Perhaps you read last month about Day 1 of the Wired25 event in San Francisco. Many a newsmaker spoke, and it was an A-list event from a speaker and attendee POV. Less was written about Day 2 — “Culture & Fam” Day, Wired called it. The formula may become a brand-builder in the 2020s as the second digital generation comes of age.
Last week’s Techonomy NYC 19 event attracted a small, passionate audience that heard brilliant and inspirational speakers. Amid the topics of IoT, 5G and AI were appearances by social media pioneer Jeremiah Owyang, Bank of America chief operations and technology office Cathy Bessant, and two presidential candidates, Andrew Yang and John Delaney.
What makes Techonomy different? Founder and EIC David Kirkpatrick asks himself that every day. When David launched the brand in 2010, few event producers addressed how technology was transforming society. In 2010, President Obama finally got around to sending a Tweet. In 2016, candidate Donald Trump averaged 375 Tweets a month.
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Former NYT reporter and Google Cloud EIC Quentin Hardy also interviewed Eric Savitz about his career and move to GM. Good reading.
The UK-based newsletter company called Trending Now uses AI to scrape what’s trending across 27 areas of B2B. Press Gazette has additional detail. The company employs ten, none of whom are journalists (by traditional definition).
The full union membership needs to ratify it on July 24, but it looks like no editors can be laid off or suffer a salary cut if the publication goes big in its use of generative AI. More detail here from Neiman.
Goldman Sachs took 32 pages to say pretty much that. The media business may turn out to be an outlier, an industry perfectly suited to synthetic, multilingual words, sounds and images at scale. As for everyone else, well, the global consultancies will learn the truth first because they have rushed to monetize Gen AI — they aren’t yet succeeding.
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