AI more critical in the future ? Absolutely . Exhibitions have a significance that goes beyond competitiveness ; they serve a vital social function in human development .
As an industry , we need to recognise and embrace this new challenge for the good of our sector , and in general for the good of humanity .
The specialised , collective moments where the people gather together to see the future and cocreate the future ( that we simplify in the word : ‘ Exhibition ’) has always been crucial in human evolution and development , but its value is now scaling up .
We should not underestimate this change , because AI it is not only a ‘ high tech new trigger ’, we have to be clear in mind that this is the first time in the history that the ‘ language processing ’ is no more an ability only of humans ( other living species do not have the ability of articulating language ), and this is a huge cultural and intellectual challenge .
Machines are now able to simulate natural language processing and that means they act ever more real day by day .
EW : At the end of you presentation you highlighted the importance of building a ‘ narrative ’ for our industry related to AI , why ? This intellectual challenge is for sure a huge advantage for exhibitions because , as mentioned , our sector represents by default the maximum expression of human2humans interactions . But a part of the big opportunity and advantage that we have means it is important also to understand the responsibility of humans2humans moments .
Already we are no more able to understand if the email we received is written by a real person or its ‘ AI ’ co-pilot technology . Soon we will no more distinguish if we will speak via phone or video call with humans or Artificial Agents .
The importance of exhibitions to fully interact with humans without ‘ machines ’ as intermediaries will be incredibly important , and with this there is a responsibility too , that has to be discussed , with deeper comprehension .
EW : And how can the industry contribute and participate ? For now we are starting to build and share ideas through LinkedIn , this is the UFI Digital Innovation Group .
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