Non-technical summits and conferences not impactful in the AI race

For decades, developer communities across the globe have served as vital engines for fostering technological adoption and innovation. These communities are not merely gatherings for networking but essential conduits for pushing developers to embrace emerging technologies, providing feedback loops that guide improvements, and ensuring the technology being built is practical and useful. Global tech giants like Google operate the Google Developer Groups (GDGs) worldwide, Facebook previously ran Facebook Developer Circles with a chapter in Kampala, and African companies like Africa’s Talking have also actively supported developer communities.

A key mandate of these communities is to organize regular meetups, workshops, summits, and conferences. These gatherings are typically hands-on, bringing together expert developers to share skills, knowledge, and technological advancements with attendees through interactive workshops, code labs, and hackathons. In Uganda, groups such as GDG Cloud Kampala and GDG Cloud Mbarara have consistently held technical events like DevFests, while the Python community has successfully organized PyCon Uganda, now heading into its third edition.

However, alongside the rise of these developer-led events, corporate entities have increasingly taken an interest in organizing technology-related summits and conferences. This trend, while seemingly positive, presents a growing concern: many of these corporate-backed events are significantly lacking in technical depth, especially in the crucial domain of artificial intelligence (AI).

The Corporate Takeover and the Technical Deficit

These corporate-led summits and conferences often secure substantial funding, sometimes from government entities and corporate sponsors eager to see their logos on billboards and banners. This kind of financial backing is something developer-led community events can only dream of. Having organized conferences like Google I/O Extended and DevFest Mbarara for three years—each attracting close to 200 students and young professionals—I have personally experienced the uphill battle of securing sponsorship. The struggle to find support is a familiar nightmare for many tech community organizers, who must often rely on volunteers and minimal budgets to pull off impactful events.

Yet, despite their financial strength, corporate-led events frequently fall short of delivering meaningful technical content. A crucial weakness is the lack of hands-on sessions where attendees can actively engage in building, deploying, and experimenting with AI models and other emerging technologies. In many cases, not a single AI model is built or deployed throughout these high-profile summits. The reason? The invited speakers are usually corporate executives, heads of IT departments, and business strategists who, while experienced in management, often lack deep familiarity with emerging AI technologies.

The AI Knowledge Gap at Corporate Summits

To be clear, this is not to undermine the experience and expertise of IT heads in various companies and entities. Many of them have led digital transformation projects, implemented enterprise systems, and managed IT infrastructure at scale. However, AI is a different ballgame. The ability to discuss generative AI tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, or DeepSeek’s R1 is one thing; understanding how to fine-tune or integrate large language models (LLMs) such as Gemma 2, LLaMA 3, or OpenAI’s GPT series to solve local problems another.

Few, if any, of these corporate speakers can claim hands-on experience in fine-tuning models, optimizing neural networks, or deploying AI systems into production. This expertise gap means that rather than meaningful, technical AI discussions, these summits often feature surface-level talks filled with buzzwords and high-level strategies that lack practical application. Meanwhile, developers seeking actual skills in AI model development and deployment leave these events empty-handed.

Contrast this with many corporate-led AI summits that focus solely on panel discussions and keynote addresses. While such formats are useful for high-level industry insights, they do little to equip attendees with the hands-on skills necessary for AI development. Without technical immersion, these summits risk becoming echo chambers where the same concepts are discussed repeatedly without any tangible output.

The Danger of Mimicking Bureaucratic Inefficiency

We frequently criticize governments for their endless boardroom meetings and benchmarking trips that yield little practical implementation. It would be a grave mistake to let this inefficiency seep into the developer community. If AI is the future, then our engagement with it must be hands-on. We cannot afford to merely discuss AI trends at conferences while leaving the actual coding and model development to others. We must actively build and deploy AI models, integrate them into real-world applications, and refine them through continuous experimentation.

Shifting the Focus: How AI Events Can Be More Impactful

To ensure that our AI summits and conferences are truly impactful, organizers should:

• Prioritize Hands-On Workshops – Every AI conference should include code labs where participants can build and deploy AI models in real time. For example, workshops on fine-tuning LLMs, training custom vision models, or implementing AI in cloud environments should be staple sessions.

• Feature Technical Speakers – Rather than filling panels with corporate executives, AI summits should prioritize experts with hands-on experience in AI research and development. This means bringing in data scientists, machine learning engineers, and AI practitioners who can demonstrate real-world applications.

• Incorporate Hackathons and AI Challenges – Practical AI challenges, such as hackathons, Kaggle-style competitions, or live coding challenges, should be an integral part of any AI summit.

• Encourage Open-Source Contributions – Conferences should foster contributions to AI open-source projects, enabling attendees to leave with more than just theoretical knowledge.

• Partner with Developer Communities – Corporate entities should work with developer communities to deliver the hands-on approach to their summits. These communities have the target audience and the experience in organizing these events.

• Develop Local AI Talent – AI conferences should facilitate mentorship programs that connect experienced AI practitioners with budding developers to ensure continuous learning beyond the event itself.

The Call to Action: Time to Get Technical

If we are serious about competing in the AI race, we must radically rethink the structure of our summits and conferences. The AI field evolves at a blistering pace, and merely talking about it will leave us perpetually playing catch-up. To secure our place in the global AI ecosystem, we must do the actual work: writing the code, training the models, deploying real-world AI solutions, and iterating on them.

Uganda’s developer community has shown immense potential, but this potential must be nurtured with the right kind of engagement. Technical summits, practical workshops, and real-world AI applications should be our focus. Anything less than this risks turning our AI discourse into an empty parade of slogans and missed opportunities.

We must choose: do we want to be passive spectators in the AI revolution, or do we want to be active builders shaping the future? The answer lies in how we structure our conferences today.

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Originally published in The Independent - Uganda here.