The past 1 year has been about the rise of artificial intelligence. During this time, we wanted and uncleaned to lay the foundations of a hybrid technological revolution, and the vision of a generation that will be born into a semi-human, semi-artificial world can already be a source of thought now.

AI will continue to grow in 2024, slowly embedding or at least influencing all other (digital) industries that we have been working on the SMART stage for many years. Health, fintech, telecommunications, cybersecurity or even sustainability are all areas that can no longer be said this year without mentioning AI.

Therefore, the next period will certainly not be about AI itself, but rather about AI’s ‘conflict’ with other industries and other digital technologies. The most important of these is sustainability versus artificial intelligence, where we will be able to watch an unmovable object and an unstoppable force in a separate “ring”. The conflict between AI accelerating at unsustainable speeds and a sustainable approach involving more and more people has been crystallised already in the first year of AI. A collision is inevitable, the question is only how strong the impact will be and whether we will look close or remotely. 

Sustainability is just one example of many: the ‘conflict’ of AI with other worlds, and the globality of technologies in this sense, will soon be insurmountable. Already in 2023, digital players were placed in a metaphoric melting crucible under which AI kept the fire. It is not a question that we will soon have to step up in the same digitalisation mass, both at individual, company and social level; and it is our collective responsibility to swim down the surface after the jump and not to immerse.

This year’s SMART is responsible for providing a life jacket and protective goggles, making evicks in the digital seas and disaster tourism safer.