Doha, Qatar, earlier this month hosted a concentrated, three-day gathering of founders, investors and technical experts where artificial intelligence formed the central thread of conversation. More than 30,000 people attended Web Summit to pitch ideas, test products and debate the technology’s trajectory, producing a set of recurrent themes about how AI is likely to evolve in the near term.
Speakers and participants ranged from global platforms to focused startups and emerging quantum firms. Companies including Meta Platforms Inc., ElevenLabs and Alice & Bob were active in discussions, according to a note circulated by Deutsche Bank research analyst Adrian Cox. Throughout panel sessions and informal conversations, attendees repeatedly returned to three dominant takeaways.
1) AI as a force multiplier for small teams
One consistent narrative at the summit emphasized AI’s potential to dramatically expand the productivity of small teams and individual founders. The technology was framed as an enabler that can let modestly staffed ventures pursue initiatives that historically required much larger engineering rosters.
"It can enable any and all of you to build companies that you can compete with any companies out there. It can take a team of one or ten engineers and make it seem like a team of hundreds," said Eduardo Saverin, co-founder of Facebook and co-founder and co-CEO of B Capital. That theme recurred across panels, highlighting the democratizing potential of AI tools for entrepreneurs and smaller businesses.
Speakers suggested that advances in AI lower barriers to entry in a range of sectors, allowing lean teams to match capabilities that previously demanded wider talent pools. This perspective resonated with many founders at the event who are using AI to speed product development, automate customer service and accelerate go-to-market timetables.
2) Movement from commoditized models to tailored solutions
Attendees and presenters also discussed how competition is shifting away from marginal improvements in large language models toward differentiation through specialized, reliable applications. Rather than trying to out-compete peers on small performance gains or lower costs for general-purpose LLMs, firms discussed building verticalized solutions that address specific customer needs.
Mati Staniszewski, CEO of ElevenLabs, highlighted this pivot, noting that companies are focusing on "building more reliable, specialized text-to-voice models and integrating them with AI-agent-enabled telephony systems." The aim, he said, is to render the technology so integrated into everyday devices and services that users experience the benefits without actively noticing the AI behind them.
"Eventually the goal should be to move beyond the focus on AI altogether," Staniszewski said, envisioning proactive, voice-activated devices that deliver value through seamless integration rather than explicit interaction.
3) Compute sovereignty, resilient supply chains and regional ambitions
Conversations at Web Summit also turned to the geopolitical and infrastructure side of AI, with speakers flagging the need for resilient supply chains, diversified compute sources and dependable energy to power large-scale data operations.
Théau Peronnin, co-founder and CEO of quantum company Alice & Bob, contrasted the 20th-century industrial imperative to supply abundant energy with the current information age requirement to provide compute. "Now in the information age, which is about the transformation of data into knowledge, governments need to provide compute," he said. That, Peronnin added, involves ensuring supply, diversifying sources and making compute abundant.
This theme was visible in commercial proposals showcased at the summit. ASE Cloud Services, a firm founded in November near Rotterdam, offers customer-service chatbots built entirely on European technology, including a model that defaults to France’s Mistral. Designed to meet EU AI and privacy regulations, ASE’s application stack uses 95% less energy than conventional chatbots, a feature its co-founder Alain van Zwol described as an extreme form of sovereignty.
"People are afraid these days of what might happen if you’re depending on another country or countries," van Zwol said. "It is hard to get more sovereign than this." The company was reported to be in talks with eight Dutch public institutions to provide citizen-facing information services.
The region hosting the summit also signaled its own ambitions. The Middle East was presented as positioning itself to be the world’s third major AI region. The narrative laid out at the event posited the United States as leading in frontier models and data centers, China in open-source models and data, and the Middle East as offering abundant solar and carbon-based energy to support large data centers able to serve Europe, Asia and Africa. Attendees argued that the region also has capital available to attract global founders.
At the opening of the event, Qatar’s Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs, Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al-Thani, announced an additional $2 billion for the Qatar Investment Authority’s Fund of Funds program, bringing total committed capital to $3 billion. The program supports 12 regional and international fund managers in Qatar.
Thomas Tsao, co-founder of Asia-focused venture capital firm Gobi Partners, linked this push for resiliency to commercial opportunity: "Every country is thinking, I’ve got to have some resiliency, and that’s creating massive opportunities for the rest of the world." Raj Ganguly, co-founder and co-CEO of B Capital, described opening the firm’s regional headquarters in Qatar as "incredibly easy," and praised the government’s outward focus toward building regional and global businesses.
What this means for markets and sectors
The discussions at Web Summit underscored implications for several parts of the economy. Technology and software producers face incentives to develop specialized models and vertical solutions, cloud and data center operators confront demands for more geographically distributed compute and energy suppliers are central to enabling large-scale data operations. Public-sector procurers, especially in Europe, may increasingly favor domestic or regional AI stacks that meet local regulation and privacy standards.
While the event showcased optimism about AI’s potential to amplify small teams, it also highlighted the infrastructure and policy work needed to make that promise resilient and regionally anchored.