They say you can’t step into the same river twice. The same is true of Montreal’s C2 Commerce + Creativity business innovation conference, which I attended for the third time this year. At C2, you can’t expect to hit the same stream of ideas at any two points in it and that, after all, is part of the goal. As a leader and team player at my agency, I aspire to live and strive for innovation. It has become essential to our effective performance and also ensures our success in the modern business world.
Throughout C2, we had the opportunity to talk with the conference’s top speakers and innovatorsto find out what they're doing to innovate and stand out, to get a glimpse of what the future holds. A few trends and ideologies stood out to me, and I want to share those with you.
Virtual Reality For Storytelling
This year’s event offered a huge array of speakers and thought leaders, perhaps most notably Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. He told us about his deep belief in virtual reality, but also acknowledged his capacity for making mistakes, a charming balance of humility. “I’m positive on virtual reality, and I could be wrong,” he said. “... (VR) is so emotionally effective ... If I use something and go, ‘Wow, you gotta try this,’ to somebody else, those are things I think are going to make it in the future in the long run.”
It was great to hear one of the more important tech innovators of our time speak in such high regard of VR, to echo what my team and I have painstakingly been educating corporations about — the emotional power of this technology. Our agency has told stories on every digital platform since the dial-up days and yet no technology has allowed us to tell stories as compelling as those through VR. This is a technology that will enable us and all agency owners to take a leap of historic proportions in storytelling abilities.
Mixing And Pairing Technologies
During our chat with Jean-François Gagné, CEO of Element AI, he noted that artificial intelligence (AI) is well-paired to improve and play off of VR. “VR is a new interface, a new way for us to interact with computers," he said. "On that front, there’s a lot of opportunity to leverage artificial intelligence capabilities to make it easier ... to engage with VR environments."
The stimulating discussions taking place at C2, surrounding the spirit of wild and constant innovation, went beyond VR and AI, two technologies that are meant to converge. An observation shared with my peers regarding all emerging technologies — ranging from VR, AR, AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), cryptocurrencies and blockchain — is that they all seem to have been made to work together seamlessly.
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