Italian Tech Week

Shared ownership. Agentic AI. Human–AI collaboration as a first. As Emmanuele Benatti, Partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG), shared with us, agentic AI only creates value when it reshapes how work gets done, blending decisive leadership with shared ownership across business and IT. From building AI-first operating models to redesigning end-to-end workflows, the future belongs to companies where humans and AI act together, guided by purpose, responsibility, and measurable impact. 🔗 Read the full conversation on how to turn agentic AI from a tool into a transformation.

🚀 From a €2M pre-seed deck to a $6.6B valuation. We sat down with Mati Staniszewski, Co-Founder & CEO of ElevenLabs, the company shaping the voice of AI. We covered a lot of ground in 40 minutes as he talks 2X speed. 😬 Among the highlights: ↳ How a personal frustration with movie dubbing in Poland turned into a global AI company. ↳ What will be the form factor of AI? (Voice, Glasses, Neuralink or ... looking at you Carl Pei 👀). ↳ The power of emotional speech and why voice is the most human interface. ↳ Behind the scenes of Lex Fridman x Narendra Modi — and how ElevenLabs made it sound natural. ↳ Giving thousands of people their voices back. ↳ Building through doubt and focusing on speed, and small teams. 🎧 Listen to the full episode on your favourite platform. Link in comments. Thanks so much, Elena Calconi and Italian Tech Week for making this possible!

Having a great idea, or spotting a real problem, is no longer enough. What will define which companies get funded in the next two decades are breakthroughs. And they will need to make innovation their very foundation. So, what’s behind the next generation of companies that will build and sustain Europe’s tech ecosystem? Founders, supported by investors who believe in them. According to Julia Hawkins, General Partner at LocalGlobe, founders need three essential qualities: - Resilience, the ability to face and endure major setbacks. - The ability to attract talent. - Obsession, that relentless drive that keeps them going. From the investor’s side, the mission is to work closely with founders to identify these traits, and to go beyond the vision of what’s possible. It’s about setting clear milestones to achieve within each round, making ambition measurable and progress tangible. What can we take away from perspectives like this? No one builds anything meaningful alone. Success comes from working with others who challenge, guide, and sometimes safeguard your vision. And that’s what we’re proud of at Italian Tech Week, a place where people go home having listened to the most inspiring voices, carrying insights that leave a mark on their journey.

Work in CX? Then this is for you: Andrea Coli, CEO at Concentrix Italy, outlines how to move from pilots to proof, modernize the stack, apply AI end-to-end, and phase autonomy to earn trust. Read the article 👇

You enjoyed attending our event, right? ✨ Here are some pictures to let you relive a few of the most magical moments. And of course, a round of applause to Piano B for helping us create one of the coolest tech events in Europe.

Entrepreneurialism is becoming increasingly relevant in Italy, the country that could benefit the most from an EU-wide initiative like EU-INC, unlocking its full potential. Italy is also home to 25 companies that have surpassed $100M in revenue, and six that reached a $1B+ valuation before hitting that milestone. So, where should Italy focus next? There are several levers to pull, but one of the most crucial is opening up beyond domestic markets. Even Italy’s most successful startups remain primarily focused on the local scene: only 31% pursue a global market strategy. Another factor is founder experience. While the number of Italian founders with experience at a unicorn has steadily increased over the past fourteen years, with projections pointing to 300+ by the end of 2025, the share of founders with international backgrounds remains low, at just 7% compared to 19% in Spain. Italians are also more likely to start companies abroad than to attract international co-founders at home. As a result, Italy’s position remains somewhat stuck in the middle, showing limited progress over the past decade compared to other European ecosystems. Still, Yoram Wijngaarde, Founder and CEO of Dealroom.co, sees great potential ahead. He believes Italy is the right place to build a startup, if founders are willing to hire across borders, attract international talent, and think global. 👉 See the full “State of VC in Italy” report to learn more.

Tomorrow’s internet runs on light, and it moves like it. During ITW we met Ludovico Diaz, CEO of NTT DATA Italia, and sat down for a long talk. In our featured article we explore IOWN and the All Photonics Network, bringing photonics closer to compute to cut energy use, slash latency, and unlock capacity. With early trials from London to Tokyo and a 2030 roadmap from the IOWN Global Forum, this is how the network rises to the AI era. Read the article.

At #ITW25, nothing gets left behind, not even the creative industry. That’s why we caught up with Vincent Legros, Director of Teads Studio, to explore how Gen AI is reshaping creativity. His take? Gen AI won’t replace humans, especially in creativity, where taste, culture, and intuition still make all the difference. 🎥 Watch the full video to hear Vincent’s insights on how AI and human creativity can truly work together.

Generative AI is about simplification. It helps people learn, shop online, and interact with machines more intuitively. Thanks to the advances of recent years, machines can now understand human input with increasing precision, reducing the need for buttons, increasing automation, and even integrating contextual data such as a user’s or driver’s mood to deliver deeper personalization. These evolutions have transformed how we interact with technology. What began as an experimental capability has become an interface revolution, where systems adapt seamlessly to human intention. In mobility, for example, AI has already moved beyond autonomous driving. Combined with digital twin technology, it’s reshaping how vehicles are conceived, built, and optimized, enabling more sustainable design, predictive maintenance, and the transformation of data into experiences that reflect what people truly expect from movement. This shift brings a customer-centric approach to the forefront, without compromising product quality. In the GenAI era, the goal is no longer just to meet functional needs, but to anticipate and fulfill human desires. Arthur Mensch, founder of Mistral AI, has a clear view on this transformation. From the start, he has advocated for open-source models and for giving enterprises the ability to customize AI, making it practical, adaptable, and ultimately profitable. At Italian Tech Week, we’re proud to see how every edition grows alongside these evolutions, how each year, the conversations become more relevant, the insights more profound, and the vision of our speakers more inspiring.

In our chat with Francesco Vassallo, Deputy Mayor of Città metropolitana di Milano, we discussed how collaboration in technology and knowledge can become a real growth engine for cities. He spoke about the Smart Metropolitan Campus, a digital infrastructure extending over 8,000 kilometers and connecting the entire Milan metropolitan area — a project designed to generate tangible benefits across the urban ecosystem. The conversation also looked ahead to the 2026 Olympic Games, which will serve as a testing ground for innovative solutions in areas like sustainable mobility, urban safety, tourism management, digital payments, and social inclusion. 🎥 Watch the full video to discover how Milan is shaping the next generation of smart cities.