The LTW 2026 Panels Worth Clearing Your Calendar For

# London Tech Week 2026: The Five Panels You Cannot Afford to Miss

London Tech Week returns to the capital June 8-12, and the signal-to-noise ratio this year is unusually high. If you are a founder raising your Series A or an investor trying to read where European AI is actually heading, here is your edited guide to the sessions worth blocking your calendar for.

**"The Emerging Case for Sovereign AI Development in Europe"**

This is the political flashpoint of the week. With George Osborne now operating inside OpenAI's orbit and Judith Dada bringing the venture capital perspective from Visionaries VC, the conversation around European AI sovereignty has teeth it lacked two years ago. The question is no longer whether Europe needs its own AI infrastructure. It is who pays for it, who controls it, and what it means for founders building on American-owned foundation models. Expect the unnamed UK government minister on the panel to signal something. Watch for it.

**"Investing in AI: Trends, Challenges, and the Road Ahead"**

Bryan Kim from a16z, Ling Ge from Tencent, and Adina Tecklu from Khosla Ventures on the same stage is a genuinely rare configuration. This is West Coast capital, Chinese strategic money, and deep-tech focused VC in one room, and their incentives do not fully align. That tension is the panel. If you want an honest read on where institutional capital is actually moving in AI, and more importantly where it is quietly pulling back, this is your session. Come with specific questions about deployment-stage companies versus research bets.

**"Securing the Future of AI: The Roadmap to Safe and Ethical AI"**

Marius Hobbhahn from Apollo Research and Jacomo Corbo from PhysicsX bring serious technical credibility to a conversation that has been dominated by policy people who do not build things. Apollo's work on model evaluations and Corbo's experience scaling physics-based AI into real industrial applications means this panel operates well below the level of talking points. If AI safety matters to your company's risk profile, regulatory positioning, or investor narrative, this is required attendance.

**"The Next Wave of AI: Building, Scaling and Winning from the UK"**

The Founders Stage sessions are where London Tech Week earns its credibility with practitioners. Corbo's presence again here tells you something about PhysicsX's standing in the UK builder ecosystem. This panel is about operational reality: hiring, compute costs, go-to-market in a market that is not San Francisco. Useful for any founder asking whether building a serious AI company from London is still a viable proposition rather than a romantic compromise.

**"Powering the World's AI Ambitions"**

Sikander Rashid from Brookfield and Dame Dawn Childs are talking infrastructure, and infrastructure is the constraint nobody wants to discuss until it becomes the only thing to discuss. Data centres, energy capacity, and grid access are now genuine competitive variables for AI companies at scale. This panel will be less glamorous than the others. It will also be more consequential.

Clear your mornings. These five sessions are where the week gets decided.