The Bacelona AI Summit was the right room

Being in the right room is always key.

For two days, AI Summit Barcelona provided the perfect place for thousands of builders to gather, with millions of conversations as a result.

Hosted at the World Trade Center on the sunny Barcelona Waterfront, the 10 track event drew crowds from across Europe and beyond for two days of deep dives into the next generation of our computing lives. The venue was a hub-bub of activity for the entire time, with the buzz of the crowds often reaching deafening levels.

But buzz aside, it was the lessons dispensed from the stage that delivered the promised value, and the reason why the Sapphire Holidays team decided to set tail on the good ship AI.

As a proud B-Corp, we took a lot away from the talk by Laura Tissot who was representing Ecosia. As a force for good, understanding how they use AI within search and the choices made underpinning the service was enlightening. Smaller models are way more capable than we give credit for, which is reassuring when evaluating options for use as part of the Classic Cottages content workflow.

For an understanding of how to construct an agentic system in a secure way within an enterprise context, the highlight had to be Arvand Modarresi. The breakdown in this session around the layers of software, guardrails around them, and importantly the right mindset around tasks that are intended for handing off to an AI led system. Artefact are clearly scaling in the right direction, and it has really helped the team to think about how we move our AI proff of concepts into production.

There were other highlights, of course. The pages of notes show that the talks were worthwhile attending. However. . . for me. . . it was the conversations around the sessions that provided the most value.

Getting to talk to the people who are building the tooling being evaluated for use in the R&D project proved invaluable. Some conversations showed that a X probably wasn’t the right option, but Y might hold the answer.

Yes. Z is exactly the right product to use.

Each of the chats saved hours of pouring over documentation and spiking hello world solutions, which to a business, has a real cost.

Being set in Barcelona didn’t hurt either.

The sunshine put smiles on the faces of the team that took the trip, as well as the attendees at the event, setting the tone of the day. Whilst good whether is the norm for the Catalan region, it’s not for us brits. It made the sights nicer to wander around, the chocolate more enjoyable, and the haircuts just that tad bit more special. Getting to spread the Aspects love around at the BarcelonaJS meetup was the icing on the cake.

Time will tell just how valuable the trip was to the business in the long run, but given we’re about to reshape our AI policies as a result of the lessons learned, I suspect the result will be invaluable.

Massive thank you to the team behind the event. It was an experience we won’t forget.

Especially when we finally got to cry into out Mojito on the shores of the Med.