Spontaneously broken conformal symmetry plays an important role in high-energy phenomenology and physics beyond the Standard Model. Furthermore, the anti-de Sitter / conformal field theory (AdS/CFT) correspondence is an essential tool for studying strongly-coupled near-conformal sectors. This thesis highlights three recent applications of these ideas addressing a variety of problems in high-energy physics. First, I discuss a novel cosmological solution to the electroweak hierarchy problem. This model makes radically different experimental predictions than traditional symmetry-based solutions, requiring a GeV-scale dilaton that mixes weakly with the Higgs boson. Second, I describe some models of continuum dark matter annihilating through the Z-portal. The unique kinematics of continuum states suppresses direct detection rates, making continuum analogs of weakly-interacting massive particles (WIMPs) experimentally viable. Third, I present a holographic calculation of energy correlators in a simple model of confinement, qualitatively reproducing some of the features of energy correlators in quantum chromodynamics (QCD).