Ambitious Essex has become a staple of the Essex business scene over the last year. In October 2024, it launched its first-ever Ambitious Essex Business Summit, which welcomed over 250 attendees eager to learn how the organisation can support local businesses.
The agenda covered a range of topics, including sustainability, green opportunities, lessons learned from other local businesses, and embracing innovation.
Since the summit, Ambitious Essex has continued to support similar, more focused events geared towards making local businesses better. To round out 2025, they’ll feature as the main sponsor of the highly anticipated Festival of Business, where new tech innovations are bound to be a key point.
Ambitious Essex Continues to Bolster Business Meets
The inaugural summit was hosted by decorated Paralympian and local business owner Danny Crates, who was joined by founders Freddie Fforde of Patch and Bolaji Sofoluwe of the ETK Group and MD, and saw 175 businesses and organisations in attendance.
The list of Ambitious Essex events has only continued to grow, featuring over 25 events this year. Tickets for these events are typically available on Eventbrite. One of the highlights this year was “Green Light: Business Success”, held in May, which provided businesses with the steps and solutions necessary for a sustainable future.
The grand finale to the year will be the Festival of Business. Taking place at Chelmsford City Racecourse on 5 November, Ambitious Essex will be the main sponsor of the flagship event. This year’s theme will be Building a Greater Essex, celebrating innovation and helping local businesses to connect and grow together. As we approach the late autumn event, one technology is bound to continue to be a huge talking point with regard to innovation.
Artificial Intelligence Can’t be Avoided
Currently, marketing campaigns need to connect with a range of customers on a personal level, as shown by businesses like Jackpot City and its casino sign up bonus promotions. By offering both 100 free spins on the site’s most popular slot as well as £100 in funds to play on anything, the promo will naturally appeal to more people.
This works well and there’s no strong need to change it. But a future alternative could be this: instead of giving large, general bonuses to all players, data collected by AI could be used to create a system of sending personalised promotions to players.
Taking this and considering it in the context of innovation, AI isn’t so much for offering up paths to innovate, but rather, analysing the data to either reinforce ideas or brush them aside swiftly. The speed at which AI can analyse the data you feed it is what empowers it to further your innovative efforts. With marketing, you can innovate by offering truly personalised promos to users by letting AI analyse user data to find the offers that would appeal the most to that individual.
The sheer analytical ability of AI and its potential to reveal what we’ve overlooked or simply can’t see will make it a key tool in the future of innovation. So, expect many at the Festival of Business to be talking up the tech.
