Some of the most valuable conversations happen when people from genuinely different contexts sit down together; not to pitch, not to present, but to think out loud.

That was the spirit when JazzComputing recently hosted Ján Kasper, PhD., MBA, PhD. and the ZAKA VC team for a visit to Stanford Universitry. ZAKA brings a distinctive investor lens, shaped by markets and ecosystems far from Silicon Valley and that difference made the exchange unusually rich.

We spent time on a question that doesn't get enough serious airtime in VC circles: where is AI actually creating durable value, versus where is it generating compelling narratives that haven't yet met reality? The gap between those two is where a lot of capital is currently living.

A few threads that stood out from our conversation:

• The hardest AI challenges aren't technical. They're organizational. Deployment, adoption, and change management remain the bottleneck.
• Geographic and sector diversity in AI investment matters more than the current concentration of attention suggests.
• The next wave of value creation will likely come from enterprises that figure out execution, not just those that figure out technology.

Stanford has a way of sharpening these conversations, there's something about being in that environment that raises the quality of thinking.

These cross-pollination moments are exactly what JazzComputing exists to facilitate: bringing serious practitioners and serious investors into the same room.