The AI Summit London 2019 – A Lesson in Global Progress

This years AI Summit in London had over 10,000 attendees at the ExCel Centre, a 300k square foot exhibition hall. With delegates from some of the leading companies in their industries and exhibitors eager to discuss their solutions, this truly was a two-day lesson in the global progress being made across the board.

Taking place on June 12 – 13, 2019, the AI Summit was part of a bigger event, which consisted of several branches, in its entirety, called TechXLR8. This larger event was made up of The AI Summit, IoT World Summit, Cloud & DevOps Summit, AR & VR World Summit, Quantum Computing Summit, Blockchain for Business Summit, and Startup Elevate.

In addition to the 300 or so exhibitor booths, there were approximately 200 speakers presenting across any one of the five industry tracks that were going on simultaneously during both days. These included talks by Microsoft, AIG, Google, Facebook, and many more. Additionally, our very own Patrice Neff, Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer, gave his presentation, Empowering Bankers with Augmented Intelligence, to a packed room at the Financial Services Summit track on the afternoon of the 12th.

His audience was quite interested to learn about the capabilities available to them with Artificial Intelligence and unstructured data. Pictures were taken with every new slide and many later came to our booth to discuss further.

One of the most fascinating things about speaking with the hundreds of booth visitors was the change in maturity that they had about Artificial Intelligence. In the span of one to two years, there has been incredible growth in understanding as well as in the acceptance of potential use of this technology. Although the technology has been quite a buzz for years, there is significantly less uncertainty and hesitation when it comes to discussing real-world use cases. Visitors also showed relief to know that we would be able to help them across various stages of readiness, starting with smaller amounts of data, implementing on-premise or in the cloud, and being able to cater to their specific needs in a relatively short amount of time.

The two most engaging elements were the fact that the vast majority of data available to companies is unstructured and that, by providing an Augmented Intelligence solution, they enhance their team’s abilities with pragmatic AI.

It was shocking to the event visitors when they realized just how much data is unstructured and the number of insights that can be harnessed from this data. Simply thinking about the emails, call notes, customer notes, news, premium feeds, social media, and so on can boggle the mind. Trying to keep up to date on all of these internal and external data sources is already difficult. Doing so in a way that allows for a clear bridge between the data and a customer need is nearly impossible without the help of AI.

Although we were surrounded by some of the latest technological advances, our visitors agreed that the knowledge worker of today cannot and should not be replaced by technology. AI has come a long way, but it is a much longer way from being able to replace the human. Instead, our AI solutions are used as tools to empower the worker so that they can find the insights and opportunities that they need in order to better serve their customers.

It goes without saying that the best part about this year’s AI Summit was the new friends that we made at the show and the lasting relationships we plan to have with them. We had a chance to discuss their needs and how we would be able to help, and look forward to providing a demonstration within the next few weeks.

If you’d like to hear more about the event or discuss how Squirro’s AI solutions can help you, please reach out as we’d welcome the chance to chat with you.