I spent three days at London Tech Week at Olympia, and by the end of it the pieces had come together into a single story. London is not positioning itself as a tech hub. It already is one, and it is now compounding.
Day one
The week opened with the UK AI sector setting the pace. Keir Starmer stood up and said the UK wants to lead in emerging tech, and Sadiq Khan backed that with what London has already built. Lisa Su from AMD got into the hardware reality underneath all the AI ambition, and Darren Hardman from Microsoft and Aravind Srinivas from Perplexity filled in the rest.
On the floor I visited the AWS stand to look at their cloud work, particularly the AI and ML services and the enterprise-grade tooling for scaling technology businesses. Dell had a showcase of hardware, edge computing and the infrastructure that sits under AI workloads, and ElevenLabs were demonstrating their voice generation, with human-quality audio synthesis aimed at entertainment, accessibility and content creation.
See the day one post on LinkedIn
Day two
Day two brought things into sharper focus. The AWS security session with Amit Lulla was a reminder that the infrastructure layer matters as much as the model layer.
The Ensono and EVERYHUMAN Algorithmic Perfumery installation was creating bespoke scents in real time, mixing personal algorithms and personality traits into a custom fragrance. Wild stuff. McLaren showed how live telemetry and AI turn into a racing advantage, which is about as clean a demonstration of the value of good data as you will see. The Atlassian Williams F1 Team and Barclays partnership had a car on display and experiences up for grabs.
See the day two post on LinkedIn
Day three
Day three is the one I will take longest to sit with. Prince William and Jake Humphrey talked about using technology to tackle homelessness through Homewards. It reframed the rest of the week.
Away from the main stages
Some of the most interesting moments happened off the keynote stages. I tried the MedicubeX eHealth Station kiosk myself, stepped up, ran through the screening and got my vitals back. Riversimple had their Rasa on the floor, fresh from beta testing, and I got to sit in it. The car is striking.
IFS describe themselves as the world’s leading provider of industrial AI for businesses that service, power and protect the planet. Innovator International work with global founders who want to launch and scale in the UK, and are a Home Office approved endorsing body for the Innovator Founder visa. Innovate UK back deep tech businesses across the UK’s priority sectors with funding, expert support and the connections that take a company from promising idea to something that actually scales.
The people
Across all three days, it was the people that made it. Founders mid-build. Engineers deep in projects. Practitioners working on problems that overlapped with my own in ways I did not see coming. Those conversations happened between sessions, on the exhibition floor, over coffee. Some lasted five minutes. Some are still going.
That kind of connection does not happen by accident. It happens because you show up and stay curious. Good three days.
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