In this article
This year’s Morgan Stanley
Tech, Media and Telecom conference lineup was stacked: Dario Amodei and Sam Altman (both in the middle of the Pentagon drama) Jensen Huang, Satya Nadella, and dozens of enterprise software CEOs trying to convince investors they’ll survive the AI reckoning.
I spent a day on the ground covering it, and then sat down with David Chen, Morgan Stanley’s head of global technology investment banking, to unpack what he heard.
Chen said the biggest change from last year was the nature of the questions. In 2025, companies were talking about using artificial intelligence to trim expenses, like shaving a few points off operating costs with copilots and automation tools. Chen said that’s now table stakes.
