About State of AI
State of AI is a trade publication covering artificial intelligence inside the enterprise, written for the engineering, security, data and business leaders who own AI decisions at real companies. It is an owned media property published by Outlever, which turns companies into the voice of their industry by building owned media ecosystems through brand newsrooms. There is no fee to participate in an interview.
What is State of AI?
AI news, data and strategy for enterprise leaders.
We report on what the frontier labs are shipping, what it costs, and what it does to engineering, security, budgets and brand once it reaches a company that has to run on it. Most of our coverage comes from the executives, operators and subject matter experts doing that work firsthand.
Our readership is global and includes professionals at Fortune 500 companies and leading organizations across enterprise technology. The publication is read daily by leaders at some of the largest companies in the world.
The group of people who own an AI decision keeps widening, and that shapes what we cover. A single model rollout now pulls in security, identity, data governance, procurement, legal, and the operating executive who answers for whatever the system touches. We write for all of them, which is why the coverage runs from lab economics on one end to who signs for the risk on the other.
Why does State of AI exist?
There is no shortage of AI coverage. There is a shortage of coverage that survives contact with an enterprise.
Model launches get reported like sport. Funding rounds get reported like scripture. What happens in the eighteen months after a company signs the contract goes largely unwritten. The eval that failed. The pilot that died over data ownership rather than performance. The second and third tool the company was already paying for that did the same job. The identity policy change that locked out a workforce because nobody had a staging environment.
That is the material we go after. Our readers can find the launch post anywhere. What is harder to find is an account from someone who already ran the thing they are about to run.
What should an enterprise leader be watching?
A working list of what we think deserves attention. It changes, which is part of the point.
- The economics under your bill. Frontier pricing has been subsidized, and model costs, rate limits and contract terms move faster than most procurement cycles.
- Duplication. Large companies routinely pay two or three vendors for one capability, usually because a platform they already license shipped it as a feature.
- Assurance you can audit. Vendors have started issuing their own safety and security attestations, scored against frameworks they wrote themselves. No other category of enterprise software works that way.
- Who owns the risk. An agent acts through an identity and reaches whatever that identity can reach, so accountability usually belongs to the data owner rather than the security office. Most AI policies never name that person.
- The foundation underneath. Identity governance, data governance and application management set the ceiling on how far any deployment can reach, and legacy estate is not going away in regulated industries.
- Concentration and leverage. The labs are converging on similar business models, and your negotiating position depends on how many of them can actually serve your workload.
- Org design. New role shapes are appearing well before anyone formally rewrites the org chart, and hiring criteria are moving toward judgment rather than tooling familiarity.
What is owned media?
Owned media is a publication that a company owns and runs itself, built to serve a readership instead of a funnel.
The difference is editorial. Most branded content is about the company that publishes it, its product, its customers, its case for why you should buy. Owned media is about the industry that company sells into. It reports, it interviews, it covers developments the way a trade publication does, and it has to earn an audience the same way, by being worth reading on its own.
A few things follow from that.
- You own it. Ad prices can rise and a platform can change its algorithm without taking your audience with it.
- It gets more valuable over time. An archive of original interviews is worth more in its third year than its first. A campaign stops working the day you stop paying for it.
- People cite it. Original reporting gets quoted, linked and forwarded. Promotional content mostly does not.
Who publishes State of AI?
Outlever, which turns companies into the voice of their industry by building owned media ecosystems through brand newsrooms. State of AI is one of our own properties, published by us rather than on behalf of an outside sponsor, and we would rather say that up front than bury it.
It is also the same thing we build for clients. We run one so we know what we are asking them to do.
Why does owned media matter now?
Two things changed, and this publication covers one of them for a living.
How buyers find information. Enterprise buying decisions take shape long before anyone contacts a vendor. Technical buyers educate themselves through peers, private communities, code they can read, newsletters, and increasingly by asking a model. By the time a procurement conversation opens, the shortlist is usually set. Whatever influence is still available to you sits upstream of your pipeline.
How information gets distributed. Search returns an answer instead of a list more often every quarter, and that answer is assembled from whatever sources the engine decided to trust. Original reporting, interviews and firsthand accounts are the material those systems pick up and attribute. Marketing copy is not. At the same time, paid channels cost more per unit of trust than they did five years ago, and much of the trade press that used to carry these conversations has consolidated.
Both problems land in the same place. The channels you rent keep getting more expensive and less effective, and the ones that still work need something worth citing. Running a publication produces that material as a byproduct of doing the work.
This is why we treat owned media as a required part of a content and go-to-market strategy, not an optional thing sitting next to content marketing.
How is this different from content marketing?
Content marketing is written for the funnel and it is about the company doing the writing. Owned media is written for a reader and it is about the industry.
The consequences show up everywhere else. Content marketing gets measured on conversion and loses value quickly. Owned media gets measured on readership and citation, and it holds value for years.
It also changes who agrees to talk to you. A CISO will not appear in a vendor's white paper. A chief AI officer will not sit for a case study about a product they are still evaluating. Those people talk to publications that will represent them accurately, and we take that seriously, because the invitation only works if we do.
What do you cover?
We publish in four sections.
Who do you interview, and why was I invited?
We regularly speak with senior executives, operators, practitioners, researchers and other subject matter experts whose experience is relevant to the topics we cover.
Our editorial team proactively identifies potential contributors based on their expertise, experience and perspective. You do not need to be a customer of, partner to, or otherwise affiliated with any company to participate.
Interviews are meant to surface useful firsthand perspective. They are not product or company promotion. For the people we talk to, an interview is a chance to contribute to the conversation in their field, share what they learned from their work, and build a published body of thought leadership around the subjects they know best.
Does it cost anything to be interviewed or featured?
No. There is no fee to participate in an interview or to be featured in State of AI.
We do not charge executives, subject matter experts, or their companies for editorial coverage. There are no placement fees, participation fees, required subscriptions, or other payments associated with being interviewed or included in an editorial feature.
Participation also does not require you or your organization to purchase anything from, become a customer of, or enter into a commercial relationship with anyone.
What should I expect if I agree to an interview?
The process is intentionally straightforward.
A member of the State of AI editorial team will have a short conversation with you, typically around 20 minutes, focused on the subject where your experience is most relevant. We then develop that conversation into an editorial feature.
Before publication, participants get an opportunity to review the article and flag factual inaccuracies, quotation issues, or important context that should be clarified. We want to represent your perspective accurately and keep the process light for people who are busy.
Selected interviews
- Enterprises Are Running A Hundred AI Models Against Their Own Code At Once: interview with Chief Security Advisor at Microsoft, U.S. Health & Life Sciences.
- AI Adoption Sticks When Leaders Are Willing to Fail in Public: interview with Chief Engineering Officer at Amplitude.
- Inside the Page Monitoring Agents Google and Apple Just Made Mainstream: interview with CEO at Visualping.