LONDON TECH WEEK 2024
London Tech Week is an event which every year gets bigger and bigger. This year it was a monster!
Here’s the takeaways …
Yes, the furure of AI is open 💪 (thanks Nicola Hodson at IBM)
Clare Barclay at Microsoft brilliantly hammered home why UK rocks for AI - super high in AIReadinessIndex and people like Microsoft are making eye-watering 😂 levels of investment here … CoPilot, just saying!
Flippin’ ‘eck, didn’t Stephan Pretorius show us what it really meant to do AI right at an organisational level: Platform, Vision, Partnerships, Investment, Data and Skills. They ALL matter - and on skills a great shout out to the University of Oxford OxAI course and hats off to WPP for their Creative Technology Apprenticeship programme 🎓👷
Still some pessimism about the whole GB vs US thing in terms of fundraising. Good businesses raise money! And actually Anthony Rose from SeedLegals made this point too with his take on being a UK based founder. But you gotta graft and hussle!
In a detailed discussion Rana Yared and May Habib confirmed that yes there is some irritation at “chatbotification” (Thank you!!!!) But more importantly I have never seen anyone articulate the needs of enterprise trust requirements better than May Habib, so that AI use will not cause a regulator to wince. Most notably it is good to see session traceability highlighted (alongside the big ✔️ items: A. SECURE B. ACCURATE C. LEGAL D. ETHICAL & 5. TRANSPARENT)
As a lawyer who committed my career to supporting tech enabled business before this was even a thing in lawyer-land, all of this ☝️ is so exciting.
But there is a BUT …
As we all now move up and focus on the app stack (because we are not all building foundational models, let’s be honest!) the laws are a quite tricky.
And, getting it right requires a real and honest dialogue between product, engineering, users and legal folk who actually ‘get’ AI (like me 🤖) Please don’t just plug it in 🔌 ‘cos you know data, IPR, ethics, rights, regulators and a quite a few use case specific laws 😬
Generally people asking me about EUAIAct and how to marry that up with “the rest of it”. Exactly.
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