We have the CEOs of Framer and Factorial speaking at Shift AI Europe in Barcelona this October. Both are worth the trip on their own. But when I talk to founders about speakers and sessions, I keep hearing a version of the same thing: I can find that on a podcast. I can read about it on LinkedIn. And they're right.
The information is out there. That's not the gap.
The gap is pattern matching.
Every founder I speak to wants the honest version of what their peers are actually doing with AI right now. Not the LinkedIn post about their transformation journey. Not the polished podcast answer where everything worked out. What's really working, what cost more than it was worth, what got quietly shelved after three months. You don't get that from content. You get it from conversation with people who have no reason to perform.
Pattern matching is what leaders do when they hear how ten other companies at their stage handled the same decision. One data point is an anecdote. Ten is a pattern. Once you can see it, your own call gets easier, because you know where you sit and what tends to happen next.
Content can't give you that. A podcast is one story, edited into a clean arc. A LinkedIn post is one story, edited to make someone look good. You can read a hundred and still not know whether your AI spend is normal, high, or reckless, because none of them are calibrated to you and none of them tell you what got cut.
Three things have to be present for pattern matching to work:
Benchmark. Not that AI is changing everything, but where you actually sit. Are your margins holding up better or worse than peers who shipped the same features? Is your pricing ahead of the curve or about to look expensive?
The unpolished version. What people tried that didn't work, what cost three times the estimate, what got quietly shelved after a quarter. This is the most useful data and the least likely to be published, because not enough people share their “failures”.
Volume. One honest conversation is a data point. You need enough of them, close together, before the signal separates from the noise. That is hard to gather one coffee at a time.
That's what we built the event around.
Shift Meetings puts 8,000 one-to-one conversations on the calendar across two days. Shift Roundtables are closed peer groups where the question is what's actually happening, not what sounds good. The format is designed for volume of honest conversation, not polished presentation.
You leave with a clearer read on where you sit in the AI shift, what others at a similar stage are doing, and what probably needs to happen next in your business.
It's the kind of clarity that tends to take months of scattered conversations to accumulate, compressed into two days.
I think it's the largest pattern matching opportunity in Europe for our industry right now. That's the reason the event exists.
Barcelona, 13-14 October. Tickets at europe.shiftai.events.
Alex
Founder, Shift AI
P.S. Shift AI Europe takes place in Barcelona but our heart lies in Portugal's pastries. Our very own Patrícia is touring Europe with pastéis de nata & VIP invites for select founders. Reach out if you want her to stop by your office.
The Shift · Published every Tuesday · shiftai.events
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