5 top talks you may have missed – as selected by Web Summit staff

With more than 1,000 speakers taking to our stages, Web Summit 2022 broke all our records. With another Web Summit behind us, here’s a look at some of the talks we loved this year.

This year, we held the biggest Web Summit to date, with more than 71,000 attendees, 1,000-plus speakers and nearly 3,000 startups joining us at Lisbon’s Altice and FIL.

There was so much content, it was impossible to get to it all. But there’s still plenty of opportunity to catch up on what you might have missed.

We’ve put together a list of some of the Web Summit team’s favourite talks, which you can enjoy right here and right now.

Pulling back the crypto curtain

Long-time TV actor-turned-student of fraud Ben McKenzie teamed up with journalist Jacob Silverman to unravel the mysteries – and absurdities – of the crypto industry in their book, Easy Money.

In this session, they talked about their adventures in crypto’s darker corners, how much real money is actually sloshing through the system, and whether anyone will survive the latest crypto winter.

Robots will be running the farm

Robots are coming to a farm near you! In fact, they may be there already, as AI and autonomous tech continue to reshape the agricultural industry.

In this session, Monarch Tractor founder and CEO Praveen Penmetsa and Provizio founder and CEO Barry Lunn show how their startups are pushing towards the future, taking us from factory to field.

Is climate salvation lost in translation?

Not enough climate-related information is being translated from English into local languages, preventing people around the world from truly understanding the perils of climate change. This only hurts those who need access to the information most.

Through the power of language, Climate Cardinals founder Sophia Kianni is helping people everywhere understand what’s happening to the planet. But how did it all begin, and how does it all work?

Giving F1 a tech edge

This was one of our most widely anticipated and well-attended talks, with attendees packing out Centre Stage to see F1 legend Toto Wolff, team principal and CEO of the Mercedes AMG Petronas F1 Team.

Speaking with TeamViewer chairman of the executive board and CEO Oliver Steil, Toto gave us a behind-the-scenes look at the technology and real-time analytics giving racing teams a competitive edge. This session showed our audience how talent and tech work together to make champions on the tarmac.

2022: The year of sportswashing?

Sportswashing is headline-making news. A year bookended by the Winter Olympics in Beijing and the FIFA World Cup in Qatar could be a sporting low-point, offering a world stage to authoritarian regimes looking to cover up their questionable attitudes towards human rights.

Despite the ostensible desire of global sporting institutions to separate sport from politics, these competitions are far from an apolitical game. Miguel Delaney, chief football writer at the Independent, and Joey D’Urso, investigations writer at the Athletic UK, joined Sky News sports correspondent Rob Harris for a discussion on how we got to this critical level of sportswashing, and on what comes next.

For more of our great stage content, check out the Web Summit YouTube channel as we continue to upload more videos from this year’s event.

Main image of Sophia Kianni on stage at Web Summit 2022: Ben McShane/Web Summit (​​CC BY 2.0)