Opening remarks

AI’s New Frontier: Building Trust and Driving Growth at Web Summit Lisbon 2025

Mr. Pascal Condamine, CMO of Craft AI, welcomed attendees to the growth stage at Web Summit Lisbon 2025. He underscored AI’s critical role, asserting it’s not just a trend but the operational backbone for modern companies. Across marketing, product, and operations, AI accelerates learning, identifies patterns, and facilitates faster, better decision-making, granting departments a “superpower” for rapid testing and optimization.

As AI integrates deeper into core growth strategies, the conversation shifts from “what AI can do” to “what can we trust AI to do” and how to scale without new risks. This evolution highlights the necessity of responsible AI deployment. Mr. Condamine then introduced Craft AI’s foundational values: trustworthy AI, security, explicability, and sovereignty, emphasizing their practical importance for sustainable growth.

Growth fundamentally relies on trust from customers, teams, and investors. If AI powers critical decisions but lacks trust, speed is lost. Trustworthy AI ensures predictable and ethical system behavior, fostering reliance. Furthermore, AI dramatically alters the security landscape; models can be attacked, data poisoned, and inference manipulated. Infiltrated AI pipelines disrupt every decision, making security a core growth enabler, not just an IT checkbox.

Explicability is vital as AI now shapes pricing, recommendations, and customer journeys. Teams need to understand AI decisions, a demand from regulators and customers alike, transforming AI into a collaborative partner rather than a mystery. Sovereignty, a critical differentiator, means companies control their data, models, and decisions. This control ensures compliance, competitiveness, and adaptability across markets, offering the freedom to build and deploy AI strategically.

Combining these values reveals that the fastest-growing companies in the AI era are those that scale responsibly. They move quickly but intentionally, recognizing that trust and transparency are now integral to the growth equation. These companies view AI as a long-term strategic capability, not merely an automation tool. Mr. Condamine invited attendees to consider AI’s broad impact on strategy, culture, and trust.

The growth stage at Web Summit Lisbon 2025 is dedicated to celebrating and dissecting rapid, smart expansion and true innovation. Over the next two hours, attendees will learn directly from startup founders driving this growth, hearing their secrets, hard-won advice, and lessons from their unique journeys. Discussions will cover themes from the current funding landscape to the crucial long-term resilience required to build lasting companies. Mr. Condamine encouraged everyone to maintain high energy for the final hours of the summit.