THoMers Dennis, Inge, Laetitia, Pieter and Thomas attended Web Summit, the largest tech conference in the world, hosted in Lisbon, Portugal. Web Summit equals 22 conferences connecting different industries, from AutoTech and MoneyConf to SaaS Monster and Talk Robot. The keyword across all conferences? Artificial Intelligence!

1. What we’ll remember from the
2017 Web Summit

2. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IS NOT YET READY
TO TAKE OVER THE WORLD
Most of the AI systems that exist today are trained based on a set of data.
Therefore the system only learns based on this narrow data, and it performs a
lot less when put in front of real users.
This is called overfitting.
We need to move beyond supervised learning based on limited training data.

3. GOOGLE IS BECOMING A SUGGESTION ENGINE
Google knows what you want better than (& before) you do and adapts its
search suggestions based on searches from similar people, your location,
device, browser history,…
By the time you reach consideration stage, it’s already too late to be convinced
by other players in the market. This means marketers must either capture
attention before the awareness stage or compete unaided in the consideration
stage.

4. SOON WE’LL ALL TALK TO OUR FRIDGE
With systems such as Siri, Alexa and Amazon Echo, we are fast moving
towards a voice-enabled world. Soon these technologies will also be available
in our cars.
There are already stories of kids who grew up with these kinds of technologies
and try to talk to the fridge in the kitchen. They are confused when it doesn’t
work. For them it is the new normal.

5. More information: ibmtjbot.github.io
BUILD YOUR OWN TJBOT
TJBot is an AI cardboard robot powered by IBM Watson. This open source
project can be laser cut or 3D printed and then brought to life using the
available recipes.
You could put a voice interface onto TJBot and give it the ability to understand
emotions, train it to wave, help your kids spell words or learn it to shine a LED
light. The possibilities are endless!

6. NAVIGATING CITIES USING AR
AR City is the future of travel and navigation. Using Augmented Reality, the app
helps you navigate with 3D directions.
As you travel, you’ll see the names of streets, buildings and points of interest
appear on top of the map.

7. FACEBOOK BOTS TO THE NEXT LEVEL
Facebook will soon enable companies to communicate directly with their
customers on their own websites using the Facebook customer chatbot plugin.
This plugin will streamline your support chat. Customers can easily switch with
your website and their Facebook page: the conversation will not be lost but
updated at all time.

8. LIFE IN 2030 WILL BE BETTER
Robots will augment our jobs. This means most jobs will not disappear but the
context will change. The vast majority of people will get more attractive jobs.
Be in charge of your own skills will be key. Soft skills will get more important as
we don’t want to delegate all our human touchpoints to robots.

9. TECH WILL HAVE A MAJOR IMPACT ON CLIMATE CHANGE
Former US vice president Al Gore stated AI, machine learning and IOT are
trends that will help future generations more easily preserve the planet.
The tech community is helping us to displace fossil fuels to generate electricity
from new and sustainable sources. Investing in our planet will soon be a
undisputable differentiator.

10. ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE ECONOMY
SingularityNet is a decentralized, open market for AI technologies using smart
contracts (blockchain).
Anyone can insert their AI modules and benefit from other’s.
This is the start of an intelligent, global brain that all systems & robots can tap
into. What if we could integrate this in humans as well?
More information: singularitynet.io

11. THE FUTURE OF LEAN STARTUP IS A BRIGHT ONE
The basics are simple: from day one your startup is a faith-based company. At
the end of the day, your strength will be in how fast you can turn faith into facts
and lean is the series of logical steps to achieve that with a limited amount of
time, money and people.
The strength of it is being applicable for every business in every industry.

12. STARTUP JOURNEY PITFALLS
- Finding a product-market fit is the start of the lean startup approach, not the
end of it.
- Believing in its own truth without ground.
- Ending up chasing money instead of chasing customers.
- Reflecting on intentions: why did you choose to become an entrepreneur ?
What is to be your own boss or to change the world?

13. ICOs TO FOSTER ENTREPRENEURSHIP
ICOs potentially allow entrepreneurs to bypass venture capitalists, keeping the
strategic direction in the hands of the founders. These are an encouraging new
way of funding for start-ups, but at the cost of funding coming with supervision
and advice.

14. THERE’S A THIN LINE BETWEEN MARKETING GENIUS AND
MANIPULATION
Attendees listened at the same time with admiration and disgust to Brad
Parscale, the digital director of the Trump presidential campaign, who gave us
insights on how they hyper-targeted up to 150.000 (!) different adds per day on
Facebook, spent $100.000.000 on the platform and raised $280.000.000 for the
campaign.
Facebook kindly offered help and assisted the Trump team alongside the data
experts of Cambridge Data Analytics.
We were left with some ethical questions like where to draw the line between
being a marketing genius and an outright manipulator, and whether it should be
allowed to use social platforms for political campaigning. We’re sure this is just
the start of the debate.