final block of the day, let's just take a moment again to give a round of applause to our partners who make this entire event possible.

let's start with our presenting sponsor, Arize. Let's give a shout out to Arize.

yeah rise next up we have our platinum sponsors oracle sonar work os and exa let's give a shout

out for them and then two more we have gold sponsors i love them all they're all my favorite

children can't read them all off right now but thank you so much our silver sponsors

and to all of our supporting partners who make this possible thank everyone yeah i don't know

if that was the first person who said they have the most energy, but that person has a lot of

energy. So before we hop into the next block, one thing that I just wanted to share, and I'm sure a

lot of you are already feeling this already, is not only is the energy palpable across the room

in between all of the sessions, but what you realize when you come to AI Engineer is that

the content is incredible. The speakers that are curated are incredible. The depth by which they

talk about the work they're doing is incredible. But this is also just surface area that acts as

a starting point for conversation amongst everyone in the room. And so for me, not only has it been

incredible to stand in the back of the room at various points in the day and just listen to

these incredible speakers who are truly living in Edge City, but then to use all of these

conversations, all these talks as surface area to have conversations with folks. So a few

conversations that come to mind that I've had throughout the day because of the content. One

was a conversation with swyx, one of the people behind this incredible event. We were talking

about just the diffusion gap that exists in enterprise AI right now. And just some fun

stats for you all. We talked to hundreds of big enterprises at 10X across financial services,

healthcare, industrials, et cetera. And the way I think about diffusion of AI across these

organizations is almost in milestones of a race. So the first big milestone at an enterprise is

just adopting a general purpose LLM. Out of curiosity, of the, let's call it 100 firms we

talked to, what percentage of those firms do you think have adopted and rolled out an LLM to all

their employees. Someone screwing out a number. 9%, I think I heard. 17%. So specific. 90%. So

90% of the enterprises we work with have rolled out a general purpose LLN. Under that is people

actually getting trained in how to use the technology, how to actually use these surfaces

in their work. That's like 60%. Next up is coding agents, agents that are actually used within

in engineering and product workflows.

That's around 50% of all the enterprises we've been in.

And then the final one, where we are truly still day one,

is agents actually working in non-engineering workflows

in an organization.

That is around 5% right now.

So going back to what I said earlier,

this community really is Edge City.

The topics that are being talked about,

we are going to continue to see those play out

over the next 12, 24, 36 months.

I've had a variety of conversations like this throughout the day.

It's a fusion gap, open source versus fine-tuned models,

how hard it is to hire great AI engineers at scale.

And so as we go about the rest of today,

but also as you think about the conference in general,

use the content as a starting point

to have interesting conversations at the edge.

With that, I would love to introduce you to our next talk,

which is with Frank Long, the head of AI at Coatue.

He's gonna be talking about a hedge fund as a function. Let's welcome Frank