Dark-colored suits and bro vests were on full display at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia + Technology conference this past week.

I joke a little here, but this has turned into one of my favorite conferences to attend. So, why is this a must-snag ticket for me?

For starters, it's a great place to catch up with top tech executives after they present a fresh slide deck or participate in a fireside panel.

They're coming in hot with their latest thinking, usually just a few weeks removed from second quarter earnings. But they're also smack in budget planning season for the year ahead, so it's a fabulous time to pick their brains on where things are headed.

I also get some new stock ideas to report on, thanks to retiring Goldman Sachs software analyst Kash Rangan.

This time I was blown away — for the third straight year — by the pace of AI growth. If AI development and capital expenditures were nearing some form of peak, I didn't pick up on it in my conversations. I continue to think this narrative is overblown, at least looking out deep into 2026.

"Revenue this year will grow over 3X. So about $13 billion in revenue from about $4 billion last year. So it's tripling on a very big base as well," OpenAI (OPAI.PVT) CFO Sarah Friar told me (video above; more context here).

She declined to put a timetable on OpenAI becoming a public company, but added, "It is a wild pace that we're on. You're defining a whole new era of AI."

CoreWeave (CRWV) co-founder and CEO Michael Intrator echoed Friar's bullishness.

"The depth of the demand, the scale of the demand, the breadth of the demand is overwhelming," Intrator said. "The industry's capacity to deliver the compute that is required by OpenAI, by the hyperscalers, by the enterprise, by the sovereigns, it's just layer after layer of overwhelming demand."

CoreWeave inked an $11.9 billion five-year deal with OpenAI for AI compute capacity in March. It expanded the deal in May by $4 billion. I suspect another expansion will be in the offing in the not-too-distant future, given OpenAI's growth rates.

Here are more takeaways from inside the conference. I hope they are helpful as you plan your tech trades for the week ahead and into year-end. Questions? Drop me a line @BrianSozzi on X.

CoreWeave's business model continues to get mixed reviews on the Street, namely how it uses gobs of debt to fund its operations. I asked Intrator about this, and he essentially gave me a three-minute masterclass on the operations. Give this a watch to get up to speed, because CoreWeave is likely to be a hot trade one way or another for the foreseeable future.

The battle for lucrative government contracts between Palantir (PLTR) and Salesforce (CRM) is one to watch.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told me this with a slight tongue-in-cheek nod: "They're [Palantir] an inspiring company. You know, they even call themselves the eighth wonder of the world now. And I find them to be very inspiring. Mostly their prices. It's inspiring me. I don't know if you've seen it, it's publicly available, but they have products on there that are billions of dollars, and I am like, wait, my prices are way too low because I can't believe the prices that they're charging their customers."

But I came away slightly more concerned about the short-term economic outlook, especially following a host of bad reads on the labor market. The Federal Reserve may have to embark on a series of rate cuts to close out 2025 in order to reaccelerate the economy in the first half of 2026.

"Our customers are still aggressively buying our products and services and paying their bills. But ... there's a degree of stress in some segments of the consumer space. Costs of certain products and services are getting higher, and that's putting some dynamics in place," AT&T (T) CEO John Stankey said.

Goldman Sachs chief economist Jan Hatzius told me the US economy is in "stall speed," with unemployment edging up. Hatzius added, "This is a time when there's a risk of a sharper downturn. And as a policymaker and as a Fed official, you're going to be particularly focused at this point on labor market developments."

Brian Sozzi is Yahoo Finance's Executive Editor and a member of Yahoo Finance's editorial leadership team. Follow Sozzi on X @BrianSozzi, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Tips on stories? Email brian.sozzi@yahoofinance.com.

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