Venture-focused Future Rewired inspires Guernsey's Tech Community

Future Rewired brought Guernsey's tech and entrepreneurial sector together to explore business building in this year's technology festival.

Guest speaker Wayne Soutter from Amazon Web Services opened the event with his talk about Amazon's Culture of Innovation, highlighting the processes they enable to foster an innovative culture and their structure that supports rapid growth and change. Building on previous year's formats, 2024 saw a new 'Inspire Me' section added to the lineup where local businesses presented their Guernsey-built products and programs. Attendees explored key concepts of delivering data to stakeholders, building dynamic websites, the basics of memory management, streamlining processes with generative AI tools and more. 

As the day came to a close, the Digital Greenhouse team presented the winners of the innovation challenge with their prizes for 'most innovative', 'best drawing' and 'funniest idea' to the problem statement "How can we use GenAI to make Guernsey a better place?" built using the ideation workshop at the beginning of the festival.

Check out our highlights takes from Future Rewired below.

Our highlights from Future Rewired 2024

Experiment with GenAI to develop your business at speed

Over the last 12 months, generative AI has taken leaps developmentally and is now a comprehensive tool that can be used to enable content creation in many formats across many sectors. From code generation to content and image generation, there are plenty of tools to help you save time and money by picking up the slack on some of the more time-consuming tasks of your business.

Trevor Nicholls has been experimenting with image-generation programs for the last year and encourages you to study prompt writing to really get the most out of AI tools. "AI isn't as random as I once thought, If you keep all the elements the same you'll get the same answer each time. Using prompts to narrow in on the kind of content you would like it to generate will help you create a consistent theme which is great for things like branding imagery."

Build at scale with Azure Bicep

Growth vs Scale!

Scaling is more cost-effective for a new business, but ultimately any size of business can be scaleable with the right resources. Knowing more about what areas you can save money on and ultimately what you count as successful scaling will make this kind of business growth more achievable.

Ellen Armsden shared, "It's so important to understand your context! Decide on what your growth metrics are, is it your profits? Growth of users? What are your income generators? A service? A physical product? Be aware of the costs that could affect this scaling effort ie, office space or unnecessary expenses."

Find your audience through growth marketing 

There is no quick fix to growing your customer base, but there are several areas that can be streamlined to make it easier! Having a target audience that will ultimately champion your business is key.

Ben Wratten recommends, "Build your audience through referrals! Make it easy for people to refer your business to their friends and colleagues, as this is a golden kind of marketing that goes a long way to getting more customers for your business." 

Manage your memory with Rust

Presenting data to your investors and shareholders

Keep your recipient in mind and don't overcomplicate your data presentations or dashboards, the human brain can only absorb so much information simultaneously. If your presentation contains too much extra information, your punchline might be lost which can lead into missed opportunities.

As Katie Inder says, "If it doesn't add to it, if it doesn't complement it, leave it out!" 

Growing your network will help grow your business

Your network is there to share ideas and grow your audience and your business, so use it!

Adrian Norman recommends reaching out to new connections, no matter what platform, especially after an event. "Don't delay it and make the most out of the connection you have made! Most successful entrepreneurs have been in your position, trying to forge connections and create their network of support so forge through how uncomfortable networking and social media might feel and get started!"