Mixture of Experts | Hosted by Activate
About the event
The next generation of consequential AI companies will be shaped not only by advances in models, but by founders who can turn those advances into reliable infrastructure, differentiated products, and enduring businesses.
India is uniquely positioned in this transition—with exceptional technical talent, rapidly evolving customer behavior, and the opportunity to build AI-native companies for both Indian and global markets.
At Activate, we spend time with founders, operators, and builders at this intersection, helping sharpen the problem, identify the right technical and market wedge, and develop a first-principles company thesis.
Mixture of Experts is our private dinner series for people building at that edge.
For this edition, we're bringing together a small group of AI founders in India with Johannes Gehrke, Technical Fellow for AI at Uber.
Johannes joined Uber in 2026 to help transform its products with AI. Previously, he spent 14 years at Microsoft, most recently as Technical Fellow for AI Infrastructure in CoreAI, where he helped build the inference and post-training infrastructure powering AI across Microsoft. Before that, he was Lab Director of Microsoft Research Redmond and the Tisch University Professor of Computer Science at Cornell University.
Johannes is an ACM Fellow, an IEEE Fellow, and recipient of the ACM SIGKDD Innovation Award.
What to expect
A candid conversation with Johannes on building AI products and organizations at scale
Insights on inference, post-training, data infrastructure, and AI systems
Where founders can build durable differentiation as AI evolves
Perspectives on India's opportunity to create globally significant AI companies
A curated room of founders exchanging ideas over dinner