Introduction

My name is Anniko.

I'm an innovation consultant, although I'm slowly and steadily getting into the world of AI.

For one reason, because we live in Zurich and it's almost impossible not to.

Secondly, because we are the co -founders with Kickstart Innovation of the Swiss AI Weeks that was happening for the first year this year.

Keeping Up With AI Trends

Before we would jump into what is that, what we learned from it and what can you learn from it?

My question is a personal one.

How do you keep up with AI trends?

so this is for everyone what do you do do you read do you build do you talk what's your secret

all of that yeah i know i know i know you're gonna have your sources from your questions

yes exactly do you have like one go -to place where you always read never miss reading

Navigating the Tool Overload

Yeah, this kind of sums up why I asked actually, because there are so many tools popping up.

If you feel like I'm curious, but everything is changing in every 10 minutes, this is the perfect place where you have to come.

We are curious and slightly overwhelmed for experts slightly underwhelmed by what these tools can do and what we think that they can do.

So a little bit of shout out for the Hall of Fame of tiny teams.

From Tools to Fluency

Tiny Teams and Swappable Heroes

we invite you to maybe not to look at AIS this big complex black box but

rather to look into it as individual tools single heroes which you can swap

and if you get into a certain fluency you will be able to hopefully find the

best mix for yourself which we are hoping to help you with is anyone using

any of these tools if not amazing then maybe you can look into it what they are

good at for what I can speak for myself meet journey gum and lovable are my

my close friends we are not best friends just yet but it might be my prompting skills which is

in actually not enabling this relationship but so far if you want to look into something new you can

A Rapidly Evolving Landscape

either just yeah take a picture of it or consult us on like what we are using right now now a little

bit of this environment so every day something new popping up which promises that we'll solve

everything without knowing your company at all and your individual work processes is kind of what

built us and brought us to the birth of Apertus.

Introducing Apertus and Swiss AI Weeks

Now we are in Switzerland, we like to build things

that are independent and ethical and top -notch tech -wise, so that was a really nice lead -up to

have something that's a transparent multilingual foundation model that has been born in the summer.

Now many people have been co -creating Apertus and lots of players who have been enabling GIFT,

Stress-Testing the Model Through Hackathons

so sponsoring it, have been thinking what's the best way to test the model, why not put

15 hackathons on it and lots of builders and try to break it and to see how far we can go with it,

right?

Because we try to train it.

Why Switzerland?

Now, knowing the people of Apertus and knowing what Switzerland

is good at, given that we have lots of global tech giants here, really, really good universities.

So this is definitely not only shows by the worldwide rankings, but also whenever you meet

hackers and whenever you just talk to each other, you realize that it really got near the talent

and fair you know capita ratio led us to some thoughts and the co -founders of the Swiss AI

Weeks to think hey this could be cool to maybe have like a series of events which could be more

An AI Festival for Real-World Use Cases

of an AI festival you for we can imagine it's AI Olympics where there are different events where

we would like to put real life cases for real companies to see what we can build on our

apparatus and see how far we can go into real -life use.

Now this was the motive behind bringing Swiss

AI Weeks to life which we did and it got a little bit out of hands.

Now it started with a couple of

events and then it became 150 partners who were actually invite only.

For next year I'm hoping

or we are hoping it's going to be even more.

If you have companies who want to join let us know.

Growth, Partners, and Inclusivity

Between the 240 events, these events varied from small scale to big scale.

So a big invitation and a big principle and value behind Apertus 2 is also to be collaborative and be access for everyone as well as in the same time private.

So what we thought that it would be wonderful if this could be used in health care, but it would be also amazing in finance.

It would be good for the city of Zurich and the canton of Wau.

And well, basically, we made that happen.

It became a nationwide initiative that was proceeding to become the most collaborative, most ethical, and also the most forward -thinking AI ecosystem in the world.

So this is what Space AI Week is aiming to be.

And hopefully it will also roll over to next year.

You as a hacker, as an expert, as an advisor can join anytime.

So let us know about that.

Probably ending up with a lot of pizza and some vibe coding in the midst.

So that's how you can imagine.

Human Problems, Not Just Tech Demos

Now, on this very mundane slide, I also wanted to show you what it could have been, basically

because the message here is that, yes, AI is very techie, but we are still hoping to

transfer those advancements to be able to solve us human problems.

