AI as a creativity booster, storytelling as a strategy: our learnings from WebSummit 2023

Lisbon is not only known for its yellow trams and hilly landscape, but also for the WebSummit, Europe's largest technology conference, which takes place here every year.

Three days at the biggest tech conference in Europe

This year's WebSummit attracted over 70,000 participants, who spent three days scurrying through the five pavilions of the Altice Arena, networking and listening to top speakers such as Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales.

And right in the middle of it all was our three-person content team, who had carefully studied the extensive programme of talks and workshops in advance in order to pick out the cherries from the countless topics.

The contributions were a colourful mix and covered many different topics - from storytelling as a central corporate strategy to podcast production to Metaverse & Web 3 - but almost all the presentations had one common denominator: AI - artificial intelligence.

Our learnings: AI as a creativity booster and opportunity for greater productivity

Artificial intelligence has been on everyone's lips for some time now and is more than just hype. One speaker at the WebSummit summarised it in the following sentence:

 90 % of the Internet will be generated by AI by 2026. (Jan Rezab)

An important goal of participating in this year's WebSummit was for us to learn a lot about how AI will change our world and how we can best deal with it. A key learning for us as a content team was to understand AI as a "creativity booster": A small idea can become something big with the support of AI. At the same time, many speakers agreed that many companies are currently not working productively in some areas. By skilfully using AI - e.g. to automatically create transcripts for meetings or templates for social media etc. - many companies could save time and invest their energy in other areas.

Hand luggage full of ideas 

The WebSummit made us curious about the developments of the future and sparked many ideas that we want to take home with us and pursue in our work at Waldhart Software. Be it how we can sustainably improve our employer branding through storytelling or how we can use ChatGPT and Co. to improve our products and services in the future. We look forward to continuously expanding our knowledge and expertise around these exciting insights.