Is there a word for when your brain is buzzing with ideas and thoughts and information that is distinct, separate and yet needs to be synthesised because it is true all at once?
There should be a word for this, because that is what a successful conference or symposium should leave you feeling.
It is a word that we need (so please wordsmiths: get creating) and it should be a benchmark of a good event.
See: if we had the word ... How was Copenhagen for Nordic Fintech Week, you would ask me ... and I would say oh it was all fortuitous singularity. Or whatever the word would be. And you would know what I mean.
Now I have to explain.
So here it goes.
The FinScan team and I attended a series of interconnected events in Copenhagen last week: the AML symposium, a series of industry roundtables bridging regulatory voices, academic views and practitioners, and the fintech conference itself. We gave a couple of excellent keynotes if I may say so myself and participated in panels that taught us something as well as gave us the opportunity to share our world view. And maybe the reason I feel so positive about the event is the combination of meeting incredible people, learning a ton of new things but doing all of that within an acknowledgment of a shared world view.
Because the reality is ... while the world is losing its head talking about AI... a lot of other things are simultaneously true.
While you are trying to wrap your head around AI and what you should (and could do with it. Two very different conversations, if we are honest with ourselves) the bad guys are also playing with AI. Faster than you.
But simultaneously, while this is happening and taking a lot of airtime and thought and budget, other technologies are maturing rapidly. Technologies that will be tomorrow's challenge but you have (or are creating) no headspace today for them. Are you worried about quantum? Not nearly enough, right?
Because there is so much on your plate and, understandable though that is, that won't protect you from what comes next.
And it's not even just quantum: it is a multitude of capabilities maturing rapidly all around us while we are grappling with the one thing that has rightly or wrongly captured everyone's attention now. And I am not saying don't pay attention to it, I am just saying that the next thing is already coming. And the next thing. And dealing with the avalanche is part of the job.
And while you are trying to deal with all that, coming at you from all directions and with no overlapping means of understanding or deploying solutions, the day job is still there.
Urgent and occasionally on fire.
All the decisions you have ever made or not made are also still there in their resonating effects.
The architecture choices you made. The systems you built, didn't build, or built but didn't maintain. The data you gathered with no quality or discipline (or expiry date, why do we not ever talk about that?). The data you amassed without clear governance. The data you could use for your AI, for your intelligence. for your MIS and for your predictive analytics. Could and should but can't because it is not really usable. It is not very good. It is plentiful but not usable.
That data and that tech estate that is a more real issue than whatever you will do with AI because without it you can't do the job at hand today... you can't think about AI... or what comes next.
And that is the convergence that every conversation we had this week came back to with incredible honesty and courage: every decision maker right now is at the receiving end of an avalanche of stuff coming at them with firehose ferocity. Anyone who says it is not overwhelming at times is lying, to be frank. Anyone who doesn't feel the weight of responsibility for making the right calls in the right time frame to allow their organisation to navigate the current landscape is, frankly, irresponsible.
I respect that sentiment.
I respect it and agree fully with the realisation that whatever hype cycle we are going through now will be followed by another and then another and then another.
We at FinScan went into the event under the banner of 'risk is everything, everywhere all at once' and leadership is the burden and responsibility of navigating all that with incomplete information to the best of your ability at all times, no matter what is happening simultaneously.
We come out of the event flying that banner even higher because it is true: leadership is risk management and in a world where more and more unknown things are hitting us by the minute, our leaders have a job and a half ahead. And the only certainties they are armed with are that the technology legacy we have and data discipline we bring determines our starting point ... and our ability to risk manage the journey determines all the rest.