SXSW 2025: from FOMO to FOMA

What progress has been made in the areas of AI, robotics and biotechnology?

At this year’s SXSW Conference, which was held from March 7 to 1, 2025, in Austin (Texas), AI in its various forms – unsurprisingly – set the tone of the various keynotes and contributions by top executives, futurologists, tech gurus and other spin doctors.

While regular users are just coming to terms with having to get to grips with GenAI applications such as ChatGPT in more and more areas of both their private and professional lives, the experts at SXSW were already discussing the limitations of large language models, reaching the conclusion that in the coming years there will be no way around AGI (Artifical General Intelligence). Optimists are looking forward to the benefits of AI, which will be everywhere, do everything, replace all previous technologies and, above all, continue to grow.

It is therefore not surprising that not everyone will be able to keep up and that many will feel overwhelmed by the amount of possibilities, the transformative pressure and the rapid pace. Futurist Amy Webb sees FOMO (fear of missing out) as having already been replaced by FOMA (fear of missing anything) and deliberately exaggerates by saying “what is cutting edge today will be gone … later today” in the sense of ever shorter development cycles.

In addition to these general bits of hyperbole, she outlines the advances in robotics and in the integration of AI and biotechnology and thus her vision of “living intelligence” – a development whose relevance was obvious from its sheer presence in many of the discussion contributions at SXSW.

What challenges will Agentic AI pose for companies and banks?

Agentic AI will have broader, more open-ended areas of application and will increasingly be caught between the conflicting priorities of real benefits on the one hand and data protection / digital security on the other. While the discussion of applications generally focused on the opportunities for corporate business models and, of course, a wide variety of use cases are also becoming interesting to banks and financial services providers, the ability to respond to end customers utilizing them also needs to be considered.

How does an institution react when an AI agent asks a complex question on behalf of a customer that is currently still answered in a confidential discussion? From the point of view of the SXSW community, this will soon be an everyday occurrence, but from the perspective of everyday industry life, it is unlikely to be the very next question addressed where budget allocation is concerned.

What are the economic and social implications of the technological advances?

Aside from the technological dimension, where not just AI, but also quantum was a hot topic, the various additional perspectives offered were particularly important in order to get the full picture. Economic and social effects, especially the concentration of power in Big Tech, the possible formation of bubbles on the capital markets, both the increasing spread of the current distribution of wealth and the drifting apart of the ability to accumulate wealth between the generations, as well as the threat of dependency and isolation, especially among young men, highlight structural risks and the need for intelligent regulation in the coming years.

The ambivalence between the expected benefits, efficiency gains and economic potential on the one hand and the warning of restrictions on individual human autonomy and creativity as well as the unreflective acceptance of AI on the other is enriching in itself, and the fact that no attempt is even made to reduce everything to one formula is refreshingly differentiated.

And so, as in real (professional) life outside of SXSW, it is left to the visitors themselves to determine their individual position, categorize and prioritize, and ultimately ask themselves how best to get a handle on their (personal) conflict between disruption and the opportunities that come with it on the one hand and their own feelings of being overwhelmed on the other. The fact that we are in the midst of a paradigm shift and that the further developments of AI are not incremental development steps, was already clear to most visitors beforehand.

The assumption that there will no longer be any form of stability as we know it and that we are entering an era of permanent transformation is confirmed by the not entirely serious phrase “The only way to solve problems with AI is to use more AI. ” We hope that aside from this, some of the actual benefits anticipated by everyone will also materialize …