AI took over SXSW 2026 – but the most memorable moments were deeply human

Austin is famous for being weird, but this year's SXSW in the Texas capital felt strangely colorless and predictable.

The main reason was AI.

AI had taken over everything. It swallowed conversations with the same insatiable appetite as a black hole. Its gravity was impossible to escape. And more than anything, people talked about it the way people talk about the weather. It's hard to make sense of. It'll probably get better tomorrow. It could be worse. We'll just have to wait and see. It'll probably be fine.

Talking about AI like the weather does make one thing clear: it's here to stay. So of course it should take up space on our radar and in SXSW's programme. But the conversation had become too broad, too generic, and too repetitive to offer much that felt genuinely new. Again and again, panels circled back to the same familiar points about how AI will reshape our jobs, our industries, and our reality. And after a while, we walked out of most conference rooms with a strong Groundhog Day feeling.

So our main takeaway from SXSW's AI conversation was this:

Demis Hassabis, co-founder and CEO of Google DeepMind, said that at SXSW London in June 2025. So even that wasn't new.

AI is underestimated in the long term because we simply can't cognitively grasp the scale of its transformative potential or its impact on the world around us. It really is a bit like the weather in that sense: impossible to fully understand. And maybe that's exactly why we overhype, overstate, and over-communicate it in the short term. The black hole is self-made. It's the latest version of the hype cycles we've previously built around e-commerce, the metaverse, machine learning, or that era when every new company apparently had to end in dot-com. That was the feeling AI left behind at SXSW.

The dominant narrative was that AI is a tool that helps unlock our uniquely human qualities. The doomsday scenario has, for now, been buried. Humans aren't about to be replaced overnight. We certainly hope that's true, and it's a comforting thought. Let AI grease the wheels of efficiency so that humans can focus on human things. Fine. But for a conference of SXSW's scale and influence, that felt a little too thin, too safe, and too one-dimensional. The people curating the SXSW program have a big task ahead of them if they want to restore the conference's ability to bring genuinely fresh thinking and intellectual depth to an audience that's already highly informed and paying close attention.

Greg Greenberg, Executive Creative Director at TBWA\Media Arts Lab, who's spent nearly 15 years working on Apple campaigns, stressed the importance of human instinct – intuition, gut feeling, provocation, tension – in corporate communication. That's how you create work that's "created, not generated", as he put it, and capable of resonating beyond its format. But as we revisited a range of Apple campaigns, beautifully made as they were, they also felt overpolished, too salesy, and oddly stripped of the wildness Greg himself so eagerly wanted to see in them.

Marco Venturelli, President and CCO at Leo, appeared on stage with Gareth Goodall, Global Chief Strategy Officer at Leo, and together they laid out the idea that we're now living in a post-purpose era, where business success depends on combining purpose with promise and proof. They made a strong case for human ideas as a uniquely powerful tool for breaking down the barriers between the desire for change and change itself. And they weren’t wrong. But ideas are, by nature, about changing something. Turning ideas into reality is strategy in motion. Ideas unite people. Ideas engage people. The two Leo leaders did what was expected of them, and did it well. But they didn’t really go beyond that. And across many of the conference's biggest talks, that was the recurring issue: plenty of interesting points, but too often delivered without the pulse, risk or vitality the speakers themselves were celebrating.

And then there was everything you can't schedule, but that happens because SXSW happens. Meeting Vico Tadeo and seeing his sublimely curated brand and shop, TOMO Mags. Visiting the gallery Northern-Southern. Spending time in the legendary Aylin studio, where, among others, Jason Hoch, producer ofLandman, discussed modern American storytelling with author James Wade and journalist Wes Ferguson. And two hours spent in the dark with the festival’s short film programme, which offered up real gems – films full of exactly the kind of singular human perspective that was constantly being praised in the big conference halls, but too rarely embodied there.

Before that short film programme, we spoke to director Victoria Trow, whose wonderfully funny filmEructationlater won the SXSW Documentary Short Special Jury Award. She told us openly that she'd never directed before. But she had an idea. And then she made it. Very Pippi Longstocking. Long live everything uniquely human that pushes through barriers, changes something in the world and still exists, in abundance, beneath the surface of SXSW.