The 2026 speakers

Miguel Arroja is EMEA Sales Leader at Deepgram, where he leads enterprise sales strategy and drives the company's growth across European markets. Deepgram specializes in voice AI for enterprise use cases, and Miguel focuses on helping organizations use speech technology to transform customer interactions and business operations.

Previously, he was Regional Vice President at Slack, leading the company's activities across Spain, Italy, and Portugal, and held senior commercial roles at Salesforce. His experience spans enterprise software, go-to-market strategy, revenue growth, and building high-performing sales teams in fast-moving technology markets.

His perspective is especially relevant for audiences interested in voice AI, enterprise adoption, customer experience, sales leadership, and the commercial transformation of AI technologies.

Dr. Jordina Torrents Barrena is a globally recognized AI researcher and senior leader at HP Inc., where she leads innovation in advanced generative AI algorithms and edge AI deployment. She holds a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Mathematics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra, where she developed computational tools for surgical planning and navigation. With more than 60 scientific publications and multiple patents, Dr. Torrents Barrena bridges academic excellence with real-world industrial impact. She has received numerous national and international awards, including the Google Women Techmakers, McKinsey's Next Generation Women Leaders, Ada Byron Award for Young Technologists, etc. In addition to her industry leadership, Dr. Torrents Barrena teaches courses in AI, Computer Science, and Business Leadership at Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, Universitat Ramon Llull, and Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Through her research, innovation, and teaching, she is helping shape a future in which intelligent systems empower both people and machines.

Roshan Manjaly leads forward deployed engineering at Vapi, the voice AI platform used by companies from YC startups to the Fortune 500 to put production voice agents in front of real callers. He holds a Master's in Artificial Intelligence from Georgia Tech and worked as a principal software engineer at Capital One before founding two startups of his own.

His work sits at the point where a voice agent stops being a demo and becomes infrastructure: mapping a customer's real workflows, handling latency and interruption, making tool calls reliable for production, and turning each deployment into something the next one can reuse. Having built Two companies himself, he treats enterprise deployment as a product problem rather than a support one.

His perspective is especially relevant for audiences interested in applied AI, voice agents in production, and the engineering gap between a working prototype and a system that survives real users.

Pedro Cuenca is a machine learning engineer at Hugging Face, where he works on open-source software, developer advocacy, and on-device AI. He was previously a co-founder of LateNiteSoft and worked on Camera+, a top photography app for iOS and one of the first to introduce custom local models for photography enhancement, spawning his strong interest in local AI. He was also involved in the development of and operations behind DALL·E mini. Pedro is based in Spain, collects big GPUS (less than he'd like) and small single-board computers (more than he needs). He contributes to multiple open-source repos and likes to share insights on open models, especially if they can be optimized to run locally.

Chandrakumar R Pillai is an AI advisor, enterprise architect, speaker and Co-Founder & President of Gate2ASI. Based in Brussels, he has more than two decades of experience across enterprise technology, banking, telecommunications and the public sector. He works at the intersection of AI governance, enterprise architecture and agentic AI, with a focus on building practical, auditable AI systems with human oversight. He also contributes to the European Commission’s Women in Digital / Women in AI initiative and to broader discussions on responsible AI, the EU AI Act and the future of enterprise AI.

Kamran Elahian is the Chairman & Co-founder of Innovera.ai. He advises major enterprises on leveraging AI for new growth initiatives. Previously, as a global high-tech entrepreneur, he co-founded ten companies and achieved seven exits, including three unicorn IPOs with a combined market capitalization exceeding $8 billion.
For 15 years, he served as Chairman of Global Catalyst Partners, a $350 million global venture capital firm investing across the U.S., Japan, China, India, Israel, and Singapore. He was the founding investor and board member of SoundHound AI, his fourth unicorn (over $4B)
His philanthropic vision is rooted in the belief that technology can dissolve barriers between nations and bridge social and economic divides. He co-founded Schools Online in 1996, connecting 6,400 schools across 36 countries to computers and the Internet, and Global Catalyst Foundation in 2000 to empower youth—through education, technology, and entrepreneurship, creating opportunities and improving lives around the world.

Raphaëlle Achach is AI Project Manager for AI Factory France at GENCI, France's national high-performance computing agency. She leads AI Factory France's technical support services, user onboarding, and application domain communities, helping researchers, startups and companies access the expertise and resources they need to develop and scale their AI projects.

Previously at CNRS, she managed AI and cybersecurity projects before leading national computer science programmes. She contributed to the launch of the Jean Zay supercomputer, the national network of AI engineers and the AISSAI centre, and served as CNRS General Secretary for PEPR IA, France's national priority research programme in artificial intelligence.

A business school graduate specialised in innovation and emerging technologies, her work focuses on turning national AI infrastructure into practical adoption: enabling access to compute, supporting users from onboarding to large-scale deployment, and building public AI services that meet the needs of research and industry.

