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For 16 summers in a row, Tim Armstrong has flown to Sun Valley, Idaho, following the July 4th holiday to attend the annual Allen & Co. Conference. The event brings together some of the most powerful and wealthiest leaders in media, technology, and finance.
The longtime tech and advertising executive brokered one of the most famous deals to come out of the summit — the $4.4 billion sale of AOL to Verizon, which began over a casual lunch in 2014.
Armstrong is now the CEO of Flowcode, a platform he founded that uses QR codes to fuel customer engagement.
Business Insider caught up with Armstrong to discuss some of the hot topics of this year’s conference, which kicked off on Tuesday.
Artificial intelligence, unsurprisingly, was top of mind for attendees.
It was the “1,000-pound gorilla” in “every conversation, every meeting,” Armstrong said.
“It used to be about media and technology, media and the internet,” he said. “There’s a third leg of the stool now: media, the internet, and AI.”
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AI is being adopted at a much faster pace than the internet was, he said, and executives and investors swapped ideas about how to best implement the technology.
Armstrong, for example, has enforced “TuesdAIs” at Flowcode. On Tuesdays, each department must focus on the technology by implementing new tools and updating processes to incorporate AI.
It’s “time to paddle out to the next wave,” he said. “Paddle hard.”
Among the media set, sports dominated conversation. It’s the “place that can still collect humans together in big audiences for live events,” Armstrong said, adding that a similar takeaway had emerged from Cannes earlier this summer.
The conference drew attendees from all over the sports world, including the NBA, NFL, and MLB commissioners, team owners like Robert Kraft and Jimmy Haslam, and entrepreneurs like Jeb Terry of venue operator Cosm.
Armstrong ended the conference with a somewhat extreme sport of his own: bridge jumping in one of Idaho’s many swimming holes.
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