Name: Web Summit Vancouver
Start: 2026-05-11
End: 2026-05-14
Location: Vancouver Convention Centre

Get 50% off 2027 tickets

We will return to the Vancouver Convention Centre from May 25 – 28, 2027. This is a limited-time offer. Act fast!

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Doors open at 5pm, and content kicks off at Centre Stage at 6pm. You’ll need to be registered and have collected your wristband and lanyard to enter.

Speakers include Sigrid Jin, Founder Member of Sionic AI; Gregor Robertson, PacifiCan Minister at Government of Canada; Hon. Brenda Bailey, Minister of Finance of British Columbia; Ken Sim, Mayor of Vancouver; and Paddy Cosgrave, CEO of Web Summit.

Join us for an unforgettable evening filled with great speakers, networking, and more.

We can’t wait to see you there!

Please note: This event has limited capacity. The exhibition floor is closed today. 

Opening Night - Doors open

Join us for the beginning of Web Summit Vancouver.

Opening remarks

On March 31, Sigrid Jin tasked AI agents with replicating Claude's codebase and released it to the world. Now GitHub's fastest growing repository in history, the code library has survived scrutiny and copyright violation claims – but what does it mean to build in a world where everything can be reproduced immediately? Join the person who burned through 25 billion tokens in a year as Sigrid explores the implications of AI on copyright, open source development, and creative work.

Can copyright survive tokenmaxxing?

AI will only realise its promise if nations, institutions, and industries can trust and adopt it at scale. Join Minister Evan Solomon and Cohere’s Chief AI Officer Joelle Pineau for a conversation on Canada’s AI moment, as they explore the role of sovereign AI, homegrown innovation, and responsible deployment in building systems that businesses, governments, and communities can rely on, making the tools of the future accessible, practical, and beneficial for everyone.

The sovereign AI blueprint

Get ready to witness a showcase of tomorrow's industry leaders, as innovative startups pitch their disruptive ideas and cutting-edge technologies. You'll get a fast-paced, high-energy session packed with groundbreaking concepts, all designed to capture your attention and potential investment.

Breakout Startups

Please make your way to the stage, content starting shortly.

At a time of global uncertainty, government and private sector partnerships are helping grow B.C.’s already leading tech sector. This is a key part of the province's plan to grow a more resilient economy that can withstand shocks that are beyond our control. Join this session to learn how government is supporting cutting edge innovation while creating pathways to good paying careers for British Columbians.

Partnering to grow B.C.’s leading tech sector

"Scaling compute" is AI industry jargon for spending more and more money on data centers and the chips (typically GPUs made by Nvidia) inside those data centers. So called hyperscalers like OpenAI, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, xAI and Anthropic aim to spend nearly a trillion dollars on compute this year, more than a dozen times the cost of the Manhattan project. China is the next biggest global spender and the EU are accelerating rapidly. In this talk, Gary will argue that this is a bad bet, unlikely to pay off, filled with numerous downsides for society, and that it may well lead to a recession.

Scaling trillions of dollars of compute: Will it turn out to be the worst bet in history?

Foundation models have transformed what AI can do. Agentic platforms are changing how work gets done. But there's a layer that most enterprise AI stacks are still missing: the operational context that tells AI not just what to do, but how the business actually works. Join Alex Rinke, Co-CEO & Co-founder of Celonis, as he makes the case that process intelligence is the essential foundation for AI that delivers real outcomes – and explain why the context layer is emerging as the defining infrastructure of the Enterprise AI era.

Context is the new competitive advantage

From Hollywood productions to streaming giants, Vancouver has quietly become one of the most important creative-tech hubs in the world. What made it work? And what will take it to the next level?

Building a world-class creative tech hub

Raising big, growing fast, or building durable systems – what actually creates advantage in AI today? Join this session as leaders who took very different paths to getting ahead share what they've learned.

