Featured Session: Multiplayer Futures: Co-Creating a Vision of SXSW 2030 (live!)

00:00:01 Henry Coutinho So, when it comes to thinking about the future, The future is plans are made by a few people sitting at the top of the organization, and they're broadcast down for the masses to execute them. And I don't think today we can do with what's available at our disposal now. Because. This is what I've spent the last fifteen years of my career obsessing over : is thinking about how to build organizations that can create a better future for us. This is what I've written two books on. I was really excited, but here a couple of years ago with Rohit Bhakar, my co author who's speaking later at the Hilton, do go check out that session where we launched "The Future Normal. " We've got another exciting announcement about our next book that we're working on to share with you later. But, there's a common idea at the heart of both of these books :. It's this. It's that the only future we will have is the one that we are able to imagine. The problem is, we don't. 00:01:01 Henry Coutinho And my argument to you is if we use these technologies, we can help people do work that's actually meaningful. Do better work. Feel it with purpose, given the agency to care about doing that work. And use some of these creative tools to unleash their imagination. But as speakers, I don't want to just talk about this for the next 45 minutes. I want us all to feel it, to experience what it feels like to do this. And so, you'll see you've got pen and paper on your chair. At the end of the session, we're going to do something together. I'm going to ask you to share your vision of what South Bank could look like in twenty thirty, and we're going to use AI to do something really cool with your drawings. Okay? So I hope I'm really excited to do this. We've got a couple of world firsts that we've never done before, and a little bit which always makes me nervous as a speaker, but I am looking forward to doing this with you. But the first argument I want. 00:01:59 Henry Coutinho Share with you before we get into that exercise is to think about how AI can give us fewer people but better jobs. And when I say this, like, how many of you are probably thinking, "Where have you been? How do you not actually read the news?" Like every single day we open our laptops and go on news feeds, we're hit with headline after headline of AI-related job cuts. This is the conventional wisdom. But actually I think there's another way to think about AI and its impact on our jobs. This quote from Jensen Weiler from a video, and he said, " If, you are thinking about AI as doing the work of half of your workforce, and hurrah, you can just cut it in half." He said, "You are thinking about it all wrong. Because what you should be thinking about when it comes to AI is that AI can do half of the work for all of your people." And when he says this, you should think, "Okay well what what does that look like? " And, the fifty percent of the work that you should be thinking about using AI to do for your people. 00:02:59 Henry Coutinho Is the bullshit tasks, the stuff they don't even want to be doing. And I don't use that word just to swipe flippantly on a South by Southwest stage ; I use it in relation to this book. This was a book that came out long before AI came on the scene, right? This book's nearly fifteen years old. There was David Graeber, who wrote this thesis talking about the reason for the crisis in engagement, crisis in employee engagement, And how rising mental health challenges in modern affluent societies dominated by white collar work are like you. The jobs that many of you have is because so much of it is fundamentally bullshit. And what he means by this is, it's not the meaningful creative work; it's coordinating meetings, managing data, analyzing some. You know, it's pushing paper around inside an organization. I mean, I'm not saying everyone here has a bullshit job, but there are many bullshit tasks that you have to do every single day, every single week. And I bet you can't wait to get rid of them. 00:03:58 Henry Coutinho I think this really takes on a different perspective when we think about AI and work. And I want to start with a little story because some of you, we talk about the headlines around AI and job loss. Some of you may remember about eighteen months ago, Klarna they came out and they said, " We ' ve now got this AI chatbot that can do the work of seven hundred people. All of our customer service representatives here, we can just fire seven hundred of them." And of course, Like we love these headlines like this because they scare us and they get our attention. So this went globally viral. You might have missed the follow-up to this, which came out last year, where the CEO said, "Actually, maybe we've got it a bit wrong. We were a bit overzealous. " Turns out our customer support people were doing more than just answering functional queries. And he said, "Actually, we're going to go back to hiring more humans again." And even if you read this news story, Which definitely did not get nowhere near as much as attention as the other news story that they're laying off seven hundred people and that we don't need customer support people anymore. 00:04:58 Henry Coutinho You might have missed what I think is the most interesting detail in this story. Because Klarna didn't just go back out and hire the same people as before into the same customer service jobs. They reimagined what a customer service role might look like. And just a few weeks ago, they released an update, a little video explaining what they did. 00:05:20 Speaker 2 Hi, this is Gabriel from Sweden. 