From Automation To Empathy, AI Dominated The SXSW Conversation

Beyond the political underpinning, the fake news agenda and the plethora of VR experiences, the one technology to really know about while at SXSW in Austin this year, was artificial intelligence (AI). That sentence has to be taken with a pinch of salt, because it's almost impossible to think of AI as a single idea, or indeed even a "trend" these days, for the very fact it is so fundamentally beginning to underpin everything we do. Christian Ward, senior editor of media and marketing at trends service Stylus, referenced Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who said: "We are on the cusp of a paradigm shift in computing that is like nothing we've seen in decades." We've been living in a world that has slowly become mobile-first, he explained, but we're moving to one that is ultimately AI-first. The view at SXSW was broken down into really what this means, both at a top line societal level and at the more applicable brand one.