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Have we suddenly moved from experimenting with AI to a time of world-changing action? That was the clear message from London Tech Week 2025, the cavernous jamboree of bold ideas, expert talks and debates held at Olympia last week. The stand-out moment was the idea that everyone might soon have a digital twin, able to sort out our lives and earn us free money. A tempting proposition. What else did we learn?
Action stations
It kicked off with Sir Keir Starmer and Jensen Huang, chief executive of tech giant Nvidia, announcing a partnership for AI infrastructure and skills. Huang, in his trademark leather jacket, schmoozed the crowd by asking if it was scarier to be aboard the AI rocketship or left behind? He reeled off a list of London AI unicorns such as Wayve, Synthesia, Eleven Labs and DeepMind. Starmer unleashed a phalanx of government announcements on AI infrastructure and skills. These were undoubtedly impressive, if perhaps not as bold as they seemed at first glance.
The suits then lined up to boast about how quickly they had already folded AI into everyday work. Fewer of them talked about guardrails, but they definitely had the best gags. “It feels as if we’ve put the engine of a Ferrari into the chassis of a Fiat Cinquecento,” warned Euro Beinat, global head for AI and data science at Prosus Group. “What could possibly go wrong?”
More than human
Starmer, oddly, claimed that AI makes us “more human”. Presumably because it liberates us from mundane tasks or, as many people call it, actual work. Frankly, we need to lean into this tech to become more than human — bionic, if you like —to stay employable. Especially if you are a white-collar worker.
May Habib, chief executive of writer.com, the popular AI automation platform, warned that 90 per cent of current roles are obsolete. She did not mean head-count will fall that much but, rather, the nature of work has now evolved.
Ambitious creators and advertising platforms enthused about generating hyper-realistic videos or images with prompts. These are now so impressive, it makes you wonder if we’ll see real photos of products again.
The big question is: are you part of the AI boom or the gloom? Enthusiasm helps, yet talent matters, too, advised Storm Fagan, chief product officer of the BBC, in a panel on innovation. “Your best people will generate even better ideas using AI,” she said. “But it doesn’t magically level up everyone else. It amplifies skill rather than replaces it.”
Super agents and digital doppelgängers
We already have access to “agents” to help us handle everyday tasks. To oversimplify, these are AI widgets — like ChatGPT — that act autonomously on our behalf. Super agents, however, can do even more, and will “self-evolve” to become smarter. There is enormous potential for these to drastically affect how we work and interact with apps.
In fact, they are already rapidly changing the nature of online services. Travel is being revolutionised, if you know how to use the tools on offer. A growing number of websites offer “agentic” bookings, where you outline the broad thrust of a journey and it figures out the details. Even ChatGPT now lets you deploy AI agents to browse multiple websites and gather a shopping basket for your approval. This is where the “digital doppelgänger” comes in. Until now, the main roadblock for a universal digital twin — as opposed to one for a specific app — is that these agents cannot make purchases. That’s because it was unsafe for them to store your payment credentials or other personal data.
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the web and founder of Solid, which aims to revolutionise how personal data is managed online, and Inrupt, his new commercial ecosystem, offered a new idea: to imagine an agentic version of yourself that you trust with your personal details and which can act on your behalf, from booking appointments to paying for shopping.
He was on stage to champion Charlie, the smart element of what his firm calls an Agentic Wallet. This enables people to create a secure “pod” of personal information about themselves. It then gives you an AI personal assistant you can rely on, and with which you allow other parties to transact.
“I thought it was a future maybe 20 or 25 years away”, Sir Tim told The London Standard. “Obviously the future arrived sooner than I’d imagined,” he added, referring to a partnership Inrupt has launched with Visa.
It could make this whole idea fly, in what Sir Tim calls “a truly exciting moment in the evolution of the web”.
Can doppelgängers make us money?
If the idea of a digital twin feels futuristic, even this is the tip of the iceberg according to Marc Taverner, founder of Bluesphere, which helps firms to navigate the rapidly emerging “agentic economy”.
While it’s great to take back control of personal data, Bluesphere believes that individuals should each get some cash whenever a third-party checks in with our data, in what Taverner calls a “micro-transaction”.
This moves us from merely being the click-meat of Google or Facebook ads, into a scenario where we each share in the value of our information. It sounds far-fetched, yet firms such as Gener8 already allow us to monetise our web browsing. So soon, not only could digital doppelgängers be doing our shopping for us, but we could be sharing a slice of the monetary pie. Now that’s appetising.