00:05:28 Speaker 2 My name is Luke. I am Sarah Bulgarovic. My name is Andreas. I actually get a chance to not just see from the inside, but also contribute to that change. What I really love about my role at Klarna is that I get to work as an investigator, Go in. 00:05:51 Henry Coutinho Deep into cases to find out what has gone wrong and how I can help the merchants and the customers. 00:05:59 Henry Coutinho And so we've reimagined the customer service role. Like this is customer evangelists working flexibly, working remotely to solve some of the higher value, more complex cases. Right? Of course AI can do some of the basic stuff, but can it build customer relationships? And look, I'm no fan of Klarna. I actually really dislike their business model. I think it encourages people to buy things. They don't need with money. They don't have. So don't have me down as a Klarna evangelist by any means, but I do think it's super interesting What their CEO is talking about when it comes to the future of work. And this is a long quote, but he says, you know, AI will never replace the most important essential jobs which is human relationships. He said, I look forward to the day when my primary job at Klarna is manning the phones, Waking up every morning, helping our customers directly and using AI to ship improvements to the product that get launched that day. He said, I tell people at Klarna there will be tons of jobs for folks who. 00:06:57 Henry Coutinho Enjoy helping, supporting, serving others. This is a very, Very different vision of the future of work from the one we hear when we just read the newspaper every time. And so, my provocation to you to think about is: when it comes to AI, How are you using AI to strip out the bullshit tasks that your people don't even want to do today? They make their jobs terrible and lose engagement. And can you use that excess capacity not to cut your workforce in half? But to lean into creating better jobs, more meaningful jobs, more human connected jobs. And so to continue this thought, I want to talk a little bit about agency. Because AI agents are the hot trend. There's twenty five sessions on the South by agenda that just have AI agents in the title. It's going to be all over all the stages you're going to hear this week. And again, It's kind of sexy. And you know, they can do work for your digital laborers. If your CEO isn't very. 00:07:57 Henry Coutinho This actually just the latest chapter in a story that is as old as time. If you think about the size of technology companies over recent history, we see this again and again. If you can't read the numbers on this slide at the top, this a logarithmic scale. So on the far left they had IBM. IBM's peak they had 400,000 employees. Like if fast forward a generation of technology Google had nearly 200, 000 employees at their peak. So it looks like a small drop, but it's actually halving in size. Like on to Meta, halving again, about eighty six thousand employees at their peak. And the reason why we need a log scale for this is because you look at the companies of today, frontier companies like AI and DeepSeek. OpenAI has only four thousand employees at the moment. DeepSeek has around two hundred. And if we use a normal scale, we wouldn't even see these bars on the right because it's so small. And my point is like this has been happening for so long, technology in its obvious way because technology gives us leverage. 00:08:55 Henry Coutinho That's what it does to us, right? It enables fewer people to have bigger impacts. And again, there is nothing profound in what I've just said; it's very obvious. What I think is more interesting is people don't seem to follow this story to its logical conclusion, which is when you have fewer people in your organization, the value of each individual increases. And, therefore, you need to make sure you are motivating. Well, ;, you need to make sure you are attracting. And. Engaging the absolute best people, and the way to do that, of course, is to give them purpose. Yuval Noah Harari talks about the ability to collaborate is what separates us from animals ;. It's humanity's superpower. And yeah, There's a time in your life when perhaps survival and earning money is your motivation for collaboration. But for many people in modern economies, we're getting past that; you need a bigger purpose. And so purpose has had a really bad rap over. 00:09:55 Henry Coutinho And we hear about the era of purpose driven business is over. It's a distraction. But I would argue actually as we go into the AI era, purpose is going to become by far and away your most important strategic asset. It gives people a reason to care. And we see this with Elon, that famous tweet on the 14 th of August this year, 00:10:21 Speaker 2 He said:" I'm considering selling Tesla stock." 00:10:25 Henry Coutinho C2 as scale twenty seven B model. Again, probably could work on that naming. But. This was a model that an AI company proposed a novel cancer treatment to most scientists. Proposed the way of delivering drugs to match your cells and your body. And when they probed it out, and it's still undergoing testing, but it seems to be very promising. But again, The most interesting part for me in this press release was not that they might help cure cancer ;. It's that they published. The model on Hugging Face and the code on GitHub, they made it available to any scientist to go and build on that discovery. And they've got a track record of this, right? Many of you will be familiar with AlphaFold, open source the protein mapping software. It's now used by millions of scientists around the world. And. Then he said we should be really vocal about the fact that this is a talent strategy. He wants to attract the AI researchers not just want to get filthy rich. You can go and do that in any industry. 