CTRL/SHIFT - 15 06 2026 CHAPEL STAGE - ANDREA DE GIORGIO - AI & ENTREPRENEURSHIP

A and entrepreneurship. It's a very good. Everything good to start. Fantastic. So, I'm going to ask all of you to just stand up and come a bit closer cuz I really want to have a chat or a little bit of an involvement.

Especially the people outside, join us. Thank you. Thank you. So, I hope you're not scared about entrepreneurship or actually AI and entrepreneurship. That's what we're going to talk about today.

My name is Andrea. Who's an entrepreneur in this room already? Okay, I see a few. Who's a want-to-be entrepreneur? Somebody who has a dream, wants to launch something, a product, a company, something.

Okay, good. That's nice. I don't know what the others do, but let's see. My journey started very early. But let's see if the clicker works.

No, it doesn't. You see, technical. Yeah, that works. Super. All right.

My journey started when I was little, but I want to tell you a story that started way earlier. It was the period of Second World War II, uh and there was a a young boy that had started working as a mechanic in this town, Naples. Um he was really, really not keen about studying anything, but he was curious about engines. So, he was so crafty. He was talking with a lot of his peers.

He was like asking the best mechanics in town to explain him how to dismantle an engine or something, and he opened his own uh how do you call it? Work workshop for that. Uh but World War II came. It was a bit of a rough time. And when it finished, he saw an opportunity to to grab.

Tanks. They were there. Nobody had any idea of what to do with them. So, he decided, "Why don't I buy some of them from the army? Cuz they sell for so cheap."

And he brought them in his workshop here in Naples. Imagine that, people seeing tanks coming. And he dismantled the engine and understood that by reversing the engine, that could have become a dynamo. That is something that produces electricity starting from gas, which was also cheap at the time. But electricity was scarce, and the hospitals had a lot of patients and needs for electricity at all times.

So, he sold these engines to the hospitals. That landed him a good amount of money. And he didn't stop there because somehow some people, you know, the Americans came to Italy to save us from the Nazis. And that's history. That's history.

We lost the war, but the American invested in Europe. And General Motors, if you remember this company, it's been bypassed by Tesla and others nowadays, but still there, still hanging on. It was the best company at the time. What happened? They asked this guy to go to the States to understand everything about their cars and sell them in Italy.

So, he become became the first reseller for General Motors in Italy. And this that's the guy. He wasn't young anymore, so I don't have any younger pictures of him. But, he was passionate about a lot of things, like yachts, sailing, sports, motors, engines, as I said. And this is his little workshop that was restored in town.

So, if somebody's from around here, maybe you've heard about Officine Belli. It was down in Viareggio. This company doesn't exist anymore. How come? Because, you see, it was a big saloon, General Motors.

They spread in all of Italy. He was managing the whole market for Italy, managing the whole market. So, this entrepreneur landed a lot of money in this country and did a lot of things, but his kids didn't really think about it. That's me, actually. He was holding me when I was 1 years old.

Uh he's a great great uncle of mine. And I heard stories about him because he died of a heart attack, I think, few years later. So, the company passed in the hands of the kids. And each one of us had different stories. My story started there.

I was a very curious kid. I started dismounting stuff. I wasn't dismounting engines, but electrical stuff at home. They were fearing me because anything that was working, "Don't give it to Andrea."

[laughter]

We need We need it. The blender is needed.

[laughter]

And of course I got a computer. You remember those boxes, those old ones? Yeah, I started like playing with floppy disk, installing Windows for workgroup when I was 6 years old. Of course this is AI generated cuz nobody took a picture of me back then. But but eventually I started thinking about this.

And sorry if I sit down. I just want to I just want to pose for a picture because somebody's going to come here and take a picture of me here. While I continue the story. So, what's inside things? What's going to be inside things?

You want it like this? Yes. Perfect. So, let's get comfortable. Yeah, take a picture.

