The future of AI - AI Tour 2023

Together with moderators Geertrui Mieke De Ketelaere & Christina Stathopoulos, we built a 3-day program to meet companies and individuals actively changing the future. Not just the basics, but actual real-life examples of AI being integrated into business practices. Sometimes completely changing it, sometimes just adapting exisitng models.

As you'll see, a good mix of large and small companies, inspiration and experiences:

• Day 0: Around 16:00 both Mieke and Christina gave their opening keynote. This sets the expectations, answers the first questions and kicks off our tour. Then a casual evening get-together with food and drinks so everyone get's to know each other.
  ‍
• Day 1: We started with inviting the industry giants to our conference room. Aamar Hussain from (ex Microsoft & Google), Ross Verral from Nvidia & Sr. Cloud Solution architects from Microsoft. Then we went on the move, to an NFT art gallery where Sir Nigel Shadbolt was waiting. Nigel best known for co-founding the Open Data Institute with Sir Tim Berners-Lee (founder of the World Wide Web). After, we visited Cloudflare like we did during the Web3 tour before finishing the day at a restaurant with the entire group.

• Day 2: Starting the day at the iconic Salesforce tower, with views over the Thames and London. Then a short bus ride, during which our moderators led a group discussion, to the gorgeous SAS Institute. From one iconic building to the next, as we finished the day at Clearly, an AI startup that is driving the global transportation industry to net zero emissions.

• Day 3: For the final day, we visited Belgian in residence Gilles Retsin who is changing the building industry with Automated Architecture. Then, a continued on to Graphcore, who have built a new type of processor for machine intelligence to accelerate machine learning and AI applications. We wrapped up with an AI applications building workshop and the final keynote by our moderators Mieke & Christina. In the late afternoon, most jumped on the Eurostar back to Belgium and France.