TEDxESEISchoolBarcelona 2026: How to Humanize the Future in Collaboration with AI

On 17 April 2026, the ESEI campus in Barcelona became the setting for something genuinely special. TEDxESEISchoolBarcelona brought together seven speakers, a VR art experience and a room full of curious minds to explore one of the most pressing questions of our time: how do we humanise the future in collaboration with AI?

The theme was not a provocation. It was an invitation. An invitation to move beyond fear or uncritical enthusiasm about artificial intelligence, and to ask instead: what does it mean to keep human values, human connection and human creativity at the centre of a world increasingly shaped by technology?

The event was hosted by Juan Victor Menendez, an ESEI alumni who brought warmth and energy to an evening of ideas that pushed that question from the stage into the real world.

The Speakers

Kate Busby: Don’t Ask AI for Answers

Kate Busby is a Fractional Chief Marketing Officer and Adjunct Professor of AI Marketing at ESEI. Over more than a decade, she has partnered with startups and scale-ups helping founders build AI-driven marketing strategies and growth frameworks that scale.

Her talk opened with a challenge: for five minutes, imagine you do not have AI. No Claude, no ChatGPT. Just you, your brain and your own curiosity. The point was not to reject the tools, but to notice the gap between passive acceptance and genuine thinking.

Kate’s central argument was that AI does not make us smarter. It shows us how we think. When we ask quick, shallow questions we get quick, shallow answers. But when we argue with AI, question it, push back against it, something changes. The moments that shape us, the experiences that build our instincts and taste, are not things an algorithm can replicate. AI gives us the average of everything that already exists. What we can give it is everything that does not yet exist.

Her invitation was direct: use AI, but do not ask it for answers. Do not let it replace your thinking. Because if your final answer is always the first answer AI gives you, what is truly yours?

Arie Elbelman: Leading with Soul in the Era of AI

Arie Elbelman R. is the founder and CEO of LEON Marketing and an ESEI professor with over 15 years of experience in marketing, communications and branding. Born in Chile and based in Barcelona since 2019, Arie has spent his career working at the intersection of communication, branding, community-building and people.

His talk opened with a question that stopped the room: where is your soul located? Not in a philosophical abstraction, but as a genuine inquiry into what makes human connection feel real. From there, Arie traced a pattern he has observed across years of working with brands, leaders and communities: the need to belong, to feel seen, to truly understand each other.

His central argument was that we are living in a moment of profound paradox. We have never been more connected, and yet we have never felt more disconnected. Around 70% of consumers report feeling disconnected from brands despite constant exposure to them. We are getting better at talking to machines and worse at truly understanding each other.

The answer, Arie argued, is not to resist AI but to give it something worth amplifying. Businesses and leaders need to understand, connect and feel first, and then bring AI into the process. When they do, AI becomes not a replacement for human depth but a mirror of it. He called this co-intelligence: not humans versus AI, but humans with AI. The talk closed with an invitation that framed the entire evening: before you ask AI for answers, reflect. Before you optimise, connect. Before you generate, understand.

Yohay Elam: Human Connection as Infrastructure: Empowering Belonging in the Age of AI

Yohay Elam is an entrepreneur who works at the intersection of product innovation, content and growth. He founded and sold Forex Crunch, a globally recognised fintech and currency analysis platform, and has since guided products from concept to launch, driven premium subscription models and engaged large audiences through podcasting, public speaking and data-driven storytelling. He is also the founder of Touch Base, a Barcelona-based startup whose mission is to reconnect people with close family and long-lost friends by reducing the anxiety of making contact out of the blue and improving social wellness.

That dual background, one in fintech and digital communities, the other in a startup built entirely around the quality of human relationships, gave his talk a particular credibility. Yohay’s argument was that human connection is not a soft or optional feature of a well-lived life. It is infrastructure. Communities and organisations depend on it structurally, just as they depend on any technology. In an era where AI is reshaping how we communicate and work, the question of how we maintain genuine belonging is not sentimental. It is one of the most strategic questions we face.

Maja Završnik: The Intelligence We’re Leaving Behind

Maja Završnik is CMO and Co-founder of SheAI, an educational platform on a mission to bridge the gender gap in AI education through courses, workshops and a global community of women supporting each other.

Her talk was one of the most arresting of the evening. Titled “The Intelligence We’re Leaving Behind,” it opened with a question that is rarely asked in mainstream AI conversations: who is not allowed to build? Of the approximately 7,000 languages spoken in the world today, only around 100 are meaningfully represented in AI training data. Women hold just 22% of AI roles globally. The perspectives, knowledge systems and ways of understanding the world that belong to the communities excluded from AI development are not just underrepresented. They are being built out of the future.

Maja’s call to action was clear: it is time we start talking about this.