How to win in AI

How can creative marketers perform at their best when they’re often expected to conform to the cultures of fast, tech-forward companies? Join Chris Konya, Chief Strategy Officer of SYLVAIN and Andrew McKechnie, Head of Business, Creative Studio at OpenAI as they unpack how to protect creative taste and shed conformity by standing up for the conditions of original thinking.

Creativity over conformity

Consumers today are split across platforms, devices and formats. This talk explores how media outlets are adapting strategies to include games, video content and cross-platform distribution  to win in an attention economy.

The fight for attention

AI transformed software – quantum will transform what’s possible. This session explores how AI, quantum computing, and real-world systems are converging into a new computing paradigm.

From bits to qubits: The next computing stack

The next phase of AI isn't about better conversations with chatbots; it's about autonomous systems that can simplify and accelerate workflows. Learn how IBM is architecting a new enterprise framework where AI agents solve real-world problems, while humans focus on high-level strategy and direction.

Building the agentic operating system

AI is being built on open source, but it is also beginning to maintain it by identifying bugs and optimizing code at superhuman speeds. Join open source leaders as they examine the flywheel effect where AI and open-source communities accelerate each other, creating a gap in quality that proprietary software can no longer close.

Open source in the agentic era

Tech used to think government was just a roadblock to ignore. Now, with AI and global trade wars rewriting the rules, tech and government need to pull together to quickly turn today’s challenges into opportunities. Join tech founder turned Finance Minister Brenda Bailey as she breaks down how to turn red tape into a launchpad.

Is slow government a bug or a feature?

Q1 of 2026 was the largest quarter for venture investment in many years. This session explores the sectors that are attracting the most aggressive capital today. From vertical AI agents to massive infrastructure behind next-gen energy and robotics. Join us as a panel of top VCs find out who is winning the fight to quality and which ‘sure bets’ from 2025 are losing their luster.

Where does the smart money land in 2026?

Clio just closed a record-setting $1B acquisition but Jack Newton didn’t slow down; he raised the bar.
That mindset is still too rare in Canada especially as AI reshapes every industry. Lucy Hargreaves is working to change that by building the policy, narrative, and community to support more ambitious companies.
In this conversation, Lucy and Jack go beyond the headline to explore what it really takes to build and scale a global company from Canada and treat every win as a starting point, not a finish line.

Building AI companies that go the distance

Digital sovereignty is no longer just about where data lives; it is about who controls the AI systems powering the national economy.  Join Bell’s Mirko Bibic and Coveo’s Louis Tetu as they outline their vision for the newly launched Canadian Sovereign AI Alliance, the importance of connectivity and compute for national resilience, and how strengthening domestic supply chains and keeping our talent in Canada can help us to lead globally.

Owning the engine: The case for sovereign AI

As tensions escalate into open conflict and the prospect of the US escalation grows, we must ask a deeper question: what happens when global power meets its limits? In this conversation, Stephen Walt and Chris Hedges examine the strategic, political, and moral consequences of a prolonged confrontation with Iran. Could this become a defining moment in the transformation of the global order and the end of US hegemony?

The Iran war and the limits of US power

With a global audience of 827 million people in 2025, F1 is now the world’s most popular annual sporting series. Amidst a season with new regulations, new teams, and unprecedented changes, this panel will look beyond the grid to discuss the fan economy, commercial partnerships, and global expansion that are driving the sport forward.

The F1 juggernaut

The social media microblogging market is overdue for a shakeup. In this talk, we explore how UpScrolled is challenging the dominance of legacy platforms by rethinking feeds, prioritizing signal over noise and giving users back control. Can a new contender redefine the future of online conversation?

UpScrolled vs. the feed giants

As the world faces a biodiversity crisis, Colossal Bioscience's Matt James explains why moonshot science like de-extinction is actually the secret weapon for saving today's endangered species. Join him as he reveals how the same tools used to bring back the species like the mammoth are being deployed to stop the current mass extinction in its tracks.

Can de-extinction save the living?

