This year’s agenda brings together senior technology leaders from across Europe to share how they’re navigating the realities of leading engineering organisations right now.
Across two days, you’ll hear practical operating stories from CTOs, VPs Engineering and Heads of Technology working through AI adoption, organisational design, platform strategy, hiring constraints, and the changing expectations of the tech leadership role itself. Alongside the main stage sessions, structured roundtables run throughout the programme so you can compare notes with peers facing the same decisions in different markets, companies and contexts.
Owners Not Renters: How We Build an Intelligent Future That Belongs to Everyone
- Your AI stack is built on infrastructure you don’t control. Models, platforms, data pipelines: all rented from companies whose interests don’t always align with yours.
- Drawing on Mozilla’s open web playbook, this session shows where engineering leaders have real leverage in AI today, from developer tooling to data licensing to model diversity.
- Open source AI is closing the gap on closed alternatives. The question is whether your organisation is positioned to take advantage of it.
- Leave with a clear framework for identifying lock-in risk in your stack, and a plan for what a more sovereign AI infrastructure looks like in practice.
Raffi Krikorian, CTO, Mozilla
The Startup Way: Innovating Within a Corporate Environment
- Large organisations kill good ideas slowly. Approval cycles, risk aversion, and competing priorities turn promising initiatives into long-delayed projects or quiet cancellations.
- This session walks through how Just Eat Takeaway built and ran startup-style teams inside a global corporate, using real AI initiatives as case studies. A practical framework for fast experimentation, faster delivery, and a clear path from idea to revenue.
- Walk away knowing how to structure a team, pitch the model internally, and cut time to market without needing to leave the building.
Nidhi Sharma, Global Head of Engineering AI and Incubation, Just Eat Takeaway.com
People in the Age of AI: Building Teams That Last
- AI is changing who does what on your team. Junior developers, curious adopters, reluctant holdouts: the gap between them is widening, and most organisations are making short-term decisions with long-term consequences.
- This series of talks looks at what sustainable AI adoption actually requires, from promoting a learning culture to navigating the reality of highly regulated environments where speed is not always possible.
- What does your team look like in five years if you get this right? And what does it look like if you don’t?
Sarah Abrantes, VP of Engineering, Adyen
The Hard Calls: Leadership, Missteps, and What You Don’t Say Out Loud
- Being a CTO means making decisions with incomplete information, under pressure, about people. Most of those decisions don’t have a clean answer.
- Bringing together technology leaders for an honest conversation about the human side of the job: the calls that kept them up at night, the ones they got wrong, and what they did next. No frameworks, no polished retrospectives.
- Come with questions you wouldn’t ask in a boardroom.
Becki Wordsworth, CTO, Meela
Seven Habits of a (Mostly) Successful Team
- Most team improvement advice is either too abstract to act on or dressed up in agile frameworks your team already ignores.
- This session is a four-year teardown of what actually made a development team ship better software, stay motivated, and keep improving. Seven habits, drawn from real experience at iBOOD: what worked, what failed, and what they’d never do again.
- Leave with concrete habits you can take back to your team immediately, no new framework required.
Sander Hoogendoorn, CTO, iBood.com
How NOT to Use AI (as a Technology Leader)
- Most AI adoption failures aren’t technical. They’re leadership failures: either too cautious to move, or too hasty to replace people once results look promising.
- This session tackles both traps. Why fear-driven avoidance costs you real opportunities, and why reckless replacement weakens the very organisation you’re trying to improve.
- The real question isn’t whether to use AI. It’s how to adopt it with the right expectations, operating model, and capabilities in place.
Ulas Can Cengiz, Founder, WinkOffice