What's inside things? What do you think? I will tell you something. What beside the screen? Has anybody asked themselves?

That's what I ask myself all the time. I went there to take a picture before the presentation. Now you see the beautiful altar behind the screen. All right. So, what's inside things?

What makes things work? How does the world goes? But most importantly, I started thinking that's not the miracle, but that was a book that was handled to me by my father, Bill Gates, The Road Ahead. So, it was about the future. I imagine a kid reading about the future.

What What are we going to build? How the world's going to change? I had the computer. I could do many things with that. But what about the future?

And that's one My My room had computers everywhere, screens, stuff, electronics. You don't see it behind the desk, but was like wide open. I was like mounting my own computer at the time. And what makes humans work? So, that was my question at some point.

I was like, I like computers, but they're stupid. They don't do what I want. They just work. But how? And what brings humans into computers?

So, I started at the age of maybe 15, 16 asking me the question and started reading books, tons of books. Uh neuroscience books. Why? Because they retro-engineered the brain. The brain works, but we don't know how.

Okay? So, we made aircrafts, for example, to fly, but we didn't study the birds. They flipped their wings. When you fly with Ryanair, do they flip their wings? No.

Different mechanics. So, basically, we get inspired by nature, but we don't build like nature does. And that's the thing. So, I started studying, studying, studying, and actually, I wanted to work I wanted to launch companies all the time. I had crazy ideas.

I started with a company in the States. I got royalties for more than 300 products, and I was only 20 years old. But my dad was like, "No, you have to study. You have to go to university. You need a title.

People won't bother." I was like, "Yeah, but Reg Return cool. He wasn't an engineer." Everybody was calling me engineer. He was the entrepreneur, the CEO of the company.

Nobody cares. So, I was like, "Why should I?" But they sent me or at least I sent myself to Sweden. Why? Because they understood AI was coming.

It was in the States, but Sweden got it. We need to create a program about this. So, AI started with Alan Turing in the '40s. There were mathematicians, statistics, a lot of stuff. Well, when I landed there, we were working with deep learning.

Deep learning was the way we understood neural networks could replace a brain. They cannot really, but it was an advanced idea. And that thing landed in the hands of many people, and out of chance, somebody said, "All we need is attention." What does that mean? Nobody knows, but they built something that was putting attention on these neural networks, and all of a sudden, we got large language models.

That's the thing you have behind chat chat GPT, Claude, and such. Now, this thing is not AI. That's just one product out of a million things that have been studied and I know all the mathematics behind it, but what do we do with it? I want to build companies. So, I started, of course, studying books about companies.

Books, books, books. You learn, you learn, you learn, and then you try to apply, but everything I try to apply is always obsolete because every time I go there, now they've changed. Now the business, the VCs, they don't ask you anymore for business plan. Burn the business plan. Why?

I studied that. No, burn it. Why? They need a motivation. They need this, they need that.

They need an MVP, minimum viable product. Go build it. And it took time. If you remember, it took time. So, company are built, they grow, they're created, they land employees.

Those are concepts that were developed after my great uncle built his company. That wasn't the truth back then, but it was a few years ago. Now, what happens is this, that along the years, many companies started landing more uh revenue, annual recurring revenue, by having less and less employees. Why? Because automatization, computer, this went faster and faster and faster and faster up to the point that there was this company, Midjourney, is the first that generated images with these large language models.

Do you know how many employees they had at the time they reached 500 millions as recurring revenue? Guess. 30. Oh, that's a very good guess. No.

No. Okay, so the estimate would have been thousands, thousands to land that money. But in fact, they only had 100 employees. So, and that is actually drastically going lower and lower. How much time left do I have?

8 minutes. That's a good time. So, I can give you a bit more details about this. So, the biggest organizations went smaller and smaller. Why?

Because automation is becoming cheaper. So, basically, the role of people is changing. Now, you don't focus on your task because why? A lot of people can do different things like create entire marketing campaigns, produce content mid-journey. They can analyze market, they can build software.

