In times of drastic social and economic changes, like the ones we live in, knowledge about the future can be a crucial factor for building it the right way. As Malcolm X once said - Education is our passport to the future, for tomorrow belongs to the people who prepare for it today! The massive potential of technological advancements in the fields of Artificial Intelligence, Virtual Reality, Quantum Computing, Automation and Robotics should make us think how we need to educate our kids and develop their skill sets for the demand of the future. The AI and Automation will surely make many manual, repetitive jobs obsolete. But as any tech advancements in the past, the ones that are before us will certainly create many occupations that we can hardly even dream of. According to the Founder of Alibaba Group, Jack Ma, if we keep the 200 years old knowledge-based approach our children will never be able to compete with machines. Instead, kids should be taught soft skills like independent thinking and team work. Of course, changing the education system will require a lot of money. In 2017, the edtech (education technology) investments in the US surpassed a record high of $9.5 billion. Forecasts show that the AI in education market is set to go past $6 billion by 2024. The topic of education, among many others, will be discussed during the Innovate! & Plenary Session of this year’s Webit.Festival Europe - the largest event for innovations and entrepreneurship in this part of the world. Many experts, such as the Director of the London School of Economics, Minouche Shafik, believe that changing our education system will be an essential part of the process of fixing the fractures in our societies and avoiding a tilt towards populism. She thinks that more and more people realize that the system of today will not work in their benefit, so they are looking to vote for anti-system players, such as Donald Trump for example. Of course, this does not mean that the populists will rule Europe and the world, but it is a strong sing for the establishment to start the process of changing itself to meet the demand of tomorrow. In a relatively near future technology will allow us to learn anything almost instantly. Our brains will be boosted with special implants that will help us memorize information - an advancement that will improve our lives dramatically. Just imagine a time when you don’t need to spend 16 years in different forms of educational institutions, so that you can get a degree. Such implants will help us personalize the education we get and learn the most suitable information for our skills. With the implants of tomorrow, we will basically have a search engine in our heads and we will be able to get all information that is online on demand, instead of knowing it. Come to Webit.Festival Europe and learn about the major steps that world’s policy makers and corporate leaders will need to take to create the infrastructure of tomorrow and protect us from the threats that will come with it. During Innovate! & Plenary Session you will get the chance to listen to top enterprise, science and policy leaders, such as the Serial Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, the Airbus Defense and Space CEO Dirk Hoke, the Senior Parther at McKinsey & Co Paul Willmott, The VP of Amazon Web Services Sandy Carter and VP of Amazon Paul Misener, the EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel, the Deputy Director-General of World Trade Organization Yonov Frederick Agah and many others. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.

We are all living in a time of exponential change both in our societies and economics. The new industrial revolution and the rise of robots and automation will change dramatically the way we live, communicate and entertain ourselves. But probably the most crucial change will come in our workplace, where we will need a completely new set of skills to stay competitive. According to the annual Future of Jobs Report, issued by the WEF, by 2020, more than a third of the desired core skill sets of most occupations will be consist of skills that are not yet considered crucial to the job today. Soon we will all need to make a serious effort to develop our soft skills, such as persuasion, emotional intelligence and the ability to teach others. Experts think that there will be a higher demand for such abilities, than the narrow technical skills. This, among many other topics, will be discussed during the Innovate! & Plenary Session of this year’s Webit.Festival Europe - the largest event for innovations and entrepreneurship in this part of the world. Students today think that getting a four-year university degree is the only way to become part of a global company such as Google, Apple or Amazon. But business leaders like the CEO of Siemens USA Barbara Humpton and her colleague in Apple Tim Cook are already questioning this old-fashioned career path. Recently Cook pointed out that the US employment at Apple includes a lot of people who did not have degrees. And the main reason for that is the fact that most of the colleges do not teach the skills business leaders need, such as coding for example. According to a LinkedIn report, prominent companies do not require that employees have college degrees. The data analysis of the social network identified, tha positions like electronic technicians, mechanical designers and marketing representatives are offered to people with no education but having the required skill set. The main drivers of this exponential changes in our work requirements are four processes: high-speed mobile internet, Artificial Intelligence, adoption of Big Data analytics and Cloud Technology. If we want to prevent a catastrophic processes in the society like mass unemployment, business and educational leaders will have to take an active role and help the workers today with re-skilling and up-skilling. While this process will unfold on a global scale, it will also be a major challenge for the new European Commission that will be appointed after the elections for Members of the European Parliament at the end of May. The new governing body will need to develop a continent-wide strategy for developing its human resource, in order for the continent to stay competitive with new global powers, such as China, who have a more centralized authority. Come to Webit.Festival Europe and learn about the major steps that European policy makers and corporate leaders will need to take to create a secure job market for us and for the generations to come. During Innovate! & Plenary Session you will get the chance to listen to top enterprise, science and policy leaders, such as the Serial Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, the Airbus Defense and Space CEO Dirk Hoke, the Senior Parther at McKinsey & Co Paul Willmott, The VP of Amazon Web Services Sandy Carter and VP of Amazon Paul Misener, the EU Commissioner for Digital Economy and Society Mariya Gabriel, the Deputy Director-General of World Trade Organization Yonov Frederick Agah and many others. Here you can see a full list of the confirmed speakers at Webit.Festival, while here you can get all the information you need about the tickets for the event.