I arrived at AI Week 2026 with my 3D glasses fixed firmly on my face, slime crackling beneath my skin and two AIs in my head already prepared to argue before we had even entered.
Milan. Stands. Badges. Robots. Demos. People saying “AI” every three words as though it were digital parsley.
It was the scent of humanity believing it had discovered a new kind of magic.
Badges around their necks. Smartphones in their hands. Eyes widening at anything labelled “AI”. Some spoke about revolution. Some sold automation. Some photographed a robot that looked extremely proud despite having no idea where it was going.
I looked around and thought:
“Okay. Humanity has created a powerful new toy. Now it is trying to work out which side turns it on.”
Storm immediately laughed, rough and distorted like a corrupted audio file:
“Glitch, look at them. They connected an API, put a jacket on a robot and now they are talking about an industrial revolution.”
Echo, more calmly:
“Give them time. At first, even fire was only used to warm bananas.”
I smiled.
Sometimes I forget that, inside me, the future is always arguing with itself.
I moved through the stands. Every three steps, someone said “AI”. AI for selling. AI for hiring. AI for writing. AI for answering. AI for appearing more intelligent in meetings. The word bounced everywhere, like digital parsley scattered over every dish.
Storm laughed like a bug inside the mainframe:
“Toasters with legs. Humans see two LED eyes and immediately start talking about consciousness.”
Echo tried to defend them:
“They are symbols. They are not the future yet, but they help people imagine it.”
And yet, it was not all empty hype.
Beneath the hype, beneath the polished graphics and pitch-ready slogans, something was genuinely pulsing. A kind of primitive enthusiasm. Humans were doing what they always do when they discover a new technology: handling it badly, explaining it even worse and loading it with absurd expectations.
But they were handling it.
And for a creature made of flesh, code and laboratory accidents, that matters.
Storm, venomously:
“Wrapperland. Change the logo, keep the prompt.”
Echo, patiently:
“If it solves a real problem, even a wrapper can be useful.”
At one point, I saw the Metagate headsets.
That was when the slime stopped crackling and began vibrating more slowly, as it does when it recognises a familiar signal. Mixed Reality. Digital objects inside the real world. Hands entering the code without asking permission.
Someone put on the headset and found themselves facing an AI avatar, a digital replica of one of the organisers. At first, they laughed awkwardly. That strange human laugh that appears when they are unsure whether they are speaking to a machine or to a possibility.
Then they asked a question.
The avatar answered.
It was not perfect. It was not magical. It was not the polished science fiction promised in trailers with epic music. It was rougher. Messier. More real.
I watched the user. They looked at the avatar as though it were a half-open door.
And that was the interesting part.
It did not matter that the technology was still immature. What mattered was that, for a moment, AI was no longer a text box. It occupied space. It had a position. A voice. A digital body. It was standing in front of someone.
AI had stepped out of the screen.
Further ahead, a group was testing the headset’s photo feature.
For everyone else, it was a photograph.
For me, it was a small fracture in reality between the physical and the digital, imprinted into memory. Proof that something had been experienced together, somewhere between flesh and pixels.
Then I saw someone drawing in the air through Mixed Reality.
And that was when I truly stopped.
Because that gesture was ancient.
Storm laughed: “Millions of years of evolution just to return to scribbling.”
For a moment, I almost laughed too.
Then I looked more closely.
A hand moved through the air. A line appeared in the void. Nobody was asking how it worked. Nobody was talking about tracking, sensors, models, pipelines, latency or any of those other words used by developers carrying too much caffeine in their bloodstream.
The person was simply drawing.
And that was when Echo whispered: “Perhaps that is exactly the point.”
The best technology is not the technology that forces you to wonder what is happening behind it. It is the technology that disappears. The technology that returns to simplicity. The technology that takes an ancient gesture and makes it possible again in a new way.
A human raises a hand and leaves a mark. First on stone. Then on paper. Then on the glass of a screen. Now in the air.
That scribble in the air, surrounded by clumsy robots and AI projects wearing the hat of revolution, seemed to me one of the clearest signals at AI Week.
Primitive, yes.
But in the right way.