Join Hiive CEO Sim Desai and Huntress CEO Kyle Hanslovan for a candid look at how late-stage founders balance funding, dilution, and employee equity. Discover the strategies today’s most ambitious companies use to deliver shareholder value and redefine liquidity without losing control.

The new liquidity playbook

As businesses transition to the agentic enterprise, trust is becoming the most critical form of engineering. Join this session to explore how embedding ethical guardrails directly into the technology stack turns governance from a compliance checklist into a driver of performance.

The trust dividend: Why ethics is a competitive advantage

AI infrastructure is projected to become a $400B+ market but building it is capital intensive, complex, and risky. Join chip leaders as they explore how the next generation of AI infrastructure companies are scaling into that opportunity.

Building AI's $400B backbone

This talk explores the growth and influence of new media in today’s digital world. From social platforms to podcasts and streaming services, new media platforms have transformed how we communicate, consume information, and shape public discourse.

The rise and reach of new media

100 million degrees Celsius. That is the brutal reality of commercial fusion. From surviving extreme thermal stress to building brand-new supply chains, we’re sitting down with industry leaders to discuss the front lines of an energy revolution that cannot afford to fail.

The race for resilient tech

What makes people love a product, not just use it? In this panel, leaders will explore how community, culture, and shared experiences turn products into something bigger. From creators to customers to superfans, we’ll look at how brands build loyalty by designing for participation, not just consumption.

Building products people love

The spray-and-pray approach to AI investing is dead. Join us as we discuss what it takes to stand out in a saturated market. We're moving beyond the hype to identify the startups building real moats, the innovative applications solving 'unsolvable' problems, and the specific traits that will define the big winners of the next 12 months.

AI's survival of the fittest

In this conversation, Dr. Gabor Maté and Hasan Piker explore loneliness as a defining feature of life in the waning phase of Western hegemony. Tracing how trauma, disconnection and feelings of unfulfillment can be systemic, and not just personal. They discuss how a period marked by inequality, media saturation, tech hegemony, and political fragmentation, creates a sense of decline, which calls for new forms of connection and solidarity.

Loneliness at the end of empire

AI agents are logging into services, making decisions, and taking action across systems, often without direct human involvement. Join 1Password CTO Nancy Wang and Genspark co-founder & COO Wen Sang as they explore how this changes the rules entirely, because we’re no longer just managing people, we’re managing autonomous actors that we've created.

When software becomes a user

The "Great Man" theory of history is killing the American Dream. Chris Smalls doesn’t just want to tax the rich; he wants to redefine what success looks like in the 21st century. The existence of the billionaire class is the ultimate bug in the global economic operating system. While tech companies lay off thousands of workers, many continue to post record-breaking profits. Smalls debates the policies that allow wealth to concentrate at the top while stagnant wages leave the broader economy struggling to move forward.

Every billionaire is a policy failure

Most technology today is built for people already connected – but billions still live beyond reliable internet access. Join this panel to explore how firsthand experiences working with farmers and Indigenous communities are shaping new approaches to digital tools, from AI at the edge to novel infrastructure. Black Eyed Peas artist and Filipino farmer advocate Apl.de.Ap joins a Canadian-born son of Vietnamese refugees to share lessons from the field on building technology designed for the world’s last-mile communities and the next billion users.

The next billion users are offline

10 group round winners take to Center Stage for the semi-final of PITCH brought to you by KPMG, our startup competition.

Each of the semi-finalists has three minutes to pitch their businesses. Our judges then choose three finalists to battle it out in the PITCH final.

Semi-finalists will be revealed following the group stages of the competition, taking place on day 1 of the event.


PITCH semi-final

The next generation of internet users are reshaping it in real time. Platforms like Roblox are blending gaming, social, and identity into something new, while raising big questions about safety and influence. Jennie Ito and Karla Martin unpack what this shift means for how we connect, create, and grow up online.

The internet they're growing into

Join us for a showcase of some of the most exciting startups currently operating in British Columbia!

