Songyee Yoon

Drawing on her work backing AI-native companies at Principal Venture Partners, Songyee Yoon offers a clear-eyed map of the AI investment landscape. She explains why today's moment resembles the arrival of the railroad more than a passing tech wave, why capital itself has become part of the competitive moat, and where value is likely to be captured as the technology matures. Audiences of investors and executives gain a disciplined framework for separating signal from hype and spotting the companies, data advantages, and infrastructure best positioned to compound over time.

Every few decades a platform shift rewrites how companies are built and how value is created. Yoon explores how the convergence of compute, data, capital, and talent is turning long-promised ideas like AI agents and synthetic data into real systems, and what that means for innovation and company building. With the perspective of both an operator and an investor, she helps leaders understand where the lasting opportunities lie, why workflows matter more than features, and how to build for a future defined by intelligence rather than scale.

In her book Mosaic of Minds, Yoon argues that as AI absorbs and amplifies the biases embedded in historical data, the real question is no longer only what AI can do, but what standards we anchor it to. A longtime advocate for human-centered AI, she makes the case that the right test for any system is not raw accuracy but whether its decisions can be explained, reviewed, and trusted, and that AI should augment rather than replace human judgment. She shows leaders why well-designed guardrails enable more creativity, not less, and why embedding ethics into how we build and teach technology is essential to AI that benefits humanity.

In Push Play, Yoon makes the case that play is one of our most powerful engines of innovation, and that gaming has long been a quiet proving ground for the technologies now reshaping every industry. Drawing on her years leading NCSOFT and founding its AI centers, she reveals why gaming has consistently been the epicenter for new technology, how it serves as an open testing ground for building AI responsibly, and what game development can teach any organization about creativity, engagement, and adoption. Gamers, as natural early adopters, offer a preview of how the rest of us will live and work with intelligent systems.

Artificial general intelligence has been the long-promised horizon of AI research, and the hype around it has rarely been louder. Cutting through that noise, Yoon offers a grounded look at where real progress is being made, which hard problems remain truly unsolved, and what realistic timelines for AGI actually look like. With the perspective of a computational neuroscientist turned investor, she helps audiences separate marketing from milestones and think clearly about what is, and is not, around the corner.

Yoon places AI alongside fire and language as one of the rare forces that reshapes what humanity is capable of. Rather than framing it as a rival to human intelligence, she presents AI as a partner in dialogue, an operating system for collective intelligence that reflects human creativity and amplifies our imagination. This big-picture keynote explores how individuals, organizations, and even nations can harness AI to augment human potential, and why the direction we choose for the technology matters as much as its speed.

Institutional capital is increasingly flowing toward the foundations of the AI economy: compute, energy, and semiconductors. Drawing on her work as an early-stage investor, Yoon argues that venture investing is best understood as the earliest learning surface for where the economy is structurally heading. She maps how capital, infrastructure, and policy are converging to redraw the global technology landscape, and makes the case that regions and institutions willing to act early can position themselves as strategic nodes in an AI economy increasingly defined by the US and China.