Despite the controversy preceding Web Summit 2023, a three-day celebration of technology, business, and progress was consistently announced. However, it turned out rather bland and sluggish, and what's worse - the mentioned controversy had little to do with it. Is the Web Summit formula starting to wear out for good?
![Web Summit 2023, or a product not as described [REPORT]](/getcontent/images/size/w30/2023/11/20231107-podsumowanie-web-summit.png)
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2.6k startups, over 1.2k investors and partners, and over 2k media representatives – including the Digitized editorial team. In terms of attendance, the Web Summit 2023 conference proved to be a great success. Between November 14 and 16, the Altice Arena in Lisbon and nearby trade and exhibition tents were visited by a total of over 70k people from 153 countries – the most in the history of the event.
So, the organizers of the conference probably breathed a sigh of relief. Just a month before the start, the whole project suddenly came under a big question mark as a result of a major image crisis. The reason was a controversial comment by the founder of Web Summit and former CEO Paddy Cosgrave about the ongoing war between Hamas and Israel.
Cosgrave's post published on platform X resonated widely in all social media and immediately had a number of consequences. Web Summit became the object of criticism from all sides involved in the conflict, and the biggest players in the technology world – Meta, Microsoft, Google, Intel, Stripe and Siemens – withdrew from the event. The remaining participants, partners and speakers also did not hide their doubts.
– The atmosphere around the event became so negative that we also seriously considered coming to Lisbon – a PR specialist representing a real estate company from Zurich, whom we met on site, tells us.
Eventually, her doubts, like those of many other participants, were dispelled at the end of October. Paddy Cosgrave then resigned and officially apologized for his words, and Katherine Maher was immediately appointed as the new CEO in his place.
"The main goal of Web Summit was overshadowed by the personal comments of the founder and former CEO Paddy Cosgrave [...] – Maher wrote in her first statement shortly after taking office.
"However, today Web Summit is entering a new phase. I am delighted to announce that I am joining the team as the new CEO, because I believe in the mission of Web Summit to connect people and ideas that change the world. Our main task is to return to what we do best: facilitating discussions between all those involved in technological development" – she added.
Despite the quick reaction of the organizers, some of the losses could not be recovered – the aforementioned technology giants did not change their minds about their participation in the event. The problem is that their presence would have changed relatively little in the overall perception of the entire conference. Positive aspects related to the possibility of building new business and social relationships were overshadowed by organizational chaos and the low quality of discussions held during the event.
– I was at Web Summit for the third time. The previous two times as a visitor, now as a startup representative, and I'll be honest: I have mixed feelings – evaluates Bartosz Duchiński, managing partner at the digital agency MU Group and co-founder and CTO of Digitized.im.
– On the first day, we had a booth that allowed us to present our project to people from other countries. The experience was positive, but the deadline and location imposed by the organizer had a huge impact on the number of visitors and the chances of success. The poorly functioning application also did not help – he adds.
Indeed, the poorly functioning application prepared especially for the event was one of the main topics of corridor conversations between participants of the Web Summit 2023. Complaints were mainly about the excessive number of notifications bombarding users every day, gaps in schedules, and a terrible system for establishing new contacts.
– I see a lot of room for improvement here, because after all, the main goal of the conference from the visitors' point of view is the opportunity to establish valuable acquaintances both at the stands and during official and unofficial accompanying events – says Duchiński.
However, these also left a lot to be desired. While events such as the official afterparty Night Summit were very popular and were rated rather positively by our interlocutors, lectures and speeches were most often described as "shallow" and "devoid of substantive value". We also visited several of them ourselves and we can agree with these statements.
The worst impression was made on us by the stage dedicated to cryptocurrencies. It became a place of quite aggressive self-promotion of speakers, and the discussions taking place there sometimes completely missed the assumed theme of the panel. On the other hand, on the stage dedicated to content marketing, the technical setting failed – part of the performances almost completely disappeared in the general noise of the event. In our opinion, solo performances were the best, during which speakers had enough space and airtime for a slightly more exhaustive analysis of the topic.
– Apart from one example, I did not hear any positive opinion about the presentations. I can therefore recommend the conference mainly because of the atmosphere around it and the people it attracts – Duchiński convinces.
– This year's edition of the Web Summit was very clearly marked by artificial intelligence – notes Tomasz Pietrzak, managing director of Sin Code. His observations are reflected in the numbers. Of the over 2.6 thousand startups participating in the event, almost 20% of them were involved in this field.
Among them, most solutions concerned broadly understood marketing and data analysis, but there were also interesting ideas in the field of health monitoring or ecology. However, Pietrzak was particularly attracted by solutions for information security and user privacy. In his opinion, innovations in this area have the potential to define the future of mass use of artificial intelligence.
– This year's edition of Web Summit has proven to me above all that there is still a lot of space for innovative solutions and ideas in the AI industry, which, unfortunately, I saw few of during the conference – summarizes Pietrzak.
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