At SXSW London everything was AI. Meanwhile, out in Shoreditch, the closest thing to high tech was a contactless payment in another hipster coffee shop.

That’s the beauty of events like SXSW: they rarely give you actionable answers, but they give you food for thought. And the bit my mind keeps snacking on is the chasm between the vision of the future – AI, space, bio-hacking – and the reality. That pulsing gap between ambition and everyday life that expands and contracts depending on the day.

I was sitting in the pavilion, waiting for the next talk to begin. One moment there was an ad for Ray Ban’s Metaverse glasses, the next – the new Sky Glass TV. One was redefining the world, another one was… a thinner TV.

And that, to me, sums up where we are now: surrounded by groundbreaking discoveries, while still living in a world that hasn’t quite caught up. That messy and beautiful human experience: ambitious in the mind, buffering in real life.

These are a few observations I’ve been sitting with since SXSW London – the ideas that spark things, the chaos of trying to make them real, the stories we tell to make sense of it all, and the drive it takes to keep going.

The dreaming

Any startup playbook says: find a pain point, address an unmet need, and you have a business to run. But I’ve noticed a paradigm shift taking place.

Picture this: Henry Coutinho-Mason, Founder at The Future Normal, and Rohit Bhargava, CEO and Founder at Non-Obvious Company, asked the audience to scribble a startup idea, upload it, and prompt AI to illustrate it in 60 seconds. What did we get? Things like a pet translator, a magic carpet, and wherever your fantasy went as a kid.

I caught myself thinking – you could actually make them happen. Pet translator? There’s enough data, research, and technology to at least play with the idea, if not work out how to build it. Though personally, I’d argue that a pup’s drooling speaks a thousand words in the face of a snack. Anyway.

That’s what artificial intelligence (AI) is doing – it shortens the space between imagination and a working prototype.

AI tools offer a user interface (UI) to access and work with knowledge. With them, you can figure out the logistics and even execute your vision. What once felt imagined is now within reach.

Fantasies, science fiction, childhood dreams are no longer stories we carry. They’re the blueprints for the future we dare to create.

We’re not just solving problems to relieve the pain anymore – we’re creating what we long for.

Sounds wild, doesn’t it? As AI brings those visions into the reality, the next question is: how do we keep up with the future that writes itself faster than we can read it?

The unpredictable

It’s rare to witness the adoption of technology as impactful as the internet. I was too young to grasp that one, but this time, my prefrontal cortex is fully online. I hope.

AI is unpredictable. I appreciated how clearly that came through in the discussions, even when my amygdala begged for certainty, agreeing with one of the speakers saying, “People don’t like searching. They like answers and actions.” Maybe, it’s time to learn to like searching.

We often try to define technology before letting it find its place in the world. But not with AI because unpredictability isn’t just a side effect.

“Unpredictability is a feature.”

If unpredictability is part of the design, then maybe adoption begins with curiosity to try and play, not to know and control.

The real work isn’t about having answers, but learning to work with uncertainty – personally, practically, and creatively.

That’s what makes AI adoption so intriguing: it evolves through a dialogue between technological development and human use. It depends on what it will evolve into and what people will do with it.

This technology finds form through emergence and its meaning through engagement.

At the same time, there’s another angle to adoption – storytelling. Our way of making the unpredictable feel understandable, usable, and deeply human.

The utopia

We don’t fully comprehend where AI is taking us, but we already feel behind it. So we try to make sense of it in order to catch up by telling stories.

Have you noticed that when we talk about AI, we often opt for some sort of a utopia?

It’s a beautiful narrative technique and a powerful way to introduce the unfamiliar. It shows its promise and sketches a dream scape of possibilities.

And maybe that’s the point – before we get the clarity, we tell the stories. Stories that help us imagine, explore, and slowly make the unknown feel a little more human.

Yet we tell a lot of stories about AI. And if you keep repeating “AI, AI, AI, AI, AI…”, at some point, it turns into dismissive German “ja, ja, ja” – consensus, but not a conviction.

The vision ignites, but it doesn’t drive the adoption fully. People do.

If AI is to be “the application layer across everything,” – as Demis Hassabis put it – and as it echoed across every panel – people need to understand how it fits into their own lives.

And this is where we are now: “I think I understand AI, but not really,” – is a common response from even the savvy. Which really means: “I know it matters. But what’s in it for me?”

That’s the real adoption gap – the gap in the narrative: from a vision to how it relates to me. It isn’t just knowing all the great things AI can do. It’s feeling how it belongs to you.

I loved the question Euan Blair, Founder & CEO at Multiverse, positioned: “How can you augment yourself with AI?” That question works with what we have right now and invites us to play with possibility. That’s a healthy and productive optimism.

The way forward

Optimism is one of the most undervalued traits. Not the kind that blindly ignores reality, but the kind that faces hardship with hope and humility. The one that creates the conditions for better outcomes.

And what are those conditions?

Aside from taking things with humor and a lighter heart, I keep coming back to one thing: celebration.

These insights came from the startup track – what better place to observe how ambitions are built and released into the world?

One theme ran as an undercurrent through many conversations there: the comparison between the American and European startup ecosystems.

You can’t deny the U.S. is ahead in many ways. But why? I heard a theory.

Americans celebrate. Everything.

They celebrate wins, participation, and even the sheer act of trying. That creates momentum. But what’s even more energizing is celebrating audacity and ambition.

In many European conversations, there’s a shyness around wanting more – as if ambition needs to be justified, softened, or made palatable. But progress doesn’t come from playing small. It comes from letting yourself dream big.

And if ambition is the fuel, then people are the infrastructure of ambition.

As Sehr Thadhani, Chief Growth Officer at Nasdaq, said: “You want people you can power through with, trust, and who will tell you the truth. People who will say the thing no one else would tell you.”

At the end, everything comes down to people: what we dream of and how we move forward with it.

The parting notes

Take a look at space – as in, where Mars is.

It feels inaccessible, but as Bianca Cefalo, Founder & CEO at Space DOTS, noted, we’ve been interacting with space for quite a while. Calling, uploading Stories to Instagram, and finding directions on Google Maps – that’s satellite communication, up there in space.

What seemed like a dream is already here. To build is to wonder. To understand is to participate.

And still nothing compares to the beautiful absurdity of being human. Because even as we dream up futures, the realities today are where we live.

After all, no matter how powerful the innovation is, there is one problem no tech, startup, or venture capital has ever managed to tackle – a line to the women’s bathroom.