London gets a glimpse into the future of business at hybrid CogX Festival

The largest event of its kind, the festival is predominantly online but heralds a return to face-to-face networking

As the sun shone children splashed in the water fountains of London's Granary Square, unaware of the biggest and brightest minds congregated next door to discuss the most pressing issues surrounding their future. How do we get the next 10 years right?

That’s the overarching question being asked at hundreds of cross-industry sessions at this year's CogX Global Leadership Summit, which is focusing on artificial intelligence and transformational technology.

In the Lighterman Brasserie flanking the square's spraying jets, the long absent face-to-face networking opportunities returned. Calling it a "milestone", CogX's founder told The National that putting on the first big post-pandemic event had been a worthwhile challenge.

“It's amazing to have everybody back in person. In the couple of roundtables I've participated in the first thing we’re saying is it's just great to be sitting across the table from each other,” says Charlie Muirhead, CogX's chief executive.

While the in-person presence at talks has been relatively sparse, organisers expect tens of thousands to be tuning in online.

The urgencies of the pandemic and climate have, Muirhead says, focalised the major issues of concern at the summit.

“Number one is social stability. How do we get everybody healthy? How do we get everybody vaccinated? How do we get people back working? How do we make sure that the economy comes back in a supported and sensible way? And then really importantly, how do we make sure that the recovery is evenly distributed, and doesn't just prefer a part of the population.”

The three-day festival marks a re-emergence of the UK capital as a bustling, networking scene. Physically sprawled across the Knowledge Quarter of Kings Cross, participants are also invited to join the three-day festival on the dozens of available online platforms. The largest hybrid event of its kind, CogX 2021 marks the capital’s first bold return to "business as usual", albeit with a reduced physical presence.

Having begun on the same day as the UK government announced a four-week delay to the complete lifting of restrictions in England, the summit's go-ahead demonstrates how far industries have come in accommodating and adapting to the pandemic.

Taking place just off the back of the G7 summit and a few months ahead of the Cop26 summit in Glasgow, climate change is unsurprisingly the second biggest concern, says Muirhead.

Oliver Dowden, Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, announces the launch of the Tech Zero Taskforce at the opening of CogX 2021 in a bid to get UK companies to sign up to Net Zero. Courtesy: CogX

CogX opened with the launch of Tech Zero Taskforce, a government-supported business initiative encouraging companies to transition to renewable energy. Announced by UK Digital Minister Oliver Dowden and led by renewable energy supplier Bulb, the Taskforce wants to set the "ultimate scaling challenge" by getting 1,000 UK companies to sign up to net zero emissions.

Bulb's founder, Hayden Wood, told The National the aim was to encourage the private sector to creatively collaborate and contribute tips on how to solve the climate change problem.

“I do think that companies have a responsibility to address this problem themselves,’ said Wood. “The other added complication here is that it's such an urgent need. So we can't really wait for somebody else to do it for us either.”

Sign-ups will make joint pledges and measure their emissions, which they will then devise a plan to reduce. The hope is that collective action and accountability will generate more efficient solutions to a complicated problem.

Innovation, says Muirhead, is the crucial third component to CogX’s overarching question and arguably the lynchpin of the entire festival. Traditionally the purview of start-ups, the chief executive says the pandemic has spurred everyone – from government to corporations – to embrace reinvention.

Lila Ibrahim of DeepMind, the British artificial intelligence research lab, tells audience members at CogX about the company's latest developments, including AlphaFold, the revolutionary clinical software programme it developed last year. Courtesy CogX

From life on Mars and the biography of the pixel, to the future of EdTech and the development of AlphaFold, CogX is displaying a bounty of worldwide technological leaps. Fittingly, the CogX Grand Jury Prize Winner was AstraZeneca, for developing its Covid-19 vaccine.

The festival's own technical infrastructure is an example of the CogX Festival's problem-solving ambitions. Hopin, the UK online events platform staging this year's Festival, raised its first capital at CogX 2019, and will be hosting the next two iterations, which Muirhead says will be truly hybrid, with plans to host 40,000 people in-person and 250,000 online at CogX 2022.

Author of the newsletter New World Same Humans, David Mattin closed day one with a glimpse into the future, outlining his predictions of the AI-fuelled trends the world is likely to see much more of in the future, including in the fields of health and wellness, creativity and human interaction. Plenty of substantive food for thought and transformative ideas to build on at this year's CogX and the next.