In the 2006 film, The Devil Wears Prada, actor Meryl Streep who plays Miranda Priestly, a powerful fashion editor, gives her new assistant a dressing down for not understanding fashion. She tells her that fashion is whatever a select group of designers say it is. But what she fails to anticipate is how these czars of style will one day be challenged on their own turf by another set of fashionistas: machines. As artificial intelligence (AI) pervades almost every field today, lines of an algorithm are now sashaying down the catwalk. India's fashion and retail industry too have started to rely on the power of machines to come up with the latest styles.

It was one very simple sentence that won SXSW this year: "We explore, or we expire," said astronaut Buzz Aldrin, who is of course known for the Apollo 11 mission and being one of the first two humans to land on the moon. He was talking about further space travel and the push for us to become a two planet species by also inhabiting Mars. But in its simplest form, that same sentiment could be turned to business today and the need for new ways of thinking in order to survive. The interesting thing is historically that's exactly what SXSW has always been about – innovation and the next big thing. Yet for 2017, there weren't any launches like the Twitter, Foursquare or Meerkat debuts of the past to write home about, nor a big headline tech to particularly speak of. Instead and perhaps unsurprisingly, the focus was very heavily political with a particular zoom in on the fake news agenda and what that means for today's society.