There is something that happens when people are in the same room that does not happen anywhere else.
I have spent the last year helping build the Data & AI Stockholm community alongside people who care about making space for real conversations about AI in organisations. Not the hype. The actual work: what it takes to implement well, what fails and why, what problems are harder than they looked in the pilot.
What strikes me at every event is how much people need to think out loud together. We have more information available than at any point in history. Every question has an answer somewhere. But information does not tell you what to pay attention to, and it does not help you work out what you actually believe.
Rooms do that. The question someone asks from the audience. The conversation that starts during the break and does not end. The moment when two people who work in completely different contexts realise they are working on the same problem.
I think rooms are becoming more valuable, not less, precisely because so much else has moved online and become faster and more abundant. The scarcity now is presence. Time that is not optimised. Conversation that does not have a defined output.
That is what I keep trying to create. Space that slows people down just enough to think together.