The TechMed Event closed with an interactive keynote by filmmaker and AI Magician Hendrik van Zwol. He opened with a warning: much of what you are about to see will soon no longer be real. What followed was a fast-paced tour of what AI can do today, and where it still goes wrong.
Van Zwol started with adoption. The number of people worldwide using AI language models grew from around 50 million in 2023 to an estimated 1.2 billion now. Yet according to a Dutch survey, 80% of respondents use AI for simple tasks and only 12% for creative ones.
This is already visible in healthcare. According to Van Zwol, one in three Dutch people now asks AI for medical advice before calling their GP, a phenomenon he calls ‘Dr ChatGPT’. In many cases, AI then advises them to contact their GP anyway. This means that AI, rather than reducing the demand for care, may actually increase it. It also raises a question: how reliable is this advice really?
With live demonstrations, he showed how AI can turn speech into text, take notes and translate in real time, build a presentation or an app within minutes, and even create a virtual copy of yourself. He also pointed to the next generation of devices, such as smart glasses and earbuds that turn speech into the main way of interacting with a computer. Closer to care, he showed AI as a second pair of eyes in radiology, skin screening with a smartphone, and the use of WiFi to monitor health at home.
He was equally open about the risks: chatbots that go off the rails, a chatbot that is not a therapist but is used like one, fake videos in which doctors are impersonated, and image generators that repeat stereotypes (“stereotype in, stereotype out”).
His advice is to work according to a simple method: human, machine, human. You stay in the loop. His closing message: AI does not take your job, it helps your talent grow. The keynote ended with an AI-generated song about the TechMed Event.