Round up of LEAP in Riyadh, March 4-7, 2024
Possibly the world's largest tech event but not without challenges.
đĽ Over 200,000 people across 4 days. 15,000 sqm of exhibitors. More than 50,000 expats. It was literally a stampede. I have been to Web Summit in Lisbon, attended SXSW a few times, been to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona - but nothing compares to this.
Couldnât walk all of 15,000 sqm so with whatever I managed to do so, here are some observations.
đ¨đł Chinese companies dominated the show: Huawei, Tencent, TikTok, Alibaba Cloud SCCC (Saudi Cloud Computing Company), China Mobile International, DJI, J&T Express, and SenseTime MEA are the ones I saw - there should be more. They were mostly on Hall 1 and 1A which are the ones as you enter. Chinese media were everywhere. The Saudi Arabia-China Entrepreneur Association, which was launched at the LEAP 2023 conference took full effect this year. This is inline with how Chinese have approached regions that are opening up and slowly, with very little fan fare, takeover like they have done across most parts of Africa.
𦾠Spatial Computing & Robotics had the most visitors. Notwithstanding the gaffes, there were some very practical and reasonable demos of spatial computing and robotics in view.
đ° These shows are mostly for large corporations to show intent by announcing investment deals. Even if 50% of what they announce actually gets deployed, they are massive. Â
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM took centre stage, announcing multi-billion-dollar commitments. Saudi Minister of Communications and Information Technology (MCIT), Abdullah Alswaha announced a staggering $11.9 billion investment from tech giants like AWS, IBM, DataVolt, and ServiceNow. Dell Technologies and Cisco showing their hands with ambitious plans to establish significant operations in Saudi Arabia.
Aramco's announcement of the Saudi Accelerator Innovation Lab (SAIL) and groundbreaking initiatives like "Metabrain" GenAI model and "Aramco LLM" set the stage for transformative collaborations. Additionally, Datadog, Uipath, and Zoho Corp's revealed plans to establish their respective academies and data centres.
Zoom CEO Eric Yuan revealed plans to integrate Zoom's services deeper into the Kingdom's technological roadmap with initiatives like Zoom AI Companion, Zoom Phone, and Zoom Contact Centre.
đ Start-ups to watch - there were quite a few start-ups that showed a lot of promise. While it was near to impossible to get a view on all of them but here are few that I came across that were impressive.
Newtrace. Bangalore based start-up that was set up in 2020 to decarbonise the world through innovation. Started by two PHD founders, they are set up to enable the wide scale adoption of green hydrogen to help fight climate change.
Cerebra AI. Much hyped AI, while there are a few fads, there certainly seems to be a sector that can get a lot of utility - medical sector. Idea of AI is to learn and build outcomes and nothing better than in medical sector where there are plenty of patterns that almost always is never wrong. Cerebra AI uses Generative AI to unlock the full potential of Non-Contrast CT, enabling any community hospital to detect hypo-dense brain tissues.
Angelswing. South Korean start-up that makes construction site data gathering incredibly sophisticated and easy - best use case for Drone usage I have seen.
đĽ Now to some challenges.
The venue where Leap was hosted, Riyadh International Convention & Exhibition Center, is about 80kms from the city which isnât itself an issue but adding Riyadh traffic and the two lane narrow entry into the venue makes it incredibly hard to get in and out. Takes 2-3 hours to get in and get out each way.
Once you get in, the way finding is quite non-existent and the volunteers, there were a lot of them, werenât familiar themselves to direct people - it was chaos finding stations and booths.
The Leap App wasnât the best designed app and the experience didnât match the scale of the event.
đđ˝ If you have come this far, thanks for the patience and time.