Web Summit 2025: AI for Society, Business & Consumers
Web Summit Vancouver (May 27-30) brought together tech leaders to discuss a range of topics – most notably artificial intelligence’s (AI’s) transformative impact on the industry, individuals, businesses and society. Key themes included managing AI’s considerable energy demand, developing user-friendly tools and helping employees adapt to working alongside AI agents.
Clarifying AI’s Social Impact
Business in the AI Age
Start-Ups Streamline Consumer Challenges
While speakers agreed that AI has the promise to transform society, perspectives on its current capabilities widely differed. Some heralded the near-term arrival of AGI (artificial general intelligence – when AI can reason like humans), while others warned that error-prone algorithms and the ballooning energy demand could stymie growth.
While speakers agreed that AI has the promise to transform society, perspectives on its current capabilities widely differed. Some heralded the near-term arrival of AGI (artificial general intelligence – when AI can reason like humans), while others warned that error-prone algorithms and the ballooning energy demand could stymie growth.
Summary
Clarifying AI’s Social Impact | While speakers agreed that AI has the promise to transform society, perspectives on its current capabilities widely differed. Some heralded the near-term arrival of AGI (artificial general intelligence – when AI can reason like humans), while others warned that error-prone algorithms and the ballooning energy demand could stymie growth. |
Business in the AI Age | Panellists debated how business and workplace culture will change as AI reshapes professional norms. Canadian social media management firm Hootsuite is already integrating AI agents into company hierarchies, effectively giving employees digital colleagues. Meanwhile, others are slowly adjusting to AI-assisted workflows by adopting tools that streamline troublesome tasks, like cleanly extracting text from PDFs. |
Start-Ups Streamline Consumer Challenges | Featured start-ups at Web Summit presented tools that address concerns about health, finance and education. These services vary in how they position the tech that powers them – some explicitly posit themselves as ‘powered by AI’, while others are platforms with tech as a subtle backbone. |
Web Summit 2025: AI for Society, Business & Consumers
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