On 18 September I am giving the opening keynote at Signal, a curated two-day gathering of the 100 most active LPs, banks, family offices, VCs, angels and founders in Switzerland and Europe, hosted by Club Deal with support from Lenz & Staehelin.
The slot is 45 minutes, first thing on the Friday, with a VC panel on AI as a competitive edge straight after. The job is to level-set the room. The audience splits three ways: investors who are not close to what is really happening in agentic AI, founders building at the forefront, and VCs financing all of it while running their own firms on none of it.
The talk starts from the gulf between the popular mental model of AI, a ChatGPT prompt for 20 euros a month, and what founders and engineers actually mean when they say agents: systems that decide what to do, do it, and iterate until the goal is met. From there it moves through how my own working week changed, what a shared context vault looks like in practice, and what enterprise rollout really involves. It is an adaptation of the INSEAD executive primer I gave in June, sharpened for an investor room: where in the VC value chain agents can be deployed today, and what that implies for the companies they back.
I will publish the deck and notes here after the event.