Claire Farwell: Clarity in the Age of AI

Claire Farwell is the founder of AI Claire and Co-City Lead Barcelona for Women in AI Spain, a LinkedIn Top AI Voice and an advocate for making artificial intelligence accessible, ethical and practical for everyone.

Her talk began somewhere unexpected: a swimming pool. Last year, Claire decided she was going to break world records in swimming. She had no clear plan, no coach, and no obvious background for it. People told her she was crazy. She started anyway.

What followed was a story not really about swimming but about clarity. Training alone, early mornings, long sessions in the pool and the sea, she found something in the water that most of life does not offer: nowhere to hide. No phone, no noise, no distraction. Just her. And in that honesty, she started seeing things she had been avoiding, and finding the courage to act on them.

Her argument was direct: as AI gets better and better at providing answers, the human capacity to ask the right questions, to think clearly, to take ownership of decisions, becomes not less important but more so. The real risk is not the machine. It is us. AI does not remove responsibility. It amplifies it. We are not just outsourcing tasks. We are beginning to outsource thinking. And when that happens, we lose something much bigger than efficiency.

Clarity, she argued, is a skill. And most of us do not train it. She qualified for the European Championships. She is just getting started.

Alex Macolino and Guston Reed: Meaning First

Alex Macolino and Guston Reed are both current students on the Master in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at ESEI. Their joint talk, delivered in two voices, was one of the most personal and searching of the evening.

It opened with a phone call. Gus’s sister, finishing her last year of university, anxious about what comes next. He asked her a simple question: what is the one thing your life is oriented towards right now? Without hesitation, she answered: a job. He felt a tightness in his chest. Not because the answer was wrong, but because it was too small. When he pushed further, past the pressure and the anxiety, she said something entirely different. She said she wants to find love.

She already knew. The system just taught her to give a different answer first.

Alex built on that with a critique of the educational pipeline that most of us have moved through: school, grades, university, job, output, income, repeat. At almost no point, he argued, do we stop to ask what any of it is for. There is a Latin distinction between instruere, to push knowledge in, and educere, to draw out the potential that is already there. Most of what we call education is really instruction.

Together they proposed love and discipline not as abstractions but as the practical foundations of a meaningful life. Love as deep connection to people and to life itself. Discipline as the sustained attention that makes love felt over time. Discipline without love becomes machinery. Love without discipline becomes vapour. Together, they become a life.

The talk then turned to AI, which Gus and Alex confessed they had both misused as a tool for producing faster emptiness, writing papers without learning, moving through systems without being changed by them. Their argument was that AI is the most powerful amplifier our species has ever built, and we are currently pointing it at the same hollow systems we were already using. A more powerful tool does not fix a hollow foundation. It deepens it.

The final question was left with the audience: what do you love enough to sustain?

The VR Art Break: Pia Behmuaras and Aida C. in Collaboration with ESPRONCEDA

Between talks, TEDxESEISchoolBarcelona offered something far from a typical conference break. Artists Pia Behmuaras and Aida C., in collaboration with the ESPRONCEDA Institute of Art and Culture, led attendees into a fully immersive VR art experience.

ESPRONCEDA is one of Barcelona’s most respected centres for contemporary and new media arts, founded in 2013 as a platform for artistic and cultural research with genuine social impact. Their collaboration with Pia and Aida brought that mission directly into the TEDx experience, using technology not as a utility but as a canvas for profound human expression.

Stepping inside that experience made the evening’s central question tangible in a way that words alone could not. This is what humanising technology actually looks like.

A Note of Thanks

An evening like this does not happen without a great deal of work behind the scenes. A huge thank you to coaches Martina Guzmán and Karina Indytska for their guidance and support throughout the process.

Thank you also to the incredible TEDxESEISchoolBarcelona student event team who made the evening possible: Lukas Dybek, Sebastian Triemer, Sofia Baptista Fileno Meireles, Maria Escoboza, Gabriela Michelazzo, Raya Ivanova and Elena García. Organising an event of this quality takes real commitment, and this team delivered.

And finally, thank you to the entire ESEI team for making the campus a place where ideas like these can take root and grow.

Why This Matters

The question of how to humanise the future in collaboration with AI is not abstract. It is being answered right now, in every business strategy, every product decision, every piece of content and every classroom.

What TEDxESEISchoolBarcelona demonstrated is that the answers are richer and more meaningful when they come from a genuinely diverse group of voices: marketers and fintech founders, educators and entrepreneurs, AI ethicists and artists, students and professionals. The future is not going to be shaped by any one discipline. It will be shaped by people who can hold complexity, think critically and keep human values at the centre of what they build.

That is exactly the kind of thinking that ESEI is committed to developing in every student who comes through our doors.

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TEDxESEISchoolBarcelona 2026: Ideas That Move From the Stage Into Real-World Impact