It is a few weeks now since I returned from Web Summit Qatar (Feb 23- 26), and I’ve had time to stop and take stock. Since arriving back home in the UK, I have been asked many times – “How was it?”.
This is how it was for me …
It was big, busy and the unseasonably chilly! (not the expected pleasant change from the colder winter days that prevail in London during February that I was expecting!). However, it was well worth the travel and the time investment. Depth and breadth of content was excellent and the speaker line-up was impressive, interesting, and engaging.
- Connections
The conference attracted a broad range of industry and subject matter experts, established and new organisations, leading and emerging tech companies, with people of every age and from across the world – east to west and north to south – attending in their tens of thousands (around 25k this year).
For me, the networking opportunities, complemented by great content shared, tech demonstrations and insights on trends, the future and regulatory environment, bring the real value to this event.
Throughout the summit a tacit agreement of creating an online AI world that is trusted, accurate and in the best interests of society and not to enable corporate domination and information distortion was clear.
Whatever continent, country, or community group someone was representing, the conversations I had with a range of people from diverse backgrounds and roles (investors, developers, engineers, content creators, media, entrepreneurs, government policy advisors and corporate executives), all were united in a singular purpose of AI for equitable, fair, responsible and honest AI.
- Grappling with speed
The pace of change that the industry is facing has never been experienced at the rate it is today. How to keep up with the pace of change is one of the pressing challenges keeping people up at night.
The pace of change is so great that the advanced deadlines when planning and preparing event and conference booth development and speaker submissions is resulting in relevancy issues. Messaging agreed can be out of date within a few weeks, when new features, functionality, and capability out-perform earlier versions.
The need for future-proofing that enables real time adaptability, flexibility and adoption means that the AI platform service provider partner must be model agnostic, allow for seamless interoperability and integration with an organisation’s entire ecosystem, and have relevant human in the loop controls to ensure compliance and accuracy, and build trust.
- The currency of time
The currency of time was a subject that came up in many of the conversations and discussions, and how AI powered solutions can help individuals and organisations free-up or ‘give back’ time taken by manual, repetitive tasks, and information overload.
We have never had so much information available to us – at the click of a button and in every imaginable format. Finding information, verifying it, and being confident in its accuracy is consuming more and more time.
Ensuring accuracy of content and then the accuracy of content interpretation and summarisation by AI is a critical subject that media organisations and companies using AI powered solutions for tasks are wrangling with. The recent instances of sharing content that has been interpreted incorrectly has caused much debate, consternation, and the temporary shuttering of some AI solutions.
AI as a time saver is seen as a positive, but the need for it to be used within a framework of guaranteed ethical, honest, and responsible usage was unanimous.
- Elevating the brand experience
“It’s all about what you do with the technology”. This is critical to creating unique and appropriate brand experiences. Technology does what it does, so it is the building of customised AI solutions, bringing together best of breed features and functionalities using a single AI management and orchestration platform, creating a mature ecosystem, that enables brands to rise above the ‘vanilla customer experience’.
The drive and focus on customisation for brands and personalisation for users continues to be a dominant topic in how to achieve the best business returns from AI solutions, particularly conversational AI.
- Relevancy
It was particularly pleasing for me to hear and engage in conversations relating to the four topics listed above. All are areas where Creative Virtual is focused and how we have engineered our V-Studio platform enables all the above requirements to be addressed.
If you would like to hear more about how our V-Studio platform can be used to create better customer brand experiences, at every stage of the customer journey, please contact us for a chat and a demonstration.
