The AI Summit London 2022

Looking to the future, the Summit’s pitch contest offered a glimpse of emerging use cases technology. At the ‘Into the Den’ stage, 30 founders and innovators faced a panel of ‘dragons,’ delivering elevator pitches for their seed to early-stage startups. The victor, UK-based healthcare AI startup Panakeia, creates digital twins of cancer cells. According to co-founder Pandu Raharja-Liu, patients respond differently to treatments based on their personal biomarker profiles. Panakeia creates a digital twin of their tissue which can be used to predict biomarkers, and then subjected to limitless testing to determine the optimal individual treatment, delivering cost and time savings as well as improving patient outcomes. A breast cancer system has already received clinical approval, with others in the pipeline.

Other notable pitches included Italian startup senior’s “digital nose’ for the Metaverse, an intriguing tool which harnesses synaesthesia to transpose real-world odours to virtual worlds; an AI algorithm from Pigro, also from Italy, which promises to help organizations unearth content in their ever-expanding knowledge bases; and technology to streamline the laborious and time-consuming task of computer vision labelling from London-based Encord.

AI is already transforming our world, but could it also help rebuild a nation? This was the plea from Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky, who closed the Summit, appearing in hologram form to call on the tech industry to help restore Ukraine’s ravaged economy. The broadcast, produced with volumetric capture technology, was simultaneously transmitted to audiences at several European tech festivals, including Brilliant Minds in Stockholm and The Next Web in Amsterdam. Attendees could also download a Zelensky avatar to watch the speech on their smartphone. Ukraine represents, “a chance for a global digital revolution,” said Zelensky; “a chance for every technology company and a chance for every visionary to show their value, skills, technologies and ambitions.”