Super AI Agents: How Will They Evolve?
Session Overview
Generative AI is evolving beyond answering questions and retrieving information — into "agents" that comprehensively understand diverse inputs like images, video, documents, and web environments, and decide their own next actions.
This session traces how search- and conversation-centric AI is developing into agents equipped with multimodal understanding, reasoning, and the ability to carry out long-horizon tasks.
We'll discuss how AI can perceive and understand both the real world and digital environments, and what technologies are needed to break complex goals into multi-step tasks and execute them. The panel will also look at the challenges AI agents must solve to be deployed in real-world services and industries — reliability and accuracy, user control, and collaboration between agents — along with where the technology is headed next.
Speakers
Professor Larry Heck is a faculty member in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the School of Interactive Computing at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds the Rhesa S. Farmer Distinguished Chair in Advanced Computing and is a Georgia Research Alliance Eminent Scholar. With more than 30 years of experience in speech recognition, natural language processing, and conversational AI, he is widely recognized as a global leader in both research and product development. He contributed to the development of Microsoft's AI assistant Cortana and later founded Google's Deep Dialogue research team, where he led the development of foundational technologies for Google Assistant. He subsequently served as a Senior Vice President at Samsung Electronics and as CEO of Viv Labs, leading the development of Bixby in North America. Today, he directs the AI Virtual Assistant Lab at Georgia Tech, where his research focuses on next-generation AI assistants designed to expand human capability, creativity, and productivity.
Kay Zhu is the Co-Founder and CTO of Genspark, bringing over 15 years of pioneering experience in AI and search technology. At Google, Kay co-invented the landmark Panda algorithm and led core search ranking efforts, focusing on machine learning and web quality. He was instrumental in advancing deep learning applications in production search systems and developing conversational AI platforms. Kay's technical leadership has been key to Genspark's rapid product innovation, where the team ships new features on a weekly basis while maintaining enterprise-scale architecture.
Dr. Yoon Kim serves as President and Chief Strategy Officer (CSO) of TwelveLabs, overseeing the company's global growth strategy, technology roadmap, and operations. He holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and began his career as a researcher at SRI International. He went on to serve as CEO of voice recognition startup Novauris Technologies, which was acquired by Apple, where he led development of Siri's core speech recognition technology. He later served as Head of the AI Center and CTO at SK Telecom, overseeing AI research and commercialization, and has invested in early-stage technology companies as a partner at Saehan Venture.