HPE Tech Con: The Foundation of HPE’s Innovation Culture
Our 23rd annual conference brought together HPE’s sharpest minds to imagine the future.
- Tech Con gathers HPE's most promising innovations and innovative thinkers to discuss, interact, share and learn.
- This year's event, HPE’s 23rd, focused on using artificial intelligence to create better business outcomes, addressing customers’ needs for automation, utilization, and energy efficiency.
- 31 of HPE’s most promising ‘early in career’ technologists were invited to take part, preparing them to be future leaders.
March 17, 2025 – In 1956, a group of 10 renowned researchers from disparate fields met at Dartmouth College for a 2-month gathering that was ultimately deemed “The Constitutional Convention of AI.” Its success has been attributed to having a bold vision, including a group of multidisciplinary thinkers, and giving them ample time to engage in unstructured brainstorming.-
At Hewlett Packard Enterprise, we just concluded our 23rd Tech Con conference, HPE’s signature internal gathering of innovators where we aspire to achieve the intellectual breakthroughs the founding fathers of AI achieved in 1956. Led by our Chief Technology Officer, it is the highest expression of our technical community, where we combine the most intriguing innovations of the year with the vibrant interest of attendees to discuss, interact, share open feedback, and ultimately learn. It is where HPE technologists strive to move their innovations forward, not a showcase, but a living think tank.
Tech Con attendees have to navigate a competitive and rigorous application process that begins by submitting an abstract aligned with HPE’s innovation strategy. This year we received 722 abstracts from 1,355 individual authors, examining areas like AI and Edge, Hybrid Cloud and Security, Sustainability and Observability. We invited 350 of our most profound thinkers – data scientists, application engineers, solution architects - representing all of HPE’s product groups as well as my team at Hewlett Packard Labs.
We also make a point of extending an invitation to pre-sales Ambassadors, who represent the voice of the customer, as well as stand out “early in career” technologists; these are folks who, in the first few years of their professional careers, have demonstrated broad growth potential through their learning agility. This year, 31 of our 350 attendees belonged to the ECT cohort. When we interview them years after attending Tech Con, many cite it as a highlight of their time with HPE and a seminal moment in their careers. They talk about the exposure they got to novel ideas, the connections they made and the relationships they developed, many of which last for decades.
This year’s theme was “Applying AI,” where we concentrated on ways to use artificial intelligence to work smarter, better and faster inside HPE - and more importantly, how to build AI into our products and solutions to enable better business outcomes for our customers, and we were privy to unique insights from one of our customers as well as a member of our Board of Directors. We know, for example, that our customers want increased automation, utilization, and energy efficiency and we talked about how to help them do that simply and securely.
While nobody may look back at this year’s event and equate our achievements with those made at Dartmouth in 1956, that’s an unrealistic threshold for success. Tech Con is a foundation of HPE’s culture of innovation, a place where ideas are planted and nourished, and it doesn’t end after three days. It’s an integral part of an ongoing process that helps Hewlett Packard Enterprise deliver meaningful technology that makes a difference in the world
You can learn more about the groundbreaking ideas we’re working on at: The Doppler Report - Thought Leadership | HPE.