Everything to know about the bigger, flashier 2025 AI Horizons Summit

The AI Horizons Summit is back this year with a larger turnout, big-name headliners and a more ambitious scope.

The Sept. 11 and 12 event will again be hosted in Bakery Square, but this year it will focus on being a ‘Pennsylvania-wide summit’ rather than only convening the Pittsburgh ecosystem, AI Strike Team executive director Joanna Doven told Technical.ly. 

2025 is about showcasing “Pittsburgh as the real center of artificial intelligence in the state, and of course beyond the state,” and finding ways to “connect our AI innovators with companies throughout Pennsylvania,” she said. 

Governor Josh Shapiro and Senator David McCormick will headline the event, bringing a bipartisan angle to the second annual summit. Other notable speakers include local tech, university and business leaders, along with global investors and Pennsylvania policymakers. 

Sold-out summit takes a broader look at PA AI

Tickets for the event sold out in the first hour registration opened, Doven said, and the summit doubled in size this year. 

The venue has a max capacity of 800 people, but more than 1,000 signed up for the pre-registration waitlist. To accommodate demand, the event will be live-streamed for free so the Pittsburgh community can still get a taste of the panel discussions even if they aren’t able to attend in-person.

“Looking at our registration, it will probably be 25% [from the] Pittsburgh region, and the rest will be a mix of policy leaders from DC, New York, Silicon Valley, venture capital investors and then the Pennsylvania-wide scene,” Doven said. 

AI Horizons follows the Energy and Innovation Summit that happened in July at Carnegie Mellon University, which attracted controversy and $90 billion of announced AI investments to Pennsylvania.

This year’s summit also has a special focus on physical AI, or artificial intelligence that is embedded into machines, devices or robots that interact with the physical world. 

From manufacturing to healthcare, artificial intelligence is increasingly finding its way into physical products, and the summit aims to capitalize on that, according to Doven. Bakery Square has been the site of a push by local developers and the AI Strike Team to attract more investment for defense tech.

The summit will feature panels on AI policy and deployment across a variety of industries, as well as “private plenaries” for candid discussions on policy and economic strategy, Doven said. It will also include the inaugural Forge AI Pitch competition, where a Pennsylvania-based AI company will win $100,000.

Building AI momentum in Pittsburgh 

Since the AI Strike Team launched in January, it’s been marketing hard for Pittsburgh to be seen as a “serious AI city,” a place where AI tools are actually commercialized successfully. 

To back up their call for AI investment, the Strike Team often cites Pittsburgh’s energy resources, workforce, research institutions, legacy industries and rising tech startups as evidence that the city is Pennsylvania’s — and arguably the country’s — leading AI hub. 

There have been some major AI investments and successful deployments of Pittsburgh-made AI-powered tech in recent months. For a few financial quarters, venture capital investment in the Pittsburgh region has largely been driven by AI companies. 

Skild AI, now valued at $4.7 billion, unveiled its AI-powered robot “brain” last month. And Abridge, another Pittsburgh-based unicorn, recently announced a partnership where its AI clinical documentation tech will be used across Highmark Health’s 14 hospitals and hundreds of clinics. 

Even smaller financial investments in the region are going to companies creating AI solutions for long-standing problems. 

“Pittsburgh is already known as a global AI leader,” Doven said, “and leveraging that into commercialization with physical AI is the economic moment that we are game to own.”