Highlights from Web Summit 2023: numbers, “queen” Generative AI... and Aptus.AI’s growth

A snapshot of Web Summit 2023 through this edition's numbers

Also our third consecutive Web Summit as exhibitors is in the books, as the latest edition of Europe's most important technology event has just ended. An edition that took place between lights and shadows, mainly due to the happenings of the weeks leading up to the event, with the resignation of former CEO Paddy Cosgrave and the consequent absence of major American companies and many of the expected speakers from the United States. This situation could have brought down attendance and diminished the appeal of Web Summit 2023, but it failed to affect the true essence of the event: bringing together all the souls of the European tech scene and its startup ecosystem. But that's not all. Even the participation of investors and media increased compared to the 2022 edition, although some aspects certainly suffered from the pre-event querelle, especially with respect to the quality of the panels. Although we will better present the outcomes of our experience at Web Summit 2023 later, we can already anticipate that, as Aptus.AI, we managed to make the four days in Lisbon pay off by meeting many potential investors, partners, clients, and talent, all of whom were interested in our disruptive work in the field of regulatory analysis and democratization of access to law. Returning instead to the overall evaluation of the event, as every year, we like to let the numbers of the 2023 edition speak for themselves first. The Lisbon Web Summit brought together between November 13 and 16, exactly 70.236 attendees, from more than 153 nations, and 806 speakers. But there were also 906 investors and 2.608 startups, followed by as many as 2.129 media representatives. As always, impressive numbers, which still fail to give an idea of what the Web Summit is all about in terms of networking possibilities. To understand it better, we suggest you watch the video on the homepage of Web Summit website, where the just-concluded edition is summarized.

Aptus.AI's growth facing the Web Summit testing ground: exam passed

As mentioned a few lines ago, in addition to the overall evaluation of the event, we want to focus on our take-home outcome from these four days in Lisbon. A necessary premise with respect to this topic is the fact that Aptus.AI arrived at Web Summit 2023 as a startup in the BETA stage, meaning with more experience and solidity than in past years. Experience and solidity also confirmed by the recent news of the agreement made with the Intesa Sanpaolo Group, which has put us in a position of greater interest not only from investors and potential clients, but also from the media. As we also wrote before we left for Lisbon, Aptus.AI's growth in 2023 made the Web Summit a great opportunity to introduce our proprietary AI technology and our RegTech SaaS Daitomic to professionals from other sectors besides financial and insurance compliance. Yes, because our innovative machine readable format of legal texts is set to revolutionize regulatory analysis not only for financial institutions, but in any regulated industry. And, in general, for anyone who needs to analyze the law interactively and efficiently. The conversations at the Aptus.AI booth started with financial compliance, but encroached into FinTech and cryptocurrencies worlds, as well as large law firms, Legal Tech and government organizations. And more. HR & Recruiting specialist, contracts experts, compliance professionals working in big transportation companies and even translation firms. All have recognized the potential of Artificial Intelligence technology capable of revolutionizing the way humans and machines interact with legal documents. Therefore we look forward to capitalizing on these new growth and business opportunities in the weeks ahead. In addition to this aspect, however, it is also impossible not to mention the amount of interaction and knowledge sharing with so many people, from all over the world and all present at Web Summit 2023 - the real hallmark of this event.

Generative AI “queen” of topics? Generic discussions, for a very complex theme

Anyway, beyond the positive outcomes, we’d like to talk also about what could have gone better at Web Summit 2023. As anticipated a few lines ago, one of the sore points of this edition was, in our opinion, the quality of some of the panels compared to previous editions, especially on topics of extreme importance such as Generative AI - and, more generally, of Artificial Intelligence. This topic, besides being a current trend, is at the core of the development of our technology and we have been following the discussion for quite some time now - in fact, since the beginning. So is the relationship between AI and law, thus discussion on how to regulate Artificial Intelligence, one of the most present within the Web Summit 2023 schedule. With respect to this topic, one of the most interesting speeches came from Andrew McAfee (Principal Researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), who argued a very strong thesis, namely that "innovation is a very unpredictable and decentralized activity [...] and therefore must be permissionless". Regardless of the merits of the thesis, McAfee's position was interesting and well-argued, unlike other debates on the need to build a responsible AI ecosystem and the future of AI in the world of finance. These were, in fact, very general panels that offered little insight for those who, like us at Aptus.AI, question every day how to concretely apply the potential of Artificial Intelligence to business and how to do so in a positive way for society. We were even amazed that the only speaker to talk about RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) - a topic we present a dedicated post on in detail - was Emil Eifrem (Founder and CEO of Neo4j), in the session on how to solve the problem of so-called hallucinations of Generative AI. In short, if Web Summit 2023 on the one hand confirmed the growth of Aptus.AI and the revolutionary potential of our proprietary AI technology, on the other hand it left us slightly disappointed regarding the quality of the content. But, dear Web Summit, there is always time to make up for it in 2024!

Journalists, investors, potential clients and talents: how many meetings at the Aptus.AI booth!

Finally, to finish our review of the 2023 edition of the Web Summit, we're glad to report on the interest that, once again this year, Aptus.AI aroused in the media present at the event. Several journalists, in fact, dropped by our booth to get to know us better and learn more about Daitomic. To resume the many meetings with media representatives, we are pleased to start with Alberto Grisoni, Editor-in-Chief of AziendaBanca magazine, with whom we spoke in depth about Generative AI and the concrete applications of this technology in the financial sector. But our CEO Andrea Tesei was also interviewed by Giulio Gaudiano, host at Strategia Digitale, one of the most listened podcasts on business in Italy, and he also had the opportunity to talk with Alessandro Ravanetti, another journalist specialized in technology issues and very interested in our path in the field of Artificial Intelligence applied to business. All conversations that will continue in the coming weeks, like the one with Pepe Moder, journalist at Radio24, among the first ever to interview Andrea, in the first years of Aptus.AI. In short, also the Web Summit 2023 left us sure of the strengthened awareness about Aptus.AI as a brand, more convinced of the value of our technology and ready to exploit the many new business opportunities that have arisen among the pavilions of the Altice Arena & Fil in Lisbon.