May 11–14, 2026. Vancouver Convention Centre, British Columbia, Canada.

Some events you attend. Some events you experience.

Web Summit Vancouver 2026 was the latter.

For four days in May, the Vancouver Convention Centre, a glass-and-steel landmark sitting on the edge of Burrard Inlet, with the mountains of North Vancouver rising behind it — became a temporary capital of the global technology world. Over 20,000 attendees from more than 100 countries poured through its doors. Founders from Lagos and London. Investors from San Francisco and Singapore. Engineers, operators, executives, and dreamers — all converging on one city for one reason: to see what's next.

The Scale of It

Walking into Web Summit for the first time is disorienting in the best way.

Thousands of booths stretch across exhibition halls the size of airplane hangars. On one side, a startup of three people demoing their first product. On the other, pavilions from IBM, Microsoft, Dell, and Google, the giants of the industry, not just watching the future unfold, but showing up to shape it. More than 1,200 Alpha startups participated alongside over 100 Beta-stage companies. More than half were working in AI. The density of ambition in that room was unlike anything you encounter at a normal industry event.

The main stage hosted keynote speakers who have built, scaled, and sometimes sold companies worth billions, founders who navigated recessions, pivots, and market collapses, and investors who backed the companies you use every day before anyone else believed in them. Breakout sessions and workshops ran in parallel: smaller, more intimate, and in some ways more valuable. The rooms where speakers stopped performing and started teaching. Where a founder could raise their hand and get a real answer from someone who had lived through what they were facing.

The meetup zones and mentorship lounges added another layer. Conversations that started as five-minute introductions ran for an hour. Connections that began on the Web Summit app became whiteboard sessions, coffee meetings, and promises to follow up, that were actually kept.

Orsola on the Floor

On May 14, the final day of the event, Orsola took its place in the Alpha Startup exhibition.

We set up. We opened the product. And we let it run.

Visitor after visitor stopped at the booth — and the moment they saw Orsola in action, something clicked. Not a polished demo with rehearsed steps. The real product: connecting Gmail and Outlook in the same conversation, coordinating across Google Calendar and Microsoft 365, managing files, scheduling meetings, generating documents, all through natural language, live, on Web, iOS, and Android.

That's the moment people understood the difference. Orsola doesn't respond to your questions. It works on your behalf.

The Conversations That Mattered

The booth attracted more than 50 meaningful conversations throughout the day.

Investors asked sharp, specific questions, about architecture, about differentiation, about where the market is heading. Founders shared their own workflow frustrations and leaned in when they saw Orsola act on them in real time. A few people asked how soon they could sign up.

The interest was genuine. The feedback was sharp. And the connections we made extended well beyond the four days of the event, with follow-up conversations still active as we write this.

What the room confirmed, more than anything else, is that the gap between what professionals need and what existing AI tools actually deliver is real, and it is large. People who had tried every AI assistant on the market reacted differently when they saw an assistant that does the work, not one that talks about it.

What an Event Like This Actually Does

Beyond the metrics and the conversations, Web Summit does something harder to measure.

It pulls you out of your own assumptions.

When you build every day inside your own product and your own team, it is easy to lose the thread of what the outside world sees and expects. Walking an exhibition where hundreds of companies are solving problems you hadn't considered — and watching which ones land, recalibrates your thinking in ways that months of internal planning cannot.

The best founders at Web Summit were not the ones with the loudest booths. They were the ones who had built something real, who could explain it clearly, and who had the confidence that comes from knowing their product works.

We left Vancouver with new relationships, sharper positioning, and a renewed sense of urgency. The market is moving fast. The opportunity is real. And Orsola is ready.

Want to be part of what comes next?

Orsola is approaching public availability. If you're a professional who wants an AI assistant that actually works with your tools, not around them. We'd love to have you in the beta.

Join the waitlist → https://www.orsola.ai/en/waitlist