Web Summit 2025: First Impressions

This is my third year in a row at Web Summit Lisbon, and this one feels especially unusual. It seems to me that Web Summit has really rethought how to make networking effective: countless meetups, plenty of topics worth real discussion, and even a 'walk and talk' format.
Halls that had stood empty for the past two years are now dedicated meetup zones.

At the same time, Web Summit 2025 highlighted a serious future issue for me: the 'AI bubble'. Two months ago I was absolutely sure the 'AI bubble' was just a hot topic for a certain kind of media. Today I think the opposite.

When large companies that have nothing to do with AI start using 'AI' purely as a marketing label, and countless startups fail to solve any real problems, it points to one thing: Michael Burry is right, and we may soon face a new economic crisis.

Is that bad? Probably not. I think it will be a fresh starting point for something new. Just as the dot-com bubble was followed by the emergence of our modern tech era, the AI bubble could become an important step toward a post-technological economy.