And this is what I'm going to also show you in the next slide, a really interesting mix

about who were the sponsors and the partners to have hundreds of people from a government,

from an academia of researchers, hackers, students,

and just enthusiasts is a wonderful feeling.

So we really do believe in innovation and for AI,

both the diversity is the key to make the best results.

And sometimes it takes a completely non -techie people

to help a big tech team to get the Trojan horse out through the door.

So we've seen many, many examples of that, actually.

Real Challenges, Real Solutions

A couple of actual challenges.

The companies have proposed their own problems

that they are hoping that the talent can solve this could be from the tiniest why don't people

send postcards anymore to the biggest how can we prevent natural disasters and these were all

tackled by the hackers i've seen my personal favorites obviously i'm really into uh nature

as well so as probably 99 of this audience but um it was really interesting to see in the winner

solutions how they were in about 48 hours actually making working products

to prevent and also to see data that has been already available what would be the

best decision making for example a landslide which was already an existing

case for Swiss Re for Ligas obviously UPS had multiple challenges this is not

surprising at all in Zurich very interesting ones as well from trusting

chatbots or who do you talk to it for as your financial advisors there are

multiple use cases in our work processes where AI can come into place.

Get Involved

Now, if you want to come

into place, you can just follow us either as a participant for next year or be a part of it.

Go attend, go speak.

I always push everyone to do whatever flows their boat, but definitely

encourage you to try to be a part of it because it was kind of like a once -in -a -lifetime

experience.

Key Learnings

Now, key learnings on our end, obviously, collaboration beats competition.

This loops back into what I said about cross -industrial collaboration.

We were really

lucky to have this in Switzerland.

This does not exist everywhere.

So this is something that's very

interesting as in comparison to other regions, like Silicon Valley is more like innovation

meets diplomacy.

Given the size of the country, it's possible to meet everyone in weeks.

You don't

have to do it for years.

So that's something that you can really tap into places if you want to.

Ethics and Policy as a Swiss Strength

Ethics are an afterthought here whilst as you can see from more experts I think it's also some sort

of second nature even in companies like ours to just drop it everything so we can do faster,

better and think afterwards if there is any ethical component to it.

Luckily here I think

we have the time and the space and also the competence to think about is this good for us

is this something that we can allow ourselves or play a critical role in how ai policy and

ethical policy will be made i'm sure switzerland will be up on that and my last message would be

Readiness vs. Adoption Gap

readiness and adoption now according to the last mckinsey survey 94 percent of people say that

they are ready or open to use ai this probably means equals gpt but only a really small amount

5 % of the companies are actively training now AI for their employees,

and let alone probably even smaller for AI privacy.

So this is a gap that we need to solve.

We are hoping that we can a little bit help with that.

I mean, also hoping that this will pass sometime soon.

And about what that does mean in your individual level,

I'm going to also just wrap it up with a question.

And we're going to do a bit of raise of hands,

Audience Pulse and Model Personalities

because you've been sitting for a while so who here uses GPT if you're allowed

to share okay mature that's 87 % per pack city all right 45 % Claude also same 46

and Gemini or white very very very yeah but all the search we have there should

should be a separate question yeah that's a very educated crowd i must say um i think this slide

oh i love it because it looks like so ai doesn't really have one personality only all the models

have superpowers and they all have biases so what we are hoping that we can also give and also roll

out as a knowledge that building and playing around it and beating the fear to it is the best

way to see what would be the best hireable teammate for you.

From Tools to Teammates

AI is not

necessarily only a tool but maybe a mindset and that's we are taking trying

to share with the Kickstart Academy where we are teaching it.

Maybe if you

Skill to Master: Model Switching

one skill that I could just like hope for and wish for for everyone is to

learn how to swap between these personalities when to use what and make

them to talk to each other because this is what differentiates a regular user to

someone who is an ai savvy professional which will be very much needed in the future so we are only

Closing and Next Steps

hoping that we can have you to become one shameless a little bit promo that we do have boot camps for

it and we happen to know very smart people smarter than us who can teach you how to do it so this

would have been us and a little bit of takeaways on the swiss ai weeks uh hope to see you there

next year hope that you're gonna follow us and all of us and also if you have

don't have anything to do tomorrow morning we have a closing ceremony

actually during the day where we gonna also have Stefan on stage announcing

some of the pilot project with our partners and the big party so you choose

either ceremony or party you can reach me on LinkedIn and I can send you the

the invitation for both.

Thank you so much for the attention.