00:11:25 Henry Coutinho But I want the people who want to change the world of science, who want to make a difference. And what's most interesting to me is it's not just these ones. If this was like a single outlier, maybe we could write it off. But when DeepSeek released their open source model, Which, as we know, there are less than 200 people, but had a trillion dollars impact on the stock market overnight. 200 people can now do this. And most people look at the technological story of this and they're like this, And I was reading an interview with the CEO of the AI lab, and he said something super interesting. He said, " T his not a technological strategy or not only a technological strategy ;, it's a talent strategy. This our way of attracting the best, brightest, Most ambitious researchers and scientists in China because they want to have an impact on the world." And he said, "There are many incredible phenomena existing in this world. All of us continue to contribute open source. It's like walking fifty kilometers; your body." 00:12:24 Henry Coutinho Your spirit is deeply disturbed. And look, most of you don't work in frontier AI labs. But we need to, you know, keep in mind. But my provocation for you is that this is going to extend as AI increasingly becomes a part of our lives. This will extend into the real world. I'm going to show an example about Patagonia talking about purpose. I can almost feel your eyes rolling. 00:12:55 Henry Coutinho Another slide about Patagonia in the presentation about purpose. Come on, it's so cliched. But my argument is the reason why it's so cliched, The reason why every single damn presentation about purpose uses Patagonia is because it's so uncommon. It's so rare because it's basically impossible to do. Like big companies as they scale they dilute their purpose. Like employee number fifty six thousand four hundred and thirty seven who joins Google isn't as committed to the mission as the original core team. 00:13:27 Henry Coutinho But what happens when teams of a hundred can do what ten thousand people used to do? Teams of a thousand can do what one hundred thousand people used to do. You no longer have to dilute your purpose as much. So, I suspect, we're going to see more and more founders doing these weird things like letting their people go surfing, Making nature the only shareholder of their business because they'll be able to because the teams that they run are smaller and more mission - driven. And so, yes, as we think about agents. 00:13:57 Henry Coutinho And how this is going to reshape your workforce. I think the real question you should be asking yourself is, are you setting a mission that inspires the best people, the best teams to care, to show agency, to embrace that mission? So we talked about capacity. We talked about agency. And now I want to talk about creativity. Which again is kind of ironic because when it comes to AI and creativity, many of us, Feel fearful. Like, where is the popular culture of the reverse? This sense of the world is flattening and sucking the individuality out of us. Well, Pew released a study at the end of last year. Fifty percent of Americans feel AI will worsen our ability to think creatively. And there's going to be tons of sessions on this later, like how do we stay creative in a world with AI? I guess it's kind of ironic to me because we've never had such godlike creative technology. 00:14:55 Henry Coutinho It amused me when I was creating this presentation. I have to use a graphic of old AI images so that you even know they're AI generated. Like if I put up the new make these models, it would just look like a bunch of photos. Like we have these amazing creative technologies. It took me two minutes on the plane on the way over here to create this. Today, the South by Southwest audience is in Austin co-creating a vision of the future. And why is that? What is this? Like, to everyone in this room, I've been to more corporate audiences that still surprises some people. Like, No one in here, even bats, an eyelid that we can do this with a single prompt. Like it's become completely normal. But I think there is a far, Far more interesting and more profoundly important conversation to be had about AI and creativity. And it looks something like this: So this is uh. This guy is a Polish uh. cardiologist who lives in Brussels. And a few weeks ago Anthropic had a hackathon. 