A lecture or panel should be a fair exchange: your time for their insight. Is it too much to ask that you leave each conversation with at least one genuinely new idea?

I found myself thinking this, seated on the side of a grey sofa, underneath a canopy of potted plants and magenta skylights. The background – the cringily named Na.i.ture Stage – may be unique, but the sentiment is pretty common. 

Nearly every professional attends conferences as part of their job. And nearly every one of those conferences is built around some combination of panels, interviews, and so-called “keynotes.” At Money20/20, more than 15,000 people paid thousands to spend three days out of the office at Europe’s largest fintech gathering.

Despite the efforts of the eminently talented Hyve Group, very little was said on stage that wasn’t planned. Nearly every presentation could have been a LinkedIn post. The sessions could seem like a slow canter from a pre-approved talking point to a mildly interesting anecdote.

So why bother going to panels – why not just hang out in the exhibitor lounge? Everyone has their own answer. It could be that walking around the conference floor for eight hours would be too much pressure for aging feet. Additionally, there’s the idea that the speech, a largely screenless zone, allows for rumination on topics that wouldn’t be possible when competing with 15 open tabs.

Say it once, say it twice, say it thrice 

For me, I’m as interested in what is said 20 times versus what is generally innovative. Conferences are cliché hunts – a way to spot when a once-useful idea has become meaningless through repetition.

My hunting began as an unconscious exercise, something to ward off a drifting imagination during an uninspiring series of answers (“Tom – do you have something to add there?”). But now I’m trying to codify this into a formal exercise. 

It sounds a bit catty, doesn’t it? I do understand that even the most mundane panel takes work and that’s its bad form to the office with a list of hot takes. “I heard a bunch of boring speakers” isn’t exactly material for the next performance review.

The best place to smoke out the worst offenders is through after-hours discussion. At Money20/20 this included an entire street that was shut down, with the pass doubling as an open tab to eight bars. By 9 p.m. it was raining, and I was shouting to a new Turkish acquaintance over the din of a thousand conversations. “How has the show been?”

“Yes, it’s been great.” Then, a pause. “But you know… It’s all the same… Agents.” 

God knows we’ve heard CEOs, technologists, futurists, regulators, and marketers parrot the same few points about the coming agentic age. Agents will empower human workers. A human will always be in the loop. There’s now a chance to truly innovate at scale. Yes, agents are coming – or perhaps they are already here – and they will solve the financial world’s every problem. Thrilling stuff. Truly.  

Other tired tropes rolled out too frequently on stage in Amsterdam included the necessity to outsource technology to experienced vendors, the increasing sophistication of hackers and something about “customer-centric” design. 

I list these overworked tropes not to shame, but to clear space for something better.

Desperately seeking a new way to talk about AI

This doesn’t mean we won’t write about Agentic AI. Rather, with each client, we’ll work to delve deeply into the complexities of actual implementation. Moving to agent-led features isn’t as simple as tossing customer data into a database and handing it to an algorithm. There are reasons why a white-labelled version of ChatGPT has not replaced every single customer service worker. That’s where we want to spend our time. 

It helps to place material in the present moment – to say things that are only true in this present moment. No one wants to hear something novel three or five years ago. But in the push toward generalities, we end up spinning truisms and tautologies.

For prospective buyers and partners, this can do the opposite of what you intended. Instead of pushing people into the sales funnel by being authoritative, you can be dismissed for being boring. If you can’t muster a nuanced argument in thought leadership, how are you going to handle a bespoke implementation for a large financial organisation?

I won’t list all the alternative ways I’ll speak about payments, digital currency and banking without falling afoul of my no-no phrases. For one, I don’t want to give the algorithm a head start. But I will keep a check on first drafts by my side, a list of no-nos that are likely to send readers to Snoozetown. 

And finally, when I say conversations were of varying quality on stage, it’s worth pointing out there were plenty of winners. I found Labour MP and fraud expert Luke Charters to be genuinely insightful about the cost and necessity of protecting victims. And there were answers from Klarna CMO David Sandström that finally made me understand why the Swedish company is such a success. 

We don’t go to conferences just to listen – we go to learn how the industry talks to itself. If the talk has turned stale, it’s on us to refresh the script.

Jon Schubin runs content for Cognito