3 trends that caught our eye at SXSW Interactive

The annual South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive Festival, held in Austin, Texas, is an incubator of cutting-edge technologies and digital creativity, featuring a trade show, startup accelerator, innovation awards and speaking events with industry leaders. "From hands-on training to big-picture analysis of the future, SXSW Interactive has become the place to discover the technology of tomorrow today."[1] This year, conversations around SXSW Interactive have been dominated by mobile apps, virtual reality, 3D printing, the internet of things, artificial intelligence and security. We've chosen to focus on 3 areas that we believe will have the most profound effect on customer experience: Fear of a robofuture was prevalent at SXSW, with apprehensions about how humanoid machines, artificial intelligence and deep learning will impact our future. John Havens, founder of The H(app)athon Project, went as far as to run a session called "The Dispensables", pointing to Gartner research predicting that 1/3 of all Americans will be out of jobs by 2025 due to automation.