00:15:55 Henry Coutinho Hackathon to you know, celebrate to mark the launch of the OpenAI four point six model. And as the story goes, And that there is probably a lot of PR in this story because they claim that he vibe coded it on the plane to San Francisco, which I am not sure I totally believe. But the narrative is right: this is a doctor, he's a practicing cardiologist in Belgium, and he saw this problem. He saw the fact that when he's sitting with his patients having a consultation, a lot of them they're scared. They're Confused, they're in shock. They're not really paying attention to everything he's saying. And so he vibe coded it out that basically it's like a meeting note taker, right? Like the we use on Zoom or whatever. And the patient, if he tells the patient about it, they want to use it. They put the phone on the table when they're having a consultation. It records it and then when they leave that consultation, when they're at home and they're feeling a bit better able to process it, They can then query the notes or query the transcripts, and he can explain in words that they understand. They can ask as many questions as they want. 00:16:51 Henry Coutinho And, so he built a solution that solved his specific pain point or his patient's specific pain point that he identified through his lived experience. Can you think about this? I think the idea, even six months ago, That a practicing doctor would be able to create a digital solution for his patients was completely and utterly inconceivable. And if you look at the other people on it, he came third. I think the other one was like there was a lawyer who came fourth, there was a road engineer from Uganda and a musician from Estonia. There were no coders who won this hackathon. Again, I suspect it's all a PR from the contest, right? But the principle holds. And we see this at every moment now. You can start to see this. I woke up yesterday morning was reading about their launch of Repl.it Agent Four, and they just launched it yesterday. But look at how they're positioning it like Repl.it used to be a coding tool, now it's creative expression, creative acceleration, creative collaboration, creative production like. 00:17:51 Henry Coutinho This being positioned as a force multiplier for human creativity, not a coding tool anymore. And this why I'm so optimistic about AI. Not because I think AI is going to solve our problems, But because I think AI will enable more people to bring their creativity and imagination to solve our biggest problems. So, look, I started this session by saying it wasn't going to be all me talking and I wanted you to do some of the work. And so this where I want to change gears. I want to do this with you because this where it gets so much more exciting for me, is to feel this in action. So, What I want to do is I want you to turn to your neighbor and I'm going to give you just a minute to discuss :. What are some of the things that you think we will be talking about at Southbank 2 03 0? Right? Is it spaces? Is it synthetic biology? Is it wearables? More AI, still AI. Like, what are we going to be talking about? 00:18:48 Henry Coutinho In four or five years time, South by Southwest. Okay, ready? Over to you. Take a minute discuss with your neighbor. Let's go. 00:18:56 Henry Coutinho Hey, how are you? Nice to meet you. I'm from Brazil. How about you? I'm from Denmark. Oh, Denmark. Cool. So what do you think about 2030? 00:19:07 Speaker 4 Well, I think there's still going to be a lot of talk about how algorithms are pushing society, but hopefully some of these, More positive takes on what technology can do and develop. Probably a lot of automation, I think. Yeah, more personalized AI agents, stuff like that. 00:19:36 Henry Coutinho Yeah, Well, i I've seen this right the cloud, which is a note taker, right? Transcribing everything and I've created a community. For the Brazilians who are here, there are three hundred people plugged on this right now and getting the transcripts. Everyone getting each other's transcripts, and it's interesting when I look at the compilation of the transcripts from yesterday. And they give you humanity, strategy, and education. And no more like efficiency, like we talked about last year a lot. Efficiency use cases. I think in a few years it will be regulation, regulation, regulation because now we have space to innovate. 00:20:18 Henry Coutinho This is where my heart starts to beat a lot faster because I am going to do something which they say you should never ever do on stage. They say never do a live tech demo. Not only am I going to do a live tech demo, I am even brave or stupid enough to do a live tech demo, where you are going to create all of the content live. So, let's do this. Right, what are we going to do? What are we going to do next? So as you can see, my next slide is a sixty second countdown timer. This super quick okay. And I'm going to ask you based on what you've just been discussing with your neighbor, To draw a vision for a startup that you want to see on stage at South by twenty thirty Okay? So few things to say this who's You know talk for a bit so you can start thinking. I I can see the terror in some of your eyes. 00:21:06 Henry Coutinho I can't draw. Okay, spoiler alert, neither can I. Okay, because look, this is my drawing. I imagined a kind of M atrix - style wearable headband that you could put on when you go to sleep, and you wake up having learned new skills. I think that'd be pretty cool. I can hardly draw. That's meant to be a guy lying in bed, okay? Because don't worry, On the next phase, we're going to use AI to do something called your drawings, okay? So the ability to draw is absolutely not required, okay? What I want you to do, Should you not have a pen and paper or a chair in front of you, is about sixty seconds to draw that. It's super quick, just a concept sketch. You can also write on your drawing with the space on the next slide on the next stage to write a few words as well. Okay? But just have some fun with it, enjoy. Some people still look absolutely terrified but let's go with it okay? Sixty seconds to draw, and we've got a cheesy AI generated song to keep us company while we're drawing. Okay? Let's go! 00:22:06 Speaker 2 I'm gonna start a new conversation. I think we're just gonna go ahead and talk about what we're doing. 