Walk back in time to March 2020. March marks the anniversary of when the world shut down; it changed many of our behaviors forever. Social and business lives have moved onto the screen. From the yoga class to the quarterly earnings call, from classrooms to funerals, we learned to see the world through the eyes of the screen. Last year we looked back to that time, the good, the bad, and the just plain weird. This movie captures some of the poignancy.

Many innovations sprung from those years as did many of our malcontents.

Just wrapping your head around AI? Move on. The next talk of the town is agentic AI. Think of it as a group of systems of AIs working together to handle ever more complicated tasks. In its simplest terms, let’s say you wanted to book a ski trip. You might ask ChatGPT or Gemini to recommend a few popular places. But, an agentic AI might look at current ski conditions, lodging availability, airline flights, car rentals and whip up the itinerary of your dreams, and even book it for you. Some of the key words explaining the power of agentic AIs are autonomy, goal-oriented, complex, and proactive. Theoretically, they anticipate your needs and give their best shot. 

How do you get your feet wet in the agentic world? For the moment, its unlikely that consumers will be building agentic AI’s of our own. But, on the back end there’s already a growing ecosystem of complex AIs working in tandem to parse your requests. In the case of digital assistants, an agentic AI might monitor your emails, messaging apps, and calendar, and then acting preemptively without waiting for instruction. Schedule a meeting? It might book the conference room, send out your Zoom invites, and gather the documents you’ll need. Or imagine getting a notice from your AI that knows you’re heading to the airport but also knows you’ll need to allot an extra 20 minutes of drive time due to congestion. Deloitte predicts that 25% of companies currently using generative AI (GenAI) in their operations will launch agentic AI pilots in 2025.

2024 saw a great consolidation in the world of events. The events giant Informa went on an acquisition tear buying up Ascential, making it the owner of large events like the Cannes Festival, and Money 20/20. But that doesn’t mean it’s curtains for new events. 

Au contraire says David Adler, founder of BizBash and long-time event analyst. He says there’s never been a better time to launch an event. 

A few notable stats to get you fired up:

1. The average number of events increased by 52% compared to 2023.
2. In-person events grew by 40.3%.
3. There was a 60% increase in smaller, regional events with fewer than 150 registrations.

Looking for funding? Event Venture Group, a group of event veterans, will invest if they like your idea and you’ve got a proven track record.

Finally, in the “that was fast” category, AI is hitting the events world. Event Tech News in partnership with EventMobi just released their study which found that 45% of event organisers are using AI tools to enhance operations and personalise attendee experiences. The most common AI applications in events include data analytics (20%), personalization (18%), and content creation (15%). And no surprise, training staff (30%) and cost (25%) are identified as the biggest barriers to adoption.

New AI tools are debuting. Certain and Grip are AI-enabled tools that create personalized agendas based on an attendee's information. Salesforce’s Dreamforce uses AI to generate Trail Maps for attendees, and then offers AI-generated “Session Summaries by Einstein.” Erin Oles, VP of Strategic Events, gives a great summary of how Salesforce used AI at a recent conference VEG co-produced. 

Even capturing a photo at an event has become AI-ified. Photier and Premagic use AI facial recognition to snap and send photos at events. They can pick you out in the crowd and share your photo while you’re at the event 

Google Trends
What do Don Bogino (the new FBI Director), Roberta Flack (she just passed away) and Lester Holt (he’s leaving NBC News) have in common? At 1 pm on Feb. 24th they were all moving up on my Google Trends. Google Trends provides an up-to-the-minute look at what’s trending in search. A helpful tool for journalists, culture aficionados and the merely curious. You can research who trended when, or check out local trends in your area. What becomes really clear after watching this for a few days is that Americans have a very short span of attention. What was trending in the morning becomes yesterday's news by afternoon. Worth checking out.

Shark It Up, Baby 
Take a guess as to what is the most viewed video on YouTube? It’s “Baby Shark Dance,” with over 10 billion views as of 2021 and still going strong according to Ian Charnas in his talk at Silicon Valley Video Summit.

WikTok
What would it look like if Wikipedia married TikTok? Meet WikTok, a visual guide to random articles from Wikipedia. Swipe and learn. 

Death of Duo
Duolingo fans will rejoice to learn that Duo, the owl mascot was not run over by a Cybertruck after all.