Rio Innovation Week (RIW) 2025, which began on Tuesday (12) in Rio de Janeiro, expects to negotiate $ 4 billion in business and create 22,000 jobs. This year’s edition has as its theme “A look through ethics” and will feature 40 simultaneous stages, 2 thousand startups and 300 exhibitors. 
The event figures were presented by the president of the organizing committee of RIW, Fábio Queiróz. “The consolidation of Rio de Janeiro as a technology and innovation hub is a reality. Our role is to understand the advancement of technology through an ethical look. The human being needs to be in charge, respecting privacy. Present companies must maintain this vision. Our compass is not to forget the past, live and adapt to the present and look into the future,” he said.
The psychologist and writer Daniel Goleman, author of bestseller Emotional intelligencea work that redefined the concept of intelligence, states that the development of emotional intelligence expands empathy, enabling the transformation of people, organizations and societies from the inside out.
Goleman explained the functioning of the brain under the effect of emotions and the relevance of emotional balance from the state of presence and focus on the present moment. The psychologist pointed out that these skills make emotional intelligence overlap to the artificial.
“Emotional intelligence is a defining ability for people’s professional and personal performance. Artificial intelligence (AI) is much smarter than us in many things, but it does not master the field of emotions. These skills are only ours. We depend on this tool to manage relationships. As an example, intuition is the result of our life experience, and this can be overcome by AI,” he said.
According to Goleman, AI does not have the repertoire that allows us to share the world with people. “As Ia enters our work routine, emotional intelligence becomes even more relevant. Social learning is a skill that will make people more effective in all their functions,” he said.
Goleman made a comment during the lecture, which led to laughter in the audience: “I convert with different people who have diverse economic and social conditions. And what attracts me is their wealth, the way they relate. And these issues are not defined by social condition, but by emotional skills. I prefer to live with Dalai Lama than with Elon Musk,” he said.
The mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, announced that the city will become an investor of startups that develop digital services to facilitate the routine of citizens. “We want to put Rio on the global route of technology to improve our people’s lives,” he said. Paes said that Rio Innovation Week will be the scene of an experience for companies to test technologies freely, seeking solutions to bring urban intelligence to the city.
The business fair continues on Wednesday, (13) with numerous attractions, including writer Marcelo Rubens Paiva, philosopher Luiz Felipe Pondé, singer Ney Matogrosso and scientist James Daniel Whitfield, who will talk about quantum computing.
