Last week (22 & 23 September), I visited AI Summit in Barcelona. It was one of the conferences I had an eye on since the beginning of the year, when I purchased the tickets, and that had set up the expectations slightly higher for me overall. Not in a bad way, but I was super excited. I love Barcelona, its vibe, food and people, and I love technology and being surrounded by likeminded people.
The great thing about such events are that they take me outside the bubble that I build and live in. I see other usages of technology that I am usually not surrounded with, and that helps me gain perspective and see where the industry is headed. Not to state the obvious but I am always amazing seing what the rest of the world is doing and how they leverage on AI.
AI Summit Barcelona is a commercial event and as such the amount of presentations that slide through the vail of showing good ideas while being an advertisement are easily quantifiable. However, once you have the muscle to recognize them you can easily get into following them superficially without giving too much depth. On the other hand, what always grabs my attention are those types of presentations, that belong to that commercial spectrum, that can be a blog post. To be fair, some of them were from non technical people which maybe justifies the intention to satisfy a diverse audience, but as a format is the least engaging.
Seeing the list of presenters on the conference was massive. It took me couple of hours to compile my agenda of both days. The venue was amazing and besides the fact that at the end of September the weather was 30ish degrees, the open space inside the World Trade Center definitely gave breath.
For me, the most interesting room was the Demo room. There was a weird organisational gimick that maybe happens across other conferences, not that I am "the conferences" guy, but our badges were being scanned at every entry and every exit of a session. And then people would be allowed to get in in groups. That enabled filling space-as-much-as-needed, but definitely did not allow everyone to see their faved session. The lines forming were going outside in the Plaza. If it wasn't for the weather, it'd not be a problem at all. That excluded me to participate on some of the practical demo sessions and overall gave me a feeling that in both of the days I am accumulating others experience at breadth and not depth. I didn't see a groundbreaking session that would shake the practices that the industry already knows about. I wasn't able to relate to much of what was shared in terms of how I personally use AI professionally and privately.
In that sense if you are a person that needs technical tease and be technically challenged with the presentations and shows, you might be disapointed with the program. However if you shuffle your expectations, you can still have fun visiting not fully technical sessions, like cold outreach automation sessions, data analysis for product growth talks, panel sessions discussing Europe's future in terms of AI regulation and safety, etc. Definitely not wasted money and time.
The thing I enjoyed the most on AI Summit Barcelona was the networking potential. I might had been the mediterranean openness, or not being surrounded by geeks all over, but people openly used the potential to network and multiple times reached out to ask you what you do, how you use AI or how you see the world.
If it's Barcelona I'd visit it every month, however the AI Summit, I am not sure if I'd come again next year. It's definitely personal taste and has nothing to do with the qualiuty of the conference. I definitely see huge value in what it brings, but I prefer in depth sessions that discuss or showcase how a problem can be broken down to its essence.
But I leave all cards open, I never mind overloading on "la bombas" and Cava.