A Europe in great shape

That this year's Web Summit was held with 40,000 sold-out tickets and participants from 128 countries must be said to be a sign that the world is back on track. At the same time, there was no shortage of reminders, both from the many stages and the practical execution, that the post-COVID world is not quite the same as the world we lived in before the pandemic.

Going into detail on everything that was presented at this conference is an impossible task, and in fact, this year's conference was somewhat less well-planned, with more superficial sofa dialogues and less depth in the presentations than we have become accustomed to in previous years. But I still dare to make a kind of overarching summary. For there were some observations that were consistent regardless of the topics presented or discussed.

The big ones are out, regulations are coming

There is no doubt that the tide has turned for the big ones. Companies like Facebook, Google, Amazon, and Apple all got their fair share during the conference. From being celebrated innovators and leaders in the "new economy," they have become the very incarnation of everything negative associated with social media, internationalization, and the negative aspects of societal development, including a lack of tax willingness from international companies and investors. Most probably noticed that Frances Haugen, the whistleblower who uncovered particularly problematic conditions and legal violations related to Facebook's operations, helped open the conference, but it was not only during that session that the big ones were scrutinized.

Surveillance capitalism is no longer a theoretical concept tied to the book of the same name by Shoshana Zuboff. During the conference, the term was consistently used as an established socio-economic concept and was described as an indisputable problem the international community must solve.

The monopoly situations the big companies have built are hindering both societal development, innovation, and economic growth, was the recurring theme. Apple was one of those who tried to counter from the stage by claiming that their 'walled garden' could not be opened up for freer competition without simultaneously opening up for cybercrime and other unwanted activities. Their defense was, however, flatly rejected by others at the conference, and not just by representatives from the EU and other public actors.

If we interpret the mood at the Web Summit this year, we can expect stronger involvement from regulatory authorities than we have seen so far. There will be laws and regulations aimed at promoting competition and ensuring that the tech giants contribute to the financing of society.

Human at the center

Another feature was the focus placed on the individual. It is no longer humans who must adapt to technology and new business models. Now the recurring theme is that technology should be adapted and built around humans. The new flexible everyday life is an example of this, where distributed asynchronous organizational models will influence how we build our physical workplaces and develop products and solutions that take into account that we no longer follow the traditional centralized collaboration models.

Privacy and integrity were another important area where there was consensus that improvement was needed. Again, referring to the problematic dominance of technology giants.

The fear of what automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI) might lead to was now less present than in previous years. Automation is about removing manual repetitive processes or the 'robot' from humans and freeing up capacity for empathy and creativity, to quote one of the speakers. Instead of being a threat to humanity and the individual, AI will help create more jobs, increase efficiency in the public and private sectors, and provide us with solutions to advanced challenges humanity will face in the future.

The concern that AI could have undesirable effects was still a topic, but in the form of how we humans must ensure that the algorithms of AI systems do not develop biased structures that can lead to systematic errors, skewed or suboptimal results. Good old-fashioned garbage in/garbage out, in other words.

Europe is in startup mode

One thing to note is that Europe has now picked up speed in terms of startups and innovation. While the Web Summit was still held in Dublin, the prevailing tone at the conferences was that Europe lagged behind the rest of the world when it came to access to private capital and public incentive and support schemes. Now this was no longer the case, quite the opposite. The work to strengthen Europe's and the EU's innovation pace has borne fruit. There is no lack of money or initiatives, according to the conference participants, and it could be felt 'on the conference floor.' Large parts of the Web Summit have always been dedicated to startups and investors, and this time it was more prominent than ever. If you are a startup with international ambitions, it's time to start planning for next year's conference, and international early-stage investors should seize the opportunity. As a networking platform, the Web Summit is unbeatable in Europe.

The conference is still characterized by many speakers and companies from the USA, but my prediction is that this will change significantly in the coming years.

Persistent technology trends

The conference focuses more on technology application than deep dives into advanced technology. But if we are to extract something, I would say that the technology trend threads still run along open standards, open source, no code, cloud solutions, platform and SaaS models, AI, and distributed web. The mentions of crypto economy and metaverse appeared more mysterious, but I take that as a sign that both represent something that is in the very early stages of practical development.