As every year, many international celebrities were present. Live from exile via video conference, for example Edward Snowden. Unfortunately, the discussion was limited to the usual findings that the world-famous whistleblower made public earlier, new exciting questions or answers did not arise.

Also the appearance of the current Huawei boss was a bit disappointing. In view of the current disgruntlement with the USA one would have hoped for more from the performance. Mind you, Guo Ping is the current Rotating Chairman of Huwawei. As with the Swiss Federal Council, no chairman may remain in power in China with Huwawei for too long; the scepter is regularly passed on.

Jaden Smith, son of Will Smith, was flown in from Hollywood to present his commitment to water projects. Throughout the congress there were also several other companies with sustainability topics.

Trending domain extensions at the congress

But by far the most present topic at Web Summit 2019 was... who is surprised... AI - Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning... etc. etc. Every third start-up or company and every third stall had the addition AI or KI (German abbrevation for Künstliche Intelligenz) in the product or service description. Interesting from the point of view of domain registrars, there are two domain extensions for artificial intelligence. .ai and .ki. .ai is actually a country-specific top-level domain of the British overseas territory Anguilla. .ki is also a country-specific top-level domain. In this case from Kiribati, an island state in the Pacific Ocean. The fees for .ki domains are currently exorbitantly high, so .ki domains are hardly important and only very few domains are registered. If you have an important project for the German-speaking world, it would be even easier to find one and register a free name.

For internationally oriented artificial intelligence companies, however, it is recommended to use .ai domains. A .ai domain is always registered for two years, which makes it a bit more expensive to start with compared to a .com domain, but you can often find nice free domain names at .ai.