Marcos Rodríguez is Partner and Head of Global Clients at SDG Group, a global consulting firm specialising in data, analytics and artificial intelligence with over 2,000 employees across Europe, North America and the Middle East. Based in Barcelona and an IESE Business School alumnus, he has built his career as a data and analytics specialist leading consulting teams and client transformation programmes.

He brings a consultant's perspective on why enterprise AI so often fails to deliver return, arguing that adoption depends less on the technology than on three things together: use cases genuinely aligned to business objectives, a sound data architecture, and change management focused on people rather than tools. He is a regular voice at industry gatherings on AI strategy for C-level audiences.

His perspective is especially relevant for audiences interested in enterprise AI strategy, data-driven transformation, and the organisational change required to move AI from pilot to production.

Bernard Kavanagh is Principal Solutions Architect (EMEA) at TiDB, a distributed database company focused on real-time analytics and AI infrastructure. He specialises in high-performance data systems and helps organisations move from fragmented data stacks to unified platforms that can support modern AI and agentic workflows.

At TiDB, he works on “Agent-First” memory stores that combine vector search, hybrid SQL, and real-time analytics in a single platform, aiming to reduce the complexity and cost of multi-service AI stacks. His production experience includes building a real-time multi-agent platform for 200,000+ IoT devices that significantly cut infrastructure costs and LLM token usage while improving diagnostic accuracy.

His profile is especially relevant for sessions on AI infrastructure, real-time data systems, agentic AI architectures, vector databases, and the practical challenges of scaling AI applications in production.

Alex Booker works on Developer Experience at Mastra, the open-source TypeScript AI agent framework built by the team behind Gatsby. Mastra, a Y Combinator W25 company, gives developers the primitives to build, evaluate, and deploy production AI agents, and Alex regularly teaches hands-on workshops on agent development with the framework. At AI Summit Barcelona 2026 he brings a builder's perspective on agent frameworks and developer tools.

Jose Ramon Iglesias is VP of FP&A and Performance Insights at Uberall, where he leads financial planning, analysis, and business intelligence. He partners closely with the executive team to drive capital allocation, investment prioritization and growth decisions. He brings more than 15 years of experience across high-growth technology companies and global enterprises, including Inditex, with expertise in connected planning, AI-enabled finance and fundraising and M&A.

Jaime Zornoza is Director of Applied AI at Aily Labs, the Enterprise Decision Intelligence company, where he leads applied AI deployments for Fortune 500 companies. An industrial engineer by training, he joined Aily Labs as a Principal Data Scientist and previously worked in data science at Alantra and in advanced analytics consulting at The Cocktail, across finance, insurance and retail.

His background also spans research at Aalto University and Universidad Politécnica de Madrid in Social Network Analysis (SNA) and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) using Machine Learning.

He brings a practitioner's view of agentic AI inside large enterprises, where models have to connect to real decisions rather than sit in isolated pilots.

His perspective is especially relevant for audiences interested in enterprise AI adoption, AI in the enterprise, and how decision intelligence translates data into real outcomes and P&L impact.

Tycho Luijten is the CEO and co-founder of Dapper, a B2B marketing agency based in the Netherlands. He works with B2B brands on demand generation and go-to-market strategy. You might have seen one of his viral LinkedIn videos such as "The Wolf of Wallstreet... but then it's B2B Marketing".

Albert Franquesa is Chief of Strategy and Board Member at Quality Clouds, a governance platform for enterprise SaaS development teams founded in 2017. He has worked in IT since the mid-1990s, first as a software developer at IBM, then in analyst and project management roles at Deutsche Bank and delivery leadership at GFT Group.

His work centres on a practical question: what happens when AI-generated code reaches production. He builds automated quality gates, audit trails and certification for code written by humans and by AI tools, applied across Salesforce and ServiceNow environments in Fortune 500 organisations. At the summit he'll show how engineering and compliance teams keep control as low-code and AI-native development speed up.

Carla Carvajal leads go-to-market for EMEA at Hilbert, an AI-native growth infrastructure platform for B2C companies backed by a16z. She brings 15+ years in sales and operations leadership, most recently as Managing Director for Spain at TOUS, where she owned full market P&L, and previously leading operations across Spain and Portugal at Getir. Earlier in her career she built Oniverse Group's retail network in Brazil from scratch.

She brings an operator's perspective, arguing that the AI shift is a business story before it is a technical one and that human judgement and customer intuition are what make it land. At Hilbert she works with customers to uncover use cases across departments and geographies, feeding what she learns in the field back into product and go-to-market strategy.

Her perspective is relevant for audiences interested in AI for consumer growth, data-driven decision-making in retail, and how commercial leaders adopt AI in practice.

