London Tech Week wrapped up its 12th edition earlier this month, and we were there as part of the Victorian Government trade mission, alongside Global Victoria and the Victorian Government Trade and Investment Office, UK, Europe & Israel.
The festival drew more than 30,000 people from over 130 countries, with more than 600 speakers spread across venues in and around Olympia London. It’s a sprawling event. Main stage programming over three days, fringe events across the rest of the city, and enough side conversations to fill a month.
But a few themes cut through the noise.
AI Isn’t Theoretical Anymore
Roughly half the sessions featured AI in some form. And the recurring line was that the technology has moved from “conceptual” to something every company now has to put to work. Not because it’s trendy, but because the competition is already doing it.
The government’s opening day set the tone. Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced a national compute push, including £400 million to buy specialist AI chips. Technology Secretary Liz Kendall rolled out a wider package centred around a £1.1 billion AI Hardware Plan. The message was clear: Britain wants to be in the game, not just consuming it.
But as one panel put it, getting AI to production is one thing. Getting it to scale is another entirely. The technology has improved—accuracy, tooling, reduced hallucination rates. But the organisational piece? That’s where most enterprises still stumble.
The Honesty About What’s Not Working
One of the more useful sessions we attended wasn’t about what’s going right. It was about what isn’t.
A panellist on the Applied AI track put it bluntly: getting AI use cases to production has genuinely improved over the last 18 months. But getting from production to scale? That still eludes most enterprises.
The problem isn’t technical. It’s organisational.
AI agents are living alongside existing processes. Trotted out for board meetings to demonstrate progress, while underlying workflows remain unchanged. Real scale means the agent has become the process, not a demonstration running parallel to it.
Matt Prebble, CEO of Accenture UK & Ireland, put a number on this: 86% of senior leaders plan to increase AI investment, while only 20% of employees feel engaged in shaping how it’s used. That gap matters.
A Different Kind of Conversation
One session that stood out wasn’t about business at all. The Prince of Wales attended for the first time, chairing a panel on using data to prevent homelessness. His Homewards initiative launched the