Talks and Presentations

Ólafur Andri is available for speaking both publicly and in private corporate meetings. Contact: andri@olafurandri.com

Here are some of the topics covered:

State of Technology

Over the last few decades we have seen exponential growth in digital technologies. Devices such as smartphones combined with cloud based services has dramatically changed our behaviour and created new businesses. Despite this enormous technological advances, some people believe that we will experience even more technological changes in the next few decades. In this lecture we look at general technological trends, such as mobile, social networks, platforms, augmented and virtual reality, Internet of things, artificial intelligence and robotics.

This lecture gives an overview without going deep into each topic. Several examples with videos are show.

The Retail Transformation

Traditional brick and mortal retial is under fire. We have seen many well-known brands close their stores. In the US, Black Friday sales are down while online sales on Cyber Monday are up. Several new delivery companies like Postmates, Deliveroo and JustEat are providing real-time food services. 81% of shoppers search for products online before buying. Retailers that are not online as well as selling traditionally could face becoming irrelevant. Retail is currently going though it biggest transformation since the start of the golden era in the 1960s.

This lecture will explain this trend and what retailers need to do, not only to survive but to take advantage of this opportunity.

Digital Transformation

The world is currently going through more technical transformation then ever in history. Futurists are predicting that the world will experience more change in the next 20 years than in the last 300. It is still unclear how emerging technologies like Augmented and Virtual Reality, Internet of things, self-driving cars and Artificial Intelligence, will have on businesses and how people behave. What is clear is that business leaders will need to adapt to a changing world and no industry will be left untouched. Think retail, healthcare, law firms, education, construction, banks, car makers to name few.

In this lecture we will look at the fundamental nature of the shifts that are happening and how they will transform businesses in the following years. Several examples are provided to give insights into this transformation.

Artificial Intelligent – A new Era of Software Development

Artificial Intelligence goes back as much as 60 years. While AI has over this time been successful in building many software system, the promise of something truly intelligent has never been realized. Until now. With recent breakthroughs in AI algorithms, in particular Neural Networks that drive Machine Learning we are entering a new era of how we build systems. In addition, this trend is driven by vast amount of computing power needed and big data. Instead of programming a system to provide a solution a system is built that can learn. Several applications such as classification like recognising real objects, transcription such are speech recognition, machine translation from one language to the next, and software testing to name few.

In this lecture we focus on types of AI, current state, types of problems currently suited for AI and the future impact of this new paradigm.