Innovate BC Startup Showcase

The venture bell curve has collapsed into a barbell. At one end: mega-funds, multi-stage giants, and sovereign wealth deploying capital at scale. At the other: specialists winning through deep domain expertise and speed. In the age of AI, the generalist VC is under threat. So what does survival look like, and who gets squeezed out?

Is the middle of VC dead?

As audiences grow more questioning and selective about the information they consume, this talk explores how trust in media is being reshaped  through technological change. Focusing on the rise of AI and other emerging tools, it examines both the risks, such as misinformation at scale, and the opportunities to enhance transparency, verification, and accessibility in news.

Media in the age of skepticism

As technology continues to evolve, so do the ways fans connect with sport. Join EA SPORTS to explore how advancements in real-world data, digital human technology, and player creation tools are enabling more authentic, lifelike, and expressive interactive experiences – and shaping more connected, immersive environments for sports fans.

It's in the game (engine): Interactive sports' tech evolution

Our three finalists battle it out to see who will be crowned winner of the greatest pitch competition in the world. Brought to you by KPMG.



PITCH final

Our finalists battle it out to see who will be crowned winner of the greatest pitch competition in the world.

In Donald Trump's first year of his second term as President, he has forced ICE to engage in increasingly extreme measures in an effort to reduce the number of immigrants residing in the US. However, these efforts have regularly broken the very laws the President is supposed to uphold. In this session we will hear from a man who helped train ICE agents, until he could no longer stand by an allow the egregious violations of the constitution to continue, about how ICE is breaking the law and what can be done about it.

ICE vs the US Constitution

As technology accelerates, which design principles will endure? Join Ammunition's Robert Brunner as he explores what will define great design at the end of the decade.

Future of design in 2030

As American politics has begun to drift towards authoritarianism, there are some who believe the democratic experiment is dead, and others who believe it has still to reach its full potential. In this debate we will interrogate the core of our political identity: a radical shift toward techno-monarchy led by a sovereign CEO, versus expanding and refining modern democracy. Join us for a definitive exploration of power, technology, and the ideologies that will shape the next century.

A battle for the soul of America

The winner of the greatest startup competition in the world takes to Center Stage to be crowned 2026 PITCH champion. Brought to you by KPMG.



PITCH winner announcement

What do a 19th-century metal tycoon, an Austrian doctor fleeing the Nazi regime, an activist leader from Pittsburgh, and the world's biggest pop star all have in common? Join Aloe Blacc as he explores how AI is connecting disparate worlds, industries, and people.

The genealogy of joy

Instead of coding every move, R&AI is building robots that learn through curiosity as well as trial-and-error. Join Marc Raibert as he explores how a robot can teach itself to navigate an obstacle course or pick up a complex tool by simulating thousands of attempts in seconds.

Dynamic robots that learn

That's a wrap for today. Join us tomorrow morning.

Sign up now to watch

Meet our 2026 speakers

Founding Member

Sigrid Jin

Renowned Physician & Author

Gabor Maté

President

Michelle Grady

Chief AI Officer

Joelle Pineau

Sam Register

Head of Business Creative

Andrew McKechnie

Ami Badani

Jerret West

Contributor

Roger Huang

Co-founder, Board Member

Max Lytvyn

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What our attendees are saying

Mada Seghete

&#8220;Regardless of the size of your company you can come and get a lot of value.&#8221;

Brad Smith

&#8220;Coming to Web Summit is really an opportunity to peer a bit into the future, connect to it, and be part of it.&#8221;

Alicia Tillman

&#8220;The atmosphere is a perfect combination of innovation, cutting-edge technology, practical insights, and unparalleled networking opportunities.&#8221;

Jager McConnell

&#8220;The most inspiring, creative conference in the world.&#8221;

Telma Brissos

&#8220;I already had high expectations, but they were exceeded; it&#8217;s much more interesting than I imagined.&#8221;

Kelly Tyndall

&#8220;There are so many areas and industries to experience in tech, but this was so well organized that I never felt lost or running around.&#8221;

Get 50% off and join us at the Vancouver Convention Center, May 25-28, 2027.