Join veteran SXSW attendee Nigel Gwilliam as he shares his key highlights and insights fresh from Austin, Texas, in our annual IPA roadshow.
Free for IPA members, sign up to one of four locations around the UK for your very own SXSW window into the conversations that will shape the year ahead, and an opportunity to ask IPA Director of Media Affairs Nigel Gwilliam your South By questions.
Amongst the thousands of innovation-driven conference sessions, diverse and surprising topics regularly arise but a core theme always emerges.
Book now to stay ahead of the curve and spend an informal morning or afternoon exchanging insights with your peers.
A lot has changed since SXSW first launched as a music festival in Austin forty years ago in 1987. Arising around the millennium, the emerging technology conference has gone from strength to strength over the last two decades, growing in size and renown alongside the city that hosts it. AI has featured on stage for longer than you may think but the explosive arrival of ChatGPT in the autumn of 2022 has led to Generative AI dominating proceedings in at the Austin spring conference ever since. It’s hard to imagine this not continuing at SXSW 2026, although things have got a lot more uncertain in the last 12 months.
We’re now in a strange new world where virtually all US economic growth is driven by the Gen AI investment of tech’s multi-trillion-dollar Magnificent Seven. Not entirely unrelatedly, this has coincided with the White House turning the 80-year-old world order on its head. Geopolitics, tariffs and climate change denial now capture the headlines alongside a growing drumbeat that we might be in the mother of all (Gen AI) bubbles.