As an employee:
If you are in the position to spend money, hire people, buy services, you also meet people you work with and it helps.
If you're junior in general or in some technology, it can be a way to be exposed to it and learn some unknown unknown.
Anything in between, maybe it's just a nice day off, paid by the company.
Every conference this year will probably be touched by talks talking about AI. If there's a year to go, it's probably this one.
Why? My intuition is telling me that this is a 'buy the rumor, sell the news' situation (with this being the 'sell' part)
It would be like buying bitcoin for the first time at $60k.
But there are more killer apps per industry than there are fingers to count with, with more relevant use cases being discovered practically daily. Yesterday was better, but now is when you make every effort to figure out what you're doing to stay relevant before someone else can tell you that you're not.