Rubén Hernández is Head of BlueTechPort at World Trade Center Barcelona. With more than 25 years of experience in ports and infrastructure, he leads the development of the Port of Barcelona's blue innovation ecosystem, connecting startups, corporates, research institutions and public authorities to accelerate the blue economy.

Laura Tissot is a Product Manager specializing in AI-driven product development, with experience building and scaling digital products across sustainability, consultancy, and banking. At Ecosia, she works on AI Chat vertical and brings a strong mix of product strategy, cross-functional leadership, and strategic design thinking.

She offers a practical perspective on how AI products are shaped, shipped, and improved in real-world environments. Her background makes her especially relevant for discussions about AI product design, user experience, and the role of product teams in turning AI into useful, scalable experiences.

She would be a strong fit for conversations around AI product innovation, search, and the future of digital experiences.

Alan Záruba is Chief Digital Content Officer at Livesport, with a long background in creative direction, graphic design and art direction, and digital media leadership. He has spent years shaping large-scale content and news experiences, combining strong visual thinking with operational responsibility for digital products.

He brings a valuable perspective on how content, design, and digital platforms evolve in an AI-driven environment, especially where audience experience and media workflows matter. His profile is particularly relevant for conversations about the future of content creation, digital storytelling, and AI’s impact on media organizations.

He is well suited to audiences exploring how AI is changing media, content operations, and the way digital experiences are created and delivered. His background makes him a relevant voice for discussions about the future of content creation and the role of creative leadership in large digital organizations.

Rory O'Driscoll is VP of Data at AirHelp, the air passenger rights company, where he leads the analytics, data science and data engineering teams behind claim assessment and automation — a business where answers have to be defensible, not just plausible. Based in Barcelona, he previously held data leadership roles at wefox and across the Vista and Cimpress group, and holds an MSc in Applied Mathematics from the London School of Economics.

His team built AIDA, an analytics agent that answers business questions in Slack against a governed semantic layer rather than generating free-form SQL. His case: the agent was the easy part. What made it trustworthy was metric governance, and the people who gained most were not the power users but the account managers stuck in the analytics queue.

He speaks as an operator, not a vendor, on what self-service costs — and what the analyst's job becomes afterwards.

Charlie Hills is a London-based AI content creator and entrepreneur, and the founder of MarTech AI, a weekly newsletter read by more than 50,000 marketers and founders. A former food tech founder, he began posting about AI on LinkedIn at the end of 2023 with no following and passed 200,000 followers within two years, leaving employment to build the operation full time.

He brings a hands-on systems perspective on applying AI to marketing and content, focused on workflows people can copy rather than commentary. He runs his entire content operation on tooling he built himself, including custom agent workflows for scripting, reviewing, repurposing and publishing, and has partnered with companies including Anthropic, Perplexity, Zapier, Notion and Airtable.

His perspective is especially relevant for audiences interested in applied AI for marketing, personal brand building, and how individuals and small teams operationalise AI into repeatable systems.

Jacob Zangel is the founder of Flourish with AI, where he helps non-technical B2B founders, marketers and creators get real business results from AI through gamified challenges, content and live experiences. Based in Berlin, he works as a growth marketing consultant with both Fortune 500 companies and startups.

He brings an enablement perspective rather than a technical one, focused on the gap between AI's promise and what non-technical operators can actually put to work. His format leans on hands-on, playful learning experiences rather than theory, on the premise that adoption follows practice.

His perspective is especially relevant for audiences interested in practical AI adoption, growth marketing, and how non-technical teams build confidence and capability with AI tools.

I'm a marketing executive, advisor and entrepreneur focused on AI, big data and deep tech. I specialize in building and executing go-to-market strategies for high growth companies in the US, UK and Europe. Additionally, I'm a cofounder of Geodes.ai, an AI visibility platform and the head liaison for MIT Alumni Club in Catalonia. I hold an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management and the Diplôme from Sciences Po Paris.

I'm an active connector in Barcelona's technology ecosystem. To get in touch with me, reach out via Linkedin.

Alberto Valero Cayón is a Tech Expansion Manager at Tether.io, where he works at the intersection of decentralized infrastructure, AI, and digital assets. He holds a background from IE Business School and has been actively involved in advancing open-source, locally-run AI systems.

Alia Zafar is Director of HR & Facilities Management at the Commonwealth Secretariat in London, bringing nearly three decades of experience across banking, energy, telecoms, and international development. A certified expert in Business AI from London Business School and Negotiation from Oxford, she is a keynote speaker on AI governance, digital transformation, and DEI at forums including London Tech Week and the Change Now Summit. Beyond her institutional role, Alia made history as the first woman elected to a cricket board in South Asia, and is a social entrepreneur, published author, and one of the global managers of the Hans Wahl Impact Entrepreneurs Community.

Design Director · Complex & Regulated B2B · Design Systems · AI-Native Builder