Analytics Pioneers Summit - Munich - July 4th 2025
- Dan Truman
- Jul 6
- 3 min read
Dan from Duga attended the Analytics Pioneers Summit in Munich on the 4th July.
A few thoughts came to me after the event, and it’s a bit of a state of the digital analytics industry type post. It was a superb event - well run, lots of thought in the layout, a great venue, interesting topics and of course, a fabulous attendee list.
AI
Of course - AI was a big topic. I think there might have been a bingo moment (AI mentioned) in almost all of the talks I attended. Some things struck me though:
Not enough fear - everyone seemed very positive about the AI helping complete tasks rather than act as a threat to employment or role existence.
In knowledge and consulting industries, how long can humans compete against AI? How long until knowledge banks (like MCP servers, for example) become available, are used everywhere and the industry is flattened and there is no need for external agency / consultancy?
In the short-term, the AI agents may be able to speed up processes and automation. But in the long-term - does that not lead to a redundancy? A human input is a cost - an AI input is a 24 / 7 round the clock repeatable process that can be relied upon.
Not enough knowledge - by the same token, some of the most well-attended (and the talk that won the prize for best of the day) talks were about AI - suggesting knowledge gaps or desire to level up in the area.
The level of interest and attendance for some of the AI-based presentations I saw, showed me an underlying trend. There is a huge popularity in AI topics, but nascent understanding. If there were more expertise, there would be fewer.
I believe the industry (digital-wide, and arguably every industry) is in a huge Proof of Concept (POC) moment.
And the thing about POCs I’ve worked on in the past is that you always learn something new.
Whether it is specifically how to do something, or learning otherwise NOT to do something, there are learnings widely available.
A huge known hole / opportunity - overall it feels like a gap and an opportunity to leverage - and it needs to be leveraged soon for any real value or gain to happen before it becomes redundant
There is a short-term (timeline TBC!) advantage here.
The level of interest, the lack of understanding, the potential in deliverable outcomes, mean there is an opportunity. But moving fast is going to be essential.
This will be gone inside 6-12 months - as soon as someone does it, the rest will follow.
Server-side
Massive topic at this event - which was a surprise to me. It is a subject that I am passionate about, but there has been a slow adoption rate.
If this event was scaled to the size of the digital industry then over 50% of website traffic would be measured using server-side tagging techniques. It isn’t, and hasn’t.
But it was very interesting to me to note that sponsors, agencies, hosts and even a few interested vendors were doing presentations on the topic. Perhaps in Germany there is about to be a big wave of new server-side implementations (or there has been recently - none of the presentations I saw showed a real-life case study, mostly theory).
Preaching to the converted at this event
It felt odd to me that server-side got so much coverage at this event. Perhaps it is still relatively new as a topic - but surely this audience (of highly technical and experienced analytics professionals) would be those already converted?Perhaps that is an opinion too far.
Surprising missed topics
Brand side applications - big focus on agency use - but how is digital analytics changing in-house at brands?
Big questions unanswered - how do you make analytics AI a commercial business case rather than a cool project to show at a conference?
I’ll end with an interesting quote from a conversation I had:
Eddie May - “Your job won’t be taken by AI, but taken by a person who’s using AI….And then their job will be taken by AI”
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