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Web Summit Lisbon ・ November 9-12, 2026

AI Summit

What are the ethical implications of AI’s breakneck development? Should we accelerate it to help solve crises like global warming, or should we be more concerned about the potential ramifications of AI everywhere all at once? 
Our expert panel discussion focused on arguably the most critical public policy issue of our time.

The great AI debate: Who decides our future?

Using autonomous vehicles as a case study, Raquel Urtasun and Sven Strohband examined how AI breakthroughs accelerate progress toward true autonomy.

AI in the physical world

What effect does artificial intelligence have on creativity, consumption and how society does business?

12 November 2024; Anastasis Germanidis, Co-Founder & CTO, Runway, on AI Summit Stage during day one of Web Summit 2024 at the MEO Arena in Lisbon, Portugal. Photo by Lukas Schulze/Web Summit via Sportsfile

Generation AI: A new era for creators and businesses

Great AI isn’t enough — it needs a tremendous amount of tooling to become usable in the enterprise. Industry leaders discussed the strategies that turn models into real solutions.

Beta to boom: Building AI for the enterprise

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Meet the AI leaders who joined us in 2025

As new systems promise to revolutionise work, governance, and thought itself, where is the line between innovation and instability? Between hand-holding and safeguarding? Stagnation or civilisational salvation?

Agents are heralded as the next wave of AI technology, but many organisations are not ready for them. Promises of multi-agent systems that can do the work of entire departments are enticing, but slow adoption, security concerns, poor API integration, and unsophisticated agents inhibit their deployment. 
What will it take for agents to go mainstream? And what will workflows look like when humans are no longer the ones working?

The agentic era

How do we go from deepfakes to deep understanding? Our social media feeds are inundated with poor-quality, AI-generated content, and yet we’re told AGI is coming next year. 
Is the dream of superintelligence and its promise of a societal renaissance truly around the corner, or are we caught in a hype bubble?

From slop to superintelligence

The AI ecosystem is evolving rapidly to meet demand, but it is struggling to keep up with a tumultuous global market. Energy consumption is rising as demand for computing accelerates, hardware is increasingly locked behind tariffs and embargoes, and AI industries are increasingly being shaped by opposing regulatory frameworks across the world. 
Is this the perfect storm for a competitive market? Or are we heading towards technological and economic gridlock?

Accelerate or hold back?

AI offers a utopian path for the future, but who foresaw rising unemployment, the replacement of therapists with chatbots, and an increased distrust in higher education? 
We’re now seeing the technology’s short-term implications, but its legacy is still to be determined as questions hang over AI’s impact on healthcare, government, and the wider social contract.