00:22:56 Speaker 2 It's kind of starts to feels the. 00:23:01 Henry Coutinho Beat. Okay, that's enough of that. For any musicians in the room, you have to take them in your job for a few years. But now, This where the magic happens. And I say this where I start to get really nervous because we're relying on the Gemini gods here. So, you all know what to do with a QR code, right? You'll see on the screen behind me there's a QR code. If you take out your phone and scan the QR code, that will take you to a little one-page website I've built with you. And you will see on your phone a box saying "activate camera." Okay? Tap on the screen, activate the camera. It turns your phone into a camera. 00:23:35 Henry Coutinho Then point your phone at the sketch, you've just drawn and you tap on the screen again. Give it a second to come into focus, tap on the screen again to take a photo of your sketch. Okay, so scan the QR code, activate the camera, point your phone at your sketch, Give it a few seconds to come into focus and then tap to take the photo. Now below me, you'll see there's a space for you to add a few words. Now, you really don't have to be a plot engineer. The AI is pretty amazing, but we've got something very special which we built just for Southwest. So it makes me nervous to know if it's going to work. Uh, but it's the first time we've ever done this. And if you give it a few words, you will get slightly better results. So we'll wait and see if this works for everyone. And now, okay, then you scroll to the bottom of the screen, and you click generate Okay so scan the QR code. 00:24:33 Henry Coutinho Activate the camera on your phone tap, add a few words and click generate, and then we'll see what's happening. Right? Okay. Yeah, I can see some stones come in. So now if we can go to the laptop, okay, here we go, right. So what's really cool about this, you're going to see this on your phone. Now this is where we have to hope that it works. I can see a lot of you are submitting it. 00:25:06 Henry Coutinho Hopefully, If you're having trouble with the Wi Fi because there are a lot of people on the same network, try changing. I think there's two networks here: South by Southwest one and also the JW Marriott one. Maybe we both know it as a new Wi Fi. Yep. 00:25:35 Henry Coutinho Is it working? Yeah. 00:25:36 Henry Coutinho Some people are getting their results. Yeah, I can see some on my little iPad here that I'm tracking. For some reason, it's not loading within here. Probably because I've changed the color of the Wi- Fi. This is why they say never do a live tech demo, right? So change to the Wi- Fi so you can back up all this stuff. Some people, it's coming in. I can see in the back end that it's working for. 00:26:25 Speaker 2 We even had a hard one. 00:26:30 Henry Coutinho It's working on your phones, okay? So maybe I need totether it to my phone. With all of this technology, I'm just going totether it to my phone for a second and see if that works better. Your own individual networks. So hopefully some of you have got results. So, you can get ahead of it. If your neighbor or your results have come in. Let's see if this is going to work. So it is working, but. Some people, many people. Okay, so everyone else has got results. What I really want to do is show you the results because this is where it gets exciting. Okay, so I will let you explore this. Let's give it one more go. 00:27:13 Speaker 2 Yes, my eye is a little more surreal than that image. So there is. 00:27:24 Henry Coutinho Although your son's very kindly, what's happening the exhibitor network? Okay, thank you. 00:27:42 Henry Coutinho Your Network is down. Okay. Although we're going to go, that's uh that was not I didn't have that on all the things I was worried about. Let's try my phone. Okay. So I can hear it. It's working. You guys, let's unplug this. Yeah, I'm trying. Here we go. Let's see. Here we go, right? Okay, So now this is what I want to tell you about, because many of you have already seen this. But, what we can start to see now is all of your ideas coming up, live on the screen. And they're coming in so fast, it can't load it So I love, seeing everyone's drawings, but I particularly love, seeing everyone's drawings, converted. 00:28:22 Henry Coutinho Into. Now, One of the reasons I was a bit nervous is because we literally, so this is Nano Banana Two, which launched last week. And so if you if anyone has any failed generations, My developer told me that you can actually generate a new image for it in ten minutes. But the quality is so much better. I thought I don't want to share this with the South by Southwest audience using a three month old model. So this literally came out last week, So it's very nascent, but look, it's really astonishing to me. Uh, you know how good the. So we can start to see, right? We've got comedy performed by humans and robots. We've got AI creativity. We've got human relationships and empathy. So you can start to see a lot of different ideas. You can start to tap into the collective intelligence of the room. I'm just going to pause this for a second till they load. Now, if you're still waiting for your results, I'm just going to pick a random one here that was coming live. So you know, this is. 00:29:21 Henry Coutinho Not one I prepared earlier. This is someone's sketch, right? We can see. Now, what are you going to do? So, What we're going to do is as well as taking your sketch and turning it into all of those image galleries that you saw, we also do some other fun stuff. Right? We created this AI roasts as you get roast mode. So, this was I was sitting with my developer, and we were talking about AI agents, and he said, so much of the conversation around AI agents is so dehumanizing. 