On the sidelines of the conference Abran Maldonado, Open AI Ambassador and expert in AI and the metaverse, and the conference keynote speaker, gave an exclusive interview to Gulf Times on the future of AI and its transformative impact on the media industry. He stressed that: “We have to adapt and adapt, we have to try things and accept that this is where it is heading, and if we just sit back, we are going to fall behind. We have to learn new skills, AI is just another skill that we need to learn.”Concerning his views on developments in Qatar, Maldonado said: “I knew the reputation of Qatar from working with smart cities exports, that it was at the top of the list when it comes to smart cities and embracing innovations and being at being at the cutting edge as a whole city. When I came here in person I saw that to be true. So, I know that when it comes to embracing new technologies, that Qatar is likely more ahead than other cities, even in the USA. I can name seven cities in the USA that are behind Qatar, when it comes to embracing innovation.”Maldonado went on to say: “You are not scared here in Qatar to try new technologies and try innovations, you embrace it and it works. I am fully confident that Qatar will be ahead of anybody else in that respect.”On the impact of AI in higher education, Maldonado said: “I speak a lot to educators about AI, soon we are getting to a point where personalizing education with a differentiation, i.e. every student will have their own curriculum, personalized to them. We are very unique learners, so why should there be one syllabus, one curriculum for a hundred students, there should be a hundred curriculums for a hundred students."That is time consuming, it very hard to do that manually, AI can do it in seconds. It will democratize education. Generation Z are going to be the on demand generation, they are not going to wait passively and watch what you decide they think or they should watch. They are going to prompt and generate what they want to watch. So, we have to create more tools to allow them to pick and generate their own new stories, to pick the topics, everyone will have their own individual algorithm.”Maldonado predicted that in the 2040 “there will be completely different jobs, it is going to be the number one in demand job in this field as from now either being an AI engineer or an AI consultant,” he said.