Inside HumanX Amsterdam: The AI Trends Shaping What Comes Next

Our CEO Tom and GTM associate Ben had the opportunity to attend the inaugural HumanX Amsterdam this week. The conference brought together industry leaders at every layer of the AI ecosystem, from major compute providers to brand-new startups, as well as expert-led talks on a variety of highly pertinent issues.

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Fresh off the plane, we hurried to the venue in hopes of hearing James Wise of Balderton Capital and Alexander Rinke of Celonis talking about the highly relevant topic of European sovereign AI. He highlighted the growing gap between model intelligence and real-world business application, noting the often-overlooked point that off-the-shelf frontier models are often not suited to many tasks in a business. This was both interesting and encouraging to hear as it points to the necessity of a company like Passion Labs in bridging that gap and ensuring businesses can best utilise the ever-growing capabilities of AI. Applied AI, they argued, is one way Europe can begin to establish sovereignty in the face of US-based hyperscalers, with exactly the kind of grounding in academia that enables Passion Labs to excel. 

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“Applying AI effectively in real world scenarios is a huge gap today.  I think the gap between model intelligence and real world applications is not getting narrow, it's actually getting wider in many areas and I think there's a lot of economic value to be created in that area”

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- Alexander Rinke, Co-founder and CEO of Celonis, talking at HumanX Amsterdam.

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Later we switched to a public sector-focussed talk from Vishal Marria of Quantexa on government deployment of GenAI at scale. He discussed the critical importance of explainability, control, and transparency in AI for mission-critical applications like border security and tax compliance in order to trust the output of such systems - a theme closely linked to the interesting topic of knowledge graphs explored in a recent Passion Academy session with Tamim, one of the ML engineers at Passion Labs. Vishal’s talk emphasised the detrimental effect of poor data quality on AI decisions, however to assess this and ensure success, there must be clear KPIs before deployment of such tools.

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Following this, we caught a talk from Alex Kendall, co-founder and CEO of Wayve, on the topic of building real-world intelligence. This was a fascinating insight into Wayve’s approach to self-driving vehicles, which involves learned intelligence enabling vehicles to adapt and react in real-world conditions rather than run off a predetermined rulebook. This proves an exciting development in the physical AI space as consumer autonomous vehicles approach large-scale availability.

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"The context layer has now become probably the most de facto question that organisations are asking... Can I reason my AI on trusted data with context?"

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- Vishal Marria, Co-founder and CEO of Quantexa, speaking at HumanX Amsterdam

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We spent Thursday flying the Passion Labs flag from our booth on Startup Alley where we met many amazing people from across the layers of the AI world, giving us a chance to understand where others have been, where they stand now relative to us, and what they are looking at regarding the future of a dynamic and diverse industry.

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We had an amazing two days in Amsterdam getting a stronger grasp of the ever widening AI landscape, and we are returning to Passion Labs with valuable new insights for the future.

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