00:29:52 Henry Coutinho It's all about AI agents coming to take our jobs. And we said, Wouldn't it be interesting if instead of an AI agent coming to take your job, you could use an AI agent almost as a creative devil's advocate? I don't know if you can see that on this. You can read them. I've looked at hundreds of these. They're actually really funny. What it is is it's a simulated WhatsApp chat between two AIs, AI agents. One of whom thinks it's the best idea in the world, the other one thinks your idea is a stupid idea. So have some fun with that. The other thing we do which is kind of cool I think Is for every single one of you, like, right from your sketch, we create a little business plan for you. Right? Five or six page business plan. Talking about how would a marketing person sell this? What's the product vision and value proposition? Who are some of the potential customers that might be interested in this idea that you've just shared? How technologically and commercially feasible is this idea? And how might you go about bringing this to life, right? What would be your prototyping roadmap. 00:30:52 Henry Coutinho How would you go about monetizing this, right? And we can customize this. I mean, what we do is with insurance companies, we can make it all about the insurance company. We make it about all sorts of industry ;. We can make it all about whatever you want, right? It's kind of wild to me that we can generate a business plan for every single person from a sketch live. And then the thing that I am really excited about, which again hopefully has worked for you guys, Is we've taken your sketch. And when I was talking about stuff with this with the South by team, They said that one of the problems that we have is there is so much FOMO. There is so So many sessions, there's fourteen hundred sessions. It's impossible to know to find the right ones. So they very kindly gave us a spreadsheet of all of the sessions, And what we've done is we've matched your idea that you have imagined will be on stage in five years' time, And we've matched you and generated you a personalized agenda for the next five days where you can see some related sessions. Now, a quick caveat: obviously we can't test this with five hundred ones, so we set the parameters quite wide. 00:31:51 Henry Coutinho Okay, so you might get some random ones in there, But our objective with this is to give you like one session that you now discover that you think will be on stage at Southwest Southwest, twenty thirty That. You can go and learn about in the next five days. So again, enjoy. I hope that works for you. Um, oh yeah, it's pretty cool. We're having a lot of fun with it. And again, you can start to see all of these ideas come together. Um, so let's go back to the slides for a second. So look I've run over fifty of these sessions around the world, big small groups, different organizations. And I just want to share a few reflections on what I think this means, right? What this signals. The first one is again coming back to this idea of automation and agency. Because, we get we hear so much in the media that with AI, you press a button, and it goes from zero to damn at ten, and that's it. There is no work left for humans. And I just don't buy it. 00:32:48 Henry Coutinho I think what you've just experienced shows us that AI is amazing at helping us go from an idea that's at one or two to six or seven, maybe seven or eight. But it's not about going from zero to ten. And I hear this time and time again, : like when people turn to their neighbors, if I do it in smaller groups, sometimes they can turn to neighbors and say, "Oh, that's not quite what I meant. " And I think there's something magical in that because when the idea is not wholly yours, you have permission to discuss it. And for me, this is about solving the blank page problem. And the other thing I'll say again, like in this room, many of you work in creative industries. Like I work in innovation. Like it's okay to share a napkin sketch for many people here. But like some of the organizations they do this with finance, construction, legal. The cultures of these organizations is one of perfection. And look as a person, I'm really grateful that my bank doesn't lose my money and I don't walk into a building and collapses right? I'm really grateful that that's the culture of many of these big companies. But what does that? 00:33:48 Henry Coutinho So, the ability to share early stage ideas, And I think this is what AI can be amazing at : is increasing the volume of ideas that people share within an organization. And it's not just the volume of ideas; it's who gets to share them. Because again, at the start of this session, we said most thinking about the future, Most strategic thinking in organizations today is done by the leadership team—maybe the strategy team, maybe the innovation team—it's people who are creative and strategic. 00:34:17 Henry Coutinho And I get it. It was really hard, if not impossible, to ask an entire room of people, an entire organization for their views on the future. Like where can we improve as an organization? But now I hope what I've just shown you is. It is possible to ask 500 people in less than 15 minutes. What you think about the future. And I was doing an event with H & M at the end of last year. And the guy who's speaking before me, he employed 100,000 garment workers across India. 