Italian Tech Week 2025: My personal highlights

I have been living in Turin for the last 2 years. It’s not such a very known Italian city like Rome, Milan, Naples or Florence. Even so, it is the 4th biggest city in Italy and it’s first capital. It is also the heart of the automotive and space industry in Italy, with companies like FIAT and Leonardo.

This is why the city of Turin is the host of the Italian Tech Week. People from all over the world come for three days for an agenda of innovation, workshops, networking and startups. FOR FREE!

The event happens at OGR, which was an industrial complex for maintenance and repair of trains. The space is now turned into a museum and a cultural collaborative complex. This includes cafes, restaurants, co-workings and spaces for art exhibitions, conferences and concerts. Even if you are visiting Turin not necessarily for the Italian Tech Week, it is worth checking it out.

The Conference:

This year the main speakers where Jeff Bezos and Ursula von Der Leyen. But there were also many other speakers with relevant experience in diverse industries. There is a lot going on simultaneously so you need to prepare in advance to take the most of it. One recommendation I give is to download the Italian Tech Week App. You can use it to create your schedule with the talks of your interest.

All the talks are in English and all the staff speak English. So, if you don’t speak Italian it is not a problem at all. There are also places for grabbing a beer, an ice cream, lunch and coffee.

A Tech conference or an AI conference?

Like most tech conferences this year, AI has dominated most of the stages. It was also insane to see the amount of founders building AI powered stuff. I was surprised to meet a founder building a product on the Augmented and Virtual Reality space. He told me his product has absolutely no AI. Because it doesn’t need to. With the AI hype his partners often request to add AI on the product. He explained that they need to have a good product first, and adding AI will only delay them. The real effort should be concentrated on the value they add with augmented and virtual reality, not with AI. I agree 100%.

Almost 10 years ago I tried to build stuff on the VR space. The market was not mature enough. Now everyone has shifted to AI and no one is talking about virtual and augmented reality. I asked this young CTO about Virtual and Augmented Reality market, new tech, hardware. He explained how mature it has become, how many opportunities there are now. But no one is actually looking or talking about it because of AI. It was very insightful.

AI and the Future of Work

Back to Italian Tech Week, one thing I took the time to explore the most, is the impact of AI on the workforce. There is a concern that AI might take many jobs away, which is in part true. Many tasks have become obsolete because of AI. Jobs that relied solely on these tasks have disappeared, just like it happened on the industrial revolution.

There is a need to evaluate how we are preparing professionals to enter and remain on the workforce. The idea of a highly specialised professional focused on one specific task or domain, which was an inheritance of the industrial revolution, is now completely obsolete. The new professional need to be able to navigate different domains of knowledge and adapt to changes very fast. Many of the speakers explained about the opportunity to use AI in the process of empowering employees to acquire new skills, learn how to use new tools and navigate new domains of knowledge without the burden of making long courses or shifting completely the career. This would also be the case to consider the employee not as a person responsible for executing tasks, but as someone with a strategic responsibility within the organisation.

Enterprise real use cases of GenAI

There is a lot of hype going on around Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI). We have seen many companies who where promising things like building a GenAI Agent capable of completely replacing software engineers. And they failed! It’s interesting to see real world cases where GenAI helped automate processes in Marketing, Customer Support, Back office and many others. These where not moonshot use cases aimed to completely revolutionise the industry and replace hundreds of people, but simply opportunities that were found that workflows could be created to support different areas of a company with the help of GenAI. Like a simple Chatbot that could access the employees data and the HR’s base of knowledge to help reduce the time with employee queries’s regarding the company’s policies and general questions. This allowed the HR team to have more time to focus on strategic actions instead of repetitive tasks and reduce costs.

European Regulation

This is a long topic with heated arguments that was also present in many discussions on the conference. The excess of regulation on the European market creates an unfair advantage for foreign companies that operate in less regulated markets, like the United States and China. This can also create some interesting opportunities. I myself helped a startup in Italy develop a B2B SaaS to allow European companies comply with ESG regulation using AI decreasing exponentially the time and cost of doing it with a consultant.

But still, the burden on the European regulation increases the costs of starting and operating companies in Europe and push back innovation efforts creating limitations and barriers compared to the less regulated markets. There is a long ongoing debate on the European community about the need to increase the competitiveness of Europe reviewing the regulatory dynamics imposed to the companies and institutions. With the advent of AI, more than ever, Europe needs to act fast to allow it’s institutions to regain the necessary means to compete on a market and evolve to be able to face the challenges of a future that is becoming every year more dynamic, complex and unpredictable.

Conclusion

Attending the conference was a great experience and it helped me understand better real use cases of AI inside established companies and innovative startups, the challenges of the European market and the technological possibilities for the future. The most amazing part is that it was free ( there were some paid workshops, but the access to the conference, main stages, networking area and common spaces was always free). In Turin there are many public and private driven initiatives that work together to foment innovation and help the entrepreneur community thrive. If you are interested in technology, innovation and entrepreneurship it’s worth to keep an eye on the Turin ecosystem and to participate in the next editions of the Italian Tech Week.