They don't need an electronic engineer to build a computer. They can get like a software house to ship chips that can be just installed with a few lines of code from cloud, you can have a computer nowadays. You don't need a degree like me in electronic engineering. Who studies that anymore? That's changing.

So, activities that required entire departments now can increasingly be performed by a very small team. That's the future. So, what if the most valuable companies founded 10 years from now don't hire a single employee? Imagine solo founders, solopreneurs. That's becoming reality, actually.

So, what if intelligence itself becomes abundant? Because we have 8 billion people on this planet, but what about all this extra intelligence that's coming hand? That's going to make human intelligence cheaper. Would you say so? People have nothing to do anymore?

And I'd say that's not reality. Why? Because AI is not a tool. It's not replacing humans, it's an operating system. I'll show you why.

So, the winners won't be bigger. They won't be company with many employees, they will be actually faster. So, fast speed is the keyword here, okay? Faster. AI doesn't eliminate people, it amplifies individuals, okay?

It doesn't amplifies yet teams. It could maybe in the future, but it amplifies the individual tasks. So, you can automate a lot of the things you do. Prediction number one is that the next generation of highly successful companies will be dramatically smaller than their pre- predecessors, okay? There's no way this is not going to happen.

I promise you. AI will become the baseline. So, what will become scarce? Guesses? Nobody?

Humans? Why? We have 8 billions. Connections, I hear. Yes, connection is getting on the direction.

Community, connection, but also trust. Who knows this? Trust. Trust is a very important thing that we need to focus on in this period. Why?

Because a lot of automated systems will come with offers automatically. They will run our errands. Do we trust the system that pays for us, that holds our credit cards, does the shopping, takes decisions for us? Who builds that system? Who's the solepreneur behind?

We need to know that Andrea was building that system. We trust Andrea, therefore we trust the AI that Andrea spread out there to help us in our daily tasks. That's what we're building. We're building human connections. So, I will leave this slide deck and the video to check this stuff, but imagine this.

You need proprietary data, you need speed of learning because you want to acquire all the knowledge about a certain business, okay? Go vertical about the people who work in that sector, why people want a certain product, why do they love it? Get familiar with the business, but then build trust, human trust, relationships. So, prediction number two is in that the AI era, the most successful entrepreneurs will combine these machine intelligence with deeply human relationships. Old playbook, build, hire, scale, control, big corporations.

New playbook is becoming validate, automate, learn, and orchestrate. Orchestrate is a new word you you're hearing more and more. Why orchestrating? Because orchestrating is about the the fourth step on this slide. You automate things quickly, okay?

You have the the ability to automate. Good, save the slides. You can validate. Validation is something really important because when you build something, then you ask the stakeholders, do we really need it this way or not? Validate.

Go validate. Go go build the trust. Ask the people, would you use it? Why? Why not?

And then just build quickly, okay? Don't spend time building like a dinosaur that will be dead before you launch it. Just build some prototypes. Give it to people. Let them play with it.

Ask them. Even if AI builds it for you and does it not the way you want it, ask people, would you buy it? Would you trust me to build this for you? And then orchestrate. So, understand what's the ecosystem you're putting together.

What's the product for? Who are the people using it? And what do they need really afterwards? So, AI is just the operative system, but you're the mind behind it. That's how we empower people.

So, the prediction number three is that the most successful founders of the next decade will behave more like conductors in an orchestra than the operators in a factory, okay? No more factories. We don't like those. Five years from now, AI will feel as normal as the internet feels today. All right?

You have it. Now you feel it's normal. AI will be normal. The tools will change. Platform will change.

Models will change. But what remains constant is entrepreneurship. It started with my great uncle with a different story, different tools, different times, different way of building. It continued with me. It will continue with you and with your sons and grandsons.

Everything will change, but humans will always see opportunities. Thank you.

Wanda, do you have any question to Andrea?