00:34:48 Henry Coutinho Even semi-literate, they're not going to share their ideas about the future, But maybe they have ideas about how the business and its operations could be improved. And look, I use images just because it's fun; you can do it, we can all do it, and you know you can show them on a big screen. That's not really the point. The point that I am trying to make here is to give you a sense of how amazing AI is at taking a rough, half-formed input and turning it into a very polished output. And so we were discussing with this government worker leader. You know, maybe this tool they could record a little voice note, And then it could take that voice note and package it into a way that the organization can process. Because, they don't want to run your business plan with bullet points of PowerPoint slide. And. So this what I think it unlocks is greater diversity of perspectives when it comes to the future. And, that's the final point. I want to make here is this kind of cool when you do it on your phone by yourself, right? And see your rough sketch transformed into a business plan and AI roast. 00:35:47 Henry Coutinho Images, etc. But where it gets even more interesting for me is when you look at this at scale, when we look at the collective intelligence of the entire room. So if we could just go back to the laptop for a second. So when I was talking, I clicked the button and we're going to go to the screen again. And so when I was talking, right? I clicked a button And we got the AI to analyze all of your ideas, right? So we've got one hundred and eighty ideas there. And if you can see, and in seconds it has categorized them. It's generated a little mind map for us. And these are themes. These are themes that you think about are going to be coming next, right? This is wild to me. Like, this would have taken a consultant hours, if not days to go through your hundred and eighty ideas. And create taxonomy and structure around them. And in seconds we can dive in. 00:36:45 Henry Coutinho To all of the themes that you've identified, right? We've built this and I can click in, and you can search, and you can explore the room's ideas. And that's wild to me. Now, A final thing I have no idea if this is going to work, because this is literally an orchard. We built this yesterday. I've. 00:37:06 Speaker 5 Never done this before. So, this is what'emsexsw'might just look like, and the results are. Exploring direct, but then also really connecting. It's such a depth, you know, help you explore. 00:37:24 Henry Coutinho Okay, did anyone draw anything about urban safety? Wait, 00:37:32 Speaker 5 Let me look through these. Oh, You know it's not explicitly urban safety, but a lot of the ideas revolved around creating better living spaces. And infrastructure like there is. 00:37:45 Henry Coutinho There's obviously there's much background noise. When I tested in my room, you can hear it. But you get the idea, right? In seconds, we have now created an interactive audio ability to chat with a live consultant about this. So can we change back to the back to the slides please? And, this is my point about we can take a huge volume like fifteen minutes ago, We had two hundred napkin sketches on your lap, and we now have a rich database of ideas. We have This mind map, right? What I will do after the session, and this takes me about twenty minutes when I come off stage. But I will turn all of your ideas into a crowd powered manifesto, A two page guide to what the South by Southwest audience think is coming next. And then we can turn that into an infographic, right? A shareable infographic. This is one when I first launched this from earlier version of this South by Southwest London. This was the outlook when you go into industry you can come you can. 00:38:44 Henry Coutinho An event, a single event, Short moments on stage into a collective vision of what an industry thinks about its future. Like this is what I am so excited about, right? We can transform our ability to extract information from all of you smart people. And so my final. I've got two more slides after this. My final slide is a QR code. So I am conscious I've shared with you a load of data. If you scan that QR code it will take you to that database afterwards As I said, I will add reports that analyze all of the ideas that you have. We'll add this infographic. We'll have a link to Google My Maps, where then you can chat to the results, right? It's kind of wild. We can do an entire consulting project in less than an hour, like it'll be ready by the time you're having lunch. Okay, this is so exciting to me. So, The final thought I want to share with you is again, we spoke at the start about this quote from EO W ilso n : " W ith Paleolithic emotions we have medieval." 00:39:41 Henry Coutinho Institutions that we have godlike technologies. And over the last forty five minutes, We've spoken about how we can use these godlike technologies to give us the capacity to do better work, to make us care about that work, to give us the agency to do stuff. And then how we can unleash our imagination, our collective imagination as well, to bring this to life. Because what I hope you've seen and experienced so viscerally now is that We can transform our medieval institutions, our medieval organizations into multiplayer ones. Thank you so much.