Who is speaking at Civo Navigate London 2026? Meet the speakers and sessions

We are thrilled to announce the first wave of speakers for Civo Navigate London 2026. Taking place on 22 September at Convene, 155 Bishopsgate, this year's lineup brings together some of the most influential voices shaping the future of AI, cloud, and data sovereignty, from MPs driving policy to engineers and founders building tomorrow's infrastructure. 

London ranks fourth globally as a tech ecosystem, behind only the Bay Area, New York, and Boston and first in Europe, according to Dealroom's Global Tech Ecosystem Index 2026. The conversations shaping how AI is governed, sovereign infrastructure is built, and UK businesses navigate a shifting geopolitical landscape are happening here. Navigate London 2026 is where those conversations come together in one room.

As we start to announce some of the speakers, here's a sneak peek into who'll be taking the stage and what they'll be covering.

The mainstage

The future of tech with Kelsey Hightower

The main stage opens with a candid conversation between Civo CEO and Founder Mark Boost and Kelsey Hightower, Retired Distinguished Engineer at Google and Board Director at Civo. Together, they will explore the forces reshaping technology today, from the rapid rise of AI and growing demands for digital sovereignty to evolving cloud strategies and shifting industry priorities.

Expect honest insights, practical perspectives, and a look at what's coming next for the tech industry from two people who have spent their careers at the sharp end of it. Watch their 2025 session on data sovereignty in the age of AI to get a sense of the conversation.

Digital sovereignty panel

One of the defining sessions of the day brings together policymakers, technologists, and industry leaders to examine how digital sovereignty is reshaping the global technology landscape. With more panelists still to be announced, we are excited to share that Julia Lopez MP and Lord Drayson will be part of this discussion.

Julia Lopez MP brings a frontline political perspective on how the UK is navigating AI governance, data regulation, and the push for domestic digital infrastructure.

Lord Drayson, Chairman of Locai Labs, brings rare cross-disciplinary authority as a life sciences entrepreneur, former Defence Procurement Minister, and now a leading figure in the UK's sovereign AI landscape. His experience spans government, industry, and deep tech in a way that few panelists can match.

The panel will be moderated by Simon Hansford, Chief Commercial Officer at Civo, returning to the chair after leading the Digital Sovereignty Panel at Navigate London 2025.

AI & cloud native room

Sovereign AI and the UK's strategic future

The UK is the third-largest AI market in the world, valued at $92bn (£72.3bn) in 2024 and larger than any other country in Europe, but safety expertise without sovereign capability leaves the country dependent on systems built elsewhere, with values and priorities set by others.

In this session, Lindley Lentati (Founder, Tertium AI and Co-Founder, Cambridge Inference) explores why the UK must treat sovereign AI as a national security requirement, drawing on the historical parallel of the US McMahon Act (formally the Atomic Energy Act of 1946), which saw the US unilaterally cut Britain off from nuclear technology it had helped develop. He will examine what France, Germany, and the EU are doing to build sovereign AI programs, and outline what a phased UK sovereign AI research program would look like, including a proposal for a coalition of democratic middle powers to build frontier AI capability under sovereign control.

Tertium AI is coordinating a middle-powers effort to build and distribute frontier-class AI to allied democracies. Cambridge Inference is building Panopticon, an AI monitoring platform for regulated industries.

Turning data isolation into a moat: cross-tenant federated learning for regulated industries

Every regulated industry hits the same wall with AI: the data that would make models genuinely useful is locked inside customers' environments, and it is never coming out. Banks, hospitals, law firms, and defence, the most valuable training signal is locked behind contracts, regulations, and rightful caution.

This session from James Faure, Director of Agentic AI, Clairo AI, reframes the data isolation problem entirely. Federated learning, where models travel to the data instead of the other way around, turns what regulated industries see as a constraint into a competitive advantage. Using cross-tenant federated learning in legal AI as a worked example, this session covers what federated learning actually is, when it is the right tool, and why the companies that figure this out first will own their categories.

Kubeflow, MLflow, and Argo on on-prem HPC for dementia research at Imperial College UK DRI

Imperial's UK Dementia Research Institute runs complex, regulated AI pipelines on sensitive clinical and home-monitoring data, making managed cloud ML a non-starter. This session from Jeremy Murray (Founder and CEO, stack8s) and Stephen Curran (Infrastructure Engineer) presents a reference architecture for running Kubeflow, MLflow, and Argo Workflows on on-premises HPC to support dementia research, from raw sensor and imaging data through to trained models and reproducible analyses.

Attendees will see practical patterns for experiment tracking, workflow orchestration, and model promotion that fit the realities of public-sector research IT: constrained budgets, strict information-governance controls, and long-lived cohorts of vulnerable participants.

DevOps for the age of AI

Semira Allen, Engineering Manager MLOps, Grainger

DevOps gave us speed and reliability for traditional applications, but it was not built for the messy, unpredictable world of machine learning. Semira Allen will pull back the curtain on MLOps: the next evolution of DevOps, engineered for the age of AI.

Semira Allen, Engineering Manager MLOps, Grainger, will cover how to extend the practices you already know, automation, CI/CD, monitoring, and observability, into the dynamic lifecycle of ML systems. Whether you are a DevOps engineer facing your first ML project, a data scientist tired of throwing models over the wall, or a leader who needs teams to deliver trustworthy AI at scale, this session delivers the playbook.

Designing context-first AI systems

Shubhangi Goyal (Senior Analyst at Admiral Group, Microsoft MVP, and London Chapter Lead for Women in Data) will explore how to design AI systems that put context first, a critical consideration as organizations move from AI experimentation to production deployment at scale.

This session covers the practical decisions behind context architecture, why getting it wrong leads to models that fail in production, and what teams can do differently to build AI systems that actually work in the real world.

More speakers to be announced

This is the first wave. More speakers will be announced in the coming weeks across AI infrastructure, cloud-native engineering, and data sovereignty, with sessions spanning both the Main Stage and the AI & Cloud Native Room.

If you want to get a feel for what Navigate London looks like in practice, watch the main stage videos from the 2025 edition or read the full event wrap-up.

General Admission tickets are available now at £300, but only until 2 August. Super Early Bird and Early Bird have already sold out.

FAQs