It was a rainy morning in Tower Hamlets and a man told me to clone myself. Some people had already done it; one of the clones looked at me from an iPad screen, waving in an endless loop. He was from Viven, an American start-up specializing in “digital twins”, or chatbot versions of real people. The company was the brainchild of the two co-founders of Eightfold.ai, an AI recruiting service that is currently the subject of a major privacy-related class action lawsuit in the US.
Digital twins were supposed to absorb your knowledge, including “tacit” knowledge, and distribute it to anyone who might want to learn from you. You had to spend time training them yourself, uploading your meeting notes and personal documents. The man said you can also advise the contents of your Gmail inbox, though he pointed out to me that this was optional.
You have to have a certain amount of arrogance to succeed in business. This conceit inevitably weighs heavily on anyone not in the business, which is why there’s something particularly pleasing about a money-making scheme with an obvious hole in it. I wondered where the financial incentives were. “Why would a professional give away all this information for free?” I asked. “Why abandon their consulting fees?” There was a pause. I thought I had trapped the man. I thought I had become one of the Dragons from Dragon’s Warehousemost likely Deborah Meaden. i didn’t have
He told me about a product designer in India who saw technology as a natural extension of his 70,000-strong LinkedIn following. Technology had a social value to him, even though he wasn’t doing any of the socializing. I went home and Googled the company, only to discover that it had already received $85 million in investment. “This is not just a digital transformation,” reads a testimonial from an HR consultant. “It’s human amplification.”
The Artificial Intelligence Summit in London was a bare-knuckle, fully clothed republic confined to an industrial-style event space near Shadwell tube station. There were more men than women, more over-50s than under-50s, and big money lurking in the background – the kind of money that accumulates in inverse proportion to cool clothes; the kind that turn managerial employees into versions of themselves on CBeebies. (“We both said ‘SharePoint’ at the same time!” shouted an American woman advertising an AI file-scanning company.) Everyone at the summit acted in the service of that money, though they rarely mentioned whether their companies were profitable.
The government had chosen London Tech Week to announce a major funding package for AI. Delegates at the conference carried on as if this had never happened. A woman advertising “e-residency” told me I could bypass the British business bureaucracy by setting up my company in Estonia. It would be simple and quick and cost under €200. I would never have to go to Estonia. She showed me a spreadsheet on her phone: 5,557 Britons were already “e-residents” and over a thousand British companies were actually domiciled in Estonia. One employee at an infrastructure firm was confident Britain would never see a data center explosion. Our energy prices, he said, were too high.
This year, the focus was on AI agents. Chatbots are there to comfort the worried; Agent AI is there to perform thankless work for the comfortable. The thing is, everyone has a PA, scheduling things on calendars, paying bills, and booking plane tickets. Half the exhibitors seemed to be selling agents of some kind.
A young woman from an AI-powered marketing services company tried to describe her job role by creating herself in a photo of a symphony orchestra. She was a conductor. To use AI agents effectively, she said, we needed to “find the right problems to solve.” Most businesses were throwing money down the drain by setting up useless agents. The issue was so widespread that her company had come up with an internal acronym for it: “Identify, Recommend, Act,” or “IRA.”
That was the goal of the summit: distilling complex technology into mental models for kids, or investors who might as well be kids. On the main stage, AI was a “five-layer cake”, with AI power, chips, infrastructure and models supporting a real-life implementation. The resemblance to a cake stopped there; the metaphor was coined by Jensen Huang at Nvidia, which has cornered the chip market and has a smaller stake in each of the other layers. A panel discussion about European “AI sovereignty” featured senior executives from the Ministry of Defense offering Miss World-level non-answers.
A senior vice president from AstraZeneca told us that you could be either “AI plus” or “AI plus”, the latter of which they were doing at AstraZeneca. She told us to think of two people. There was Patrick, who had already died of lung cancer, and Amara, who would hypothetically beat her diagnosis because she lived in “a world in which HE empowered every element of her care.” She talked about this unproven technology package as if it were a sports car or a fancy watch. AstraZeneca would treat Amara, which did not exist, with “speed, precision and acumen”.
Patrick and Amara flashed on the screen. They were elderly people, with AI-generated faces and hospice-like backgrounds. The speech sounded AI-generated, too: the flat average of any script for a TV charity campaign, with predictable counter-positions and tonal ramblings, planned pauses that could almost be em-dash, and phrases like “But we can’t do it alone.” The man next to me was watching the American version of Dragon’s Den out loud on TikTok. A pheasant feather sat on the brim of his fedora.
In the exhibitor area, two companies were trying to give away a pair of Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses. (“Because the best AI executives see everything,” said one ad.) A humanoid robot’s head sat on a table. He turned to address the crowd, though a blast of corporate EDM in the background drowned out anything he said. It was disturbing, not least because the designers had forgotten to add eyelids. A utopian illustration in the background demonstrated several possible use cases for the finished robot, which would eventually also have a humanoid body. The robot, which the designers said was an “it”, would walk to “points of interest”. She would interview panelists at conferences and exhibitions, no different. She would play chess with members of the public. A team of tired-looking assistants wandered around, wearing t-shirts that read: “The Man in the Loop.”
Last year, consumer AI saw a flavor revolution. Companies like Anthropic adopted serif fonts and hand-drawn illustrations, hosted dinner parties for influencers, and ran ads about the importance of thinking for yourself. But Tower Hamlets was the land of business-to-business, and the new ventures around me all seemed to take their aesthetic cues from chatbots that had been trained on previous start-ups. They were named in a very familiar startup language that felt almost obnoxiously out of place and weightless: Optimizely, Retool, Elsewhen, Unguess, Glean, Jeen. When I Googled exhibitors, I often found websites that could have been built ten years ago: blue-purple gradients, rounded corners, sans-serif text, and equally spaceless and weightless diagrams.
There is a big difference. A few years ago, these websites were plagued with drawings of utopian giants suffering from universal lipedema. They were industry mascots, standing for something bigger than a single product: the techno-optimistic worldview of the entire sector. HE has left this illustration style in the past, which might be the best thing he ever did. Some of the biggest corporations at the event came with mascots that looked like they should be hanging Japanese keys. File scanning service Glean had its own claw machine, complete with Labubu-shaped toothed octopuses; IBM’s pavilion featured a statue of its new hard-hatted chatbot character, kawaii totem IBM Bob. As a surprised-looking employee introduced the company’s new agent system, IBM Bob stared at me blankly. He looked like he was going to remove Hello Kitty and her friends from their leadership roles. A pair of HTML braces decorated his round belly.
“You appeared,” said an email at the end of the conference, directing me to a series of AI-generated podcast summaries. “You engaged. You challenged assumptions. You shared insights and built the connections that turn strategy into action.”
I hadn’t challenged, shared or built anything. I was traded for it. At any other time in recent history, the kind of people who trafficked me would have been forced to go door-to-door, selling makeup or encyclopedias. As I walked back to Shadwell tube station, past a bunch of businessmen and a few corner shops, all I could think about was IBM Bob and his big, dumb, complaining eyes.
(Further reading: Elon Musk is ready to help himself to your retirement fund)
