I just got back from the European Cloud Summit in Wiesbaden, Germany (May 15-16). Inspiring, to say the least.
Wiesbaden turned out to be the perfect spot for this event. Some nice green parks for a morning walk, and local bars to unwind in the evening. The event was well organised and took place at the RheinMain Congress Center, which is a nice venue right in the center of the city.
The European Cloud Summit has grown into the largest Microsoft Azure and cloud computing summit in Europe. This year, the focus was on artificial intelligence (AI), security, and infrastructure, all topics that any IT professional or tech enthusiast would find interesting and wants to know more about.
My main objective was to deepen my understanding of AI, and the event did not disappoint. The sessions provided fresh perspectives on the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence.
Most sessions were to the point, delivered by enthusiastic speakers who are experts in their fields, including Dan Holme, Jason Himmelstein, Donna Sarkar, Carlotta Castelluccio and Maxim Salnikov, who brought an impressive range of expertise and perspectives.
There were several panel debates that were particularly engaging with back-and-forth discussion, offering different viewpoints.
My key takeaways and highlights
Given how quickly AI is evolving, what we’re talking about today will be old news in just a few weeks, so I quickly share my experience on the event while it’s still hot.
The keynote session set the tone with a deep dive into how Microsoft Copilot and AI are accelerating innovation. Copilot’s capabilities were highlighted, like its ability to join a meeting when you can’t make it and give you the highlights later. How handy is that?!
Copilot Studio was also showcased, including its capability to integrate with over 1,200 systems to query data using prebuilt connectors, linking business applications such as SAP with your Copilot.
Additionally, the Copilot Learning Hub, designed for technical practitioners, was highlighted as a go-to resource for role-specific training, while the Copilot Dashboard and Adoption Community emphasized Microsoft’s commitment to supporting user adoption and administrator insight.
Following the keynote, we delved into the broader landscape of AI. It’s clear that multimodal AI represents the future, with platforms like GPT-4 Turbo enabling text, image, and audio-to-text, opening new possibilities for applications.
The session on prompt engineering was particularly valuable, with its focus on tokenization and structuring prompts effectively. The session emphasized the importance of prompt specificity, as well as clarity, to improve model responses.
Another intriguing topic explored were the nuances between weak AI and strong AI. The conversation highlighted weak AI’s focus on specialized tasks and contrasted it with strong AI, or AGI, which aspires to understand and learn broadly like a human. There was a good discussion about ethical issues too, like deep fakes and misinformation – definitely things we need to watch out for.
And of course… lunch. There were plenty of street food stalls with a nice variety of dishes, so there was something for everyone and no chance of leaving hungry.
To wrap things up, we got to see AI-generated music from ElevenLabs, which was a fun peek into how AI might collaborate with artists.
Conclusion
The European Cloud Summit was an enlightening and highly valuable experience. For IT project managers and IT experts, it provided cutting-edge insights into AI and Azure infrastructure alongside practical takeaways and valuable networking opportunities. I highly recommend attending next year’s summit for anyone looking to stay ahead in the rapidly evolving fields of cloud computing and AI.