Elon Musk suggested we’re all characters in a videogame.

Gawker CEO Nick Denton called Silicon Valley too thin-skinned.

Jeff Bezos proposed moving industrial manufacturing into space.

Sheryl Sandberg said Peter Thiel’s lawsuit-funding is irrelevant to his work on the Facebook board.

Plenty of juicy headlines emerged from Code Conference last week. But the 2016 Code Conference was much more than a three-day tech industry briefing with dozens of speakers. For creative or business leaders, it was a glimpse into the rapidly approaching future.

For those of you who couldn’t attend or who had to rush back to work, MediaLink together with Zeitguide wanted to distill key insights beyond what ended up in your Twitter feed.

To follow, the essential ideas from Code Conference worth bringing back to your office.

ENOUGH WITH DISRUPTION. LET’S TALK COGNITION.

Artificial intelligence was the silver thread running through all the Code sessions — albeit under different names. IBM CEO Ginni Rometty insisted on “cognitive systems.” Facebook CTO Mike Schroepfer used the term “deep learning.” Sponsor QUALCOMM adopted the phrase “cognitive tech,” and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos preferred “machine learning.” They were all referring to the same basic idea: Computers that refine their own programs and algorithms, getting “smarter” as they churn through data to deliver better and better results.

Just last year, the conversations about AI were tinged with alarm about losing control of such superintelligence — and Bill Gates and Elon Musk did echo some of those concerns. But optimism reigned. AI should be transformative for business — a tool for exponential increase in productivity and a way to wring value and insight out of zettabytes of data.

Rometty, who has staked IBM’s future strategy on Watson-style computing, said even people’s everyday lives will be touched by cognitive AI in the next five years:education, financial systems, medical diagnostics, weather forecasts. “If it’s digital, it will be cognitive,” she said.

AI will dominate developers’ agenda in the decade ahead, said Google CEO Sundar Pichai, just like smartphones did the last decade. He also believes his company has the edge: Google’s been answering user queries for years. It has data, to be sure, but also a keen understanding of how people instinctively want to interact with computers.

Facebook is less than a year into a specific AI project called Deep Text that the company says can understand the meaning of thousands of posts per second, in 20 languages, with near-human accuracy. Right now, Deep Text might offer to hail Uber if you say you need a ride, but it wouldn’t if you say you took a taxi. Over time it could turn Facebook from a diversion to a searchable source of collective intelligence.

It is early in the AI game — Bezos called it not even the first inning, but the first batter — but anticipation is high. “The dream is finally arriving,” said Bill Gates. “This is what it was all leading up to.”

The Takeback
All the data powering AI is human — our posts, our queries, our medical research — so maybe this intelligence isn’t artificial after all.  What would your company ask Watson? Or an all-knowing Google? How could a computer that doesn’t just contain, but understands an infinite amount of information help make better business decisions?

BUILD, BUY…OR BUDDY UP?

I’ll scratch your back; you’ll scratch mine. A lot of businesses have a deep tech itch right now and are looking for the right back-scratcher in order to grow.

Transportation is a prime example. Uber’s got a network of riders — but it needs self-driving cars. Google’s developing self-driving cars — but who’s going to sell them?

Build.
When Henry Ford started his company in 1903, he knew the goal wasn’t to somehow build a faster horse. Today, Ford knows it’s not just manufacturing cars — it’s providing mobility. CEO Mark Fields spun off Smart Mobility LLC, a wholly-owned subsidiary that focuses just on ride-sharing, self-driving and connectivity. “We have to be really honest with ourselves and ask, how do we win?” Fields said. “What are the capabilities we need? In some cases, we’ll have the capabilities in house; in some cases; there are other companies [that do it well].”

Buy.
Cisco’s found a lot of dance partners, according to CEO Chuck Robbins. Its Internet of Things services — which track 28 million connected devices (mostly cars, in fact) — are run by Jasper, a company it acquired earlier this year. In 2015, Cisco started or completed 11 acquisitions across data security and analytics that quickly put it near the top of IoT providers.

Buddies.
In the rideshare/autonomous vehicle arena, the high-profile investments have been between GM and Lyft, Toyota with Uber and Apple’s $1 billion investment in Didi(China’s leading ride-share company, with a market four times the size of Lyft and Uber combined in the U.S.). Didi president Jean Liu asked, “Why do you have to own a company to provide a service?”

Fields skirted questions about Ford’s collapsed talks with Google and Uber. But he was definite on one point: acquisitions or partnerships only work is if there’s a good cultural fit and equal benefits to both sides of the deal. “The dynamics get very funky very quickly if somebody thinks they’re getting screwed.”

The Takeback
Most of us can’t do it alone. Make strategic decisions on what’s best to build yourself, what complementary businesses to buy or who is a compatible partner.

NEW DEFAULT SETTINGS FOR DIVERSITY

Siri. Alexa. Cortana. The Google Assistant. As Kara Swisher pointed out, the voices of all our digital assistants are, by default, female.

Melinda Gates drove home the irony of that when she pointed out where women need a real voice in the tech industry. “When I graduated 34% of undergraduates in computer science were women. The peak was 37%.” Gates said. “And we’re now down to 17%.” We need, she added, “a diverse environment creating AI and tech tools and everything else we’re going to use.”

At the conference, photographer Helena Prince gave the diversity issue a face — or really dozens of faces. Her projected portraits of the largely unseen communities in the industry (LGBT, disabled, over 50, people of color, immigrants) was an unmistakable contrast to those that tend to dominate the covers of Wired or Fast Company.

For Price, the Techies portrait project was an opportunity to inspire people to pursue tech careers regardless of gender, race or socio-economic background. “If a specific population is building the future, then the future will be designed for that specific population,” Price told us after her session. “The rest of the world will be even more left behind, perhaps left out.”

The Takeback
When thinking about diversity, perhaps we shouldn’t just think about today, but the future. All enterprises are creating technology for the future and those with the widest range of contributing voices will build a world relevant to a greater population.

BALANCING FOCUS WITH FLEXIBLITY

One thing rang out across Code Conference sessions: the rate of change in tech — and therefore all companies — is accelerating. For anyone trying to nail down a business strategy, this reality produces alternating moments of thrill and terror.

OK, maybe more terror for some of us — but not Amazon’s Bezos, who relishes the overwhelming speed and complexity of tech. His meetings rarely have agendas; he wants new ideas to fly. “Thinking you know exactly where you’re going is a kind of lack of humility that doesn’t let you invent,” he said.

Still, Amazon keeps a laser-like bead on one thing: the customer. “We never think of ourselves as tied to any particular technology or skill set. We think of ourselves as tied to our customers and we’re trying to work backwards from their needs.” Cisco’s Chuck Robbins and Ford’s Mark Fields both echoed that customer-focused sentiment from the stage.

Devin Wenig, CEO of eBay, reminded everyone that customer-focus doesn’t mean simply lowering price or speeding up delivery, a la Amazon. For Ebay, it means taking advantage of the scope and uniqueness of its inventory. “I’d rather have a billion unique items that arrive in three days than a billion commodity items that arrive in an hour,” he said.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explained that they are always working on 3-year (optimizing successes), 5-year (growing new platforms) and 10-year horizons (investing in core technologies). What was also interesting is how Facebook decides what to invest in: Can this technology enhance sharing? Will it create intimacy or empathy or social connection – because that’s what their customers come to Facebook for. That’s why Facebook is investing in Virtual Reality and AI that can translate posts into multiple languages.

For those whose business models require a more scientific approach, there’s always the Musk Model. Set a date. For the founder of Space X, there’s no equivocation on deadlines: In orbit by 2018, on Mars by 2025.

Finally, we loved this advice from Bezos, though, which seemed to fit everyone’s leadership style: Be stubborn on vision, but flexible on details.

The Takeback
In a time of volatile change for technology-dependent industries, we need to iterate our approaches to leadership, decision-making and growth strategy just like we do software.

CONCLUSION

As Bezos pointed out, when it comes to digital technology, the game has hardly begun. To that, we’d add: we’re writing the rules on the fly.

But the key to winning will stay the same: play with speed, passion and focus.

As Recode co-founder Kara Swisher said closing the conference: Game on!