Private Dinner Series

MAIC Private Dinner Series are a platform to have open and cross-industry conversations between leaders and visionaries around AI and its impact.

Private Dinner Series are professionally recorded and will be used as a documentary to show the future generations how our generation envisioned creating a being more intelligent than ourselves.

Inaugural Dinner:


With the Miami Tech Week and Emerge, Miami AI Club launched its Private Dinner Series with a selected group of influential executives, AI founders and investors at the very night of Emerge.

The inaugural dinner featured distinguished speakers:

Dr. Seth Dobrin: Former Chief AI Officer of IBM, Dr. Dobrin shared his expertise on the transformative impact of AI.

Adam Fletcher: As Chief Security Officer of Blackstone, Adam delved into the intersection of AI and security.

Joining them was Nima Schei, a neuroscientist, AI innovator, and CEO of Hummingbirds AI and Miami AI Club.

The dinner, hosted by Nima Schei and Sara Zargaran, was made possible with support from Vultr and Holland & Knight. This exclusive gathering set the stage for collaboration, networking, and groundbreaking ideas in the AI landscape.

Dinner 2:

At the MAIC Private Dinner Series No. 2, we welcomed Patrick Heim, a methodological and multidimensional explorer.

From Tony Jimenez of Medina Ventures, a driving force behind the momentum of Miami’s tech ecosystem, to the other Patrick, Patrick Dyer who is behind many successful cyber initiatives in Miami and beyond, from startups to Fortune 500s, we all welcomed Patrick and listened to how he envisioned the future which made him a great investor, but how he’s envisioning the next chapter, the AI chapter, and his investment methodology.

Patrick has a German methodology, a solid investment portfolio, and he’s winning. He is at the intersection of two gigantic global megatrends: AI and Cybersecurity. As a very reputable CISO, he knows the pain points, he knows everyone, and he has great energy.

Yet he’s not bounded by good; he’s looking for the great. When he was at the top of his CISO career, being the CISO of four major companies, including Kaiser Permanente, Dropbox, and Salesforce, he changed course and moved to an unknown new space: venture capital. And he won.

His rebellious and outside of the box thinking has taken him to uncharted waters. I haven’t met his wife, but I’m sure a lot of his success is because of her.

Thank you, Kevin Cochrane/ Vultr for supporting the first and the second episode of the MAIC Private Dinner Series, and thanks to Maksym Petruk/ WeSoftYou Inc. for joining our esteemed sponsors.

Dinner 3:

MAIC’s third Private Dinner was a very special evening with a diverse group of leaders, founders, and investors from South Florida and beyond.  It was a celebration of human spirit and ingenuity in the face of life’s greatest challenges. Miami is becoming the epicenter of cross-industry, thought-provoking conversations around AI, with some guests flying in from three other states for this very special night.

Dr. Kenneth Goodman, a philosopher, AI ethicist and the Founder and Director of the Institute for Bioethics and Health Policy, who has spent 35 years on ethics, shared his important insights on the AI ethics landscape.

Alejandro Dabdoub, an investor, AI researcher, and the writer of Beyond Algorithms book encouraged us to look beyond AI and shared the fundamentals of creating a positive impact through AI in corporations. He also shared his upcoming book on how to leverage the positive economic impact of AI for the job rescaling of employees whom AI’s job losses would impact.

At the dinner, we had open conversations around various topics, starting with AI and cybersecurity/risk. Merritt Baer and Ofer Klein, Reco AI’s CISO and CEO, shared their perspectives on AI and cybersecurity.

Courtney Adante and Sparky Zivin, Teneo’s cyber risk and AI leaders, shared their perspectives on AI risks, including Deepfakes.

Alejandro shared how deepfakes and voice cloning are widely being used in Mexico for extortion, and ✅Roland Kissoon MBA, CCSK, CRISC gave some perspectives on how an archbishop’s deepfake video is being used in the Caribbean to ask for money. The conversations continued on the impact of AI on other industries, from the security of data to the issue of bias.

Paula Tolliver, who has been sitting on the board of major companies, brought some invaluable points about AI in the boardrooms. And then moving to AI and healthcare and the enormous potential of AI in precision medicine, drug design, and improving the quality of care.

After dinner, Raymond Rodriguez-Torres, the founder of the LiveLikeBella Foundation, whose talk last month was the highest-viewed TED Talk touching over a million hearts, shared his captivating story and the efforts to solve childhood cancer through AI, including their recent AI collaboration with Florida International University and Nicklaus Children’s Hospital Foundation’s to improve pediatric cancer treatment. He highlighted the collaborative research effort using AI to triangulate genetic, molecular, and personalized drug screening for new and innovative treatment protocols in children with cancer and defined functional precision medicine. This trial showed an unprecedented 83% disease-free survival in children who participated in the trial and made the April cover of NATURE Medicine.

And at the very end, we had a book signing session with Alejandro and his book, Beyond Algorithms.

Thanks to Reco AI and Teneo for sponsoring the third private dinner.

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