I spent 3 days surrounded by the smartest people in AI. I left more nervous than
By Joanna Lambadjieva · October 7, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
I spent 3 days surrounded by the smartest people in AI.
I left more nervous than when I arrived.
I was an official media partner at HumanX.
One of the largest AI conferences in Europe.
I met incredible people.
Special shout out to Omri Hurwitz, Christoph Schwaiger, Sheau Pei Chong (MBA, MSc) and Mayuri Reddy. You guys made the whole trip 10x more worthwhile.
Had conversations that broke me out of my ecommerce bubble.
And honestly? They rattled me.
I watched Kareem Ayoub, VP of AI Technical Strategy at Google DeepMind, get asked point-blank about where AI is heading.
The answer wasn't clear.
Not because he was deflecting.
Because genuinely, nobody knows.
But the signal through the noise was fascinating:
→ Websites are splitting into two audiences. Humans and AI agents. Webflow sees fixed sitemaps disappearing within 12 months, replaced by dynamic "choose your own adventure" experiences.
→ Only 17% of orgs have deployed agents. Amazon's "let 1,000 flowers bloom" approach? 90% of demos never reached production.
→ SaaS is moving to outcome-based pricing. Sierra charges €1 to resolve a case that costs €10 in a call center. Seat-based licensing is dying.
→ Video ad production went from 13+ days to under an hour. But the real insight: better models don't replace the same work. They expand the canvas. 4x more content, not faster versions of the same.
→ The best AI-generated content? Made by people with deep production backgrounds. The milestone now is clients asking "is this AI or real?" instead of "make it look real."
Nobody has a playbook.
The people building this technology said it out loud.
That's either terrifying or the biggest opportunity of our careers.
I think it's both.