By B2B Tech Team, WP Communications
Leadership, sustainability, the power of AI and attracting the right talent were key trends at this year’s Tech Show London conference hosted at the ExCel London. Let’s unpack it.
First day
Attendance
The conference was exceptionally busy on the first day, so much so that the organisers had to open a second cloak room by 10am due to the sheer amount of people attending in the morning. It shows a seismic shift from previous years due to an urgent need for new technologies: not only for businesses in London but across the world, with delegates flying in from all corners of the globe.
Championing sustainability
A key session that stood out was sustainability and cost savings for data centres. An industry leader attending the session commented that it was somewhat of a paradox as being sustainable costs money and without legislation there wouldn’t be much of an incentive to get behind it. It was agreed that with the right roadmap and use cases it would be possible, however, it would need buy-in from the C-Suite and support from the government to provide ‘green’ power sources. There’s no good being sustainable if data centres are using fossil fuels to build sustainable infrastructure.
Leading to succeed in software engineering
Leadership in software engineering was discussed at great length. For software engineers there’s a habit of personally fixing problems as they arise and when transitioning to a leadership role it’s a habit that needs to be broken. A leader needs an ability to zoom out and see the broader landscape, including the role of people, personalities, technology and skill set. They need to be that safe space for the team to receive strategic advice and guidance.
Second day
Prompt engineering: Power of AI
Context is key. While AI has a place in optimising workflows and productivity, the trend was around its potential being limited to the prompts that we feed it. That’s why providing context is essential in getting the most out of it. The utilisation of AI in software engineering was cited as a trend, moving away from a model of using AI agents as a support function for human coders, to enabling AI agents to build systems faster on a machine-to-machine basis. This will reduce the amount of time developers spend checking code and accelerate project implementation.
Attracting the right talent
Among technology firms and the wider industry a recruitment bias was flagged for those that understand the recruitment process. It was argued that the recruitment architecture is currently weighted to attracting those who have all the resources available to do well. The key to championing greater inclusivity is moving outside the traditional model of graduate recruitment and introducing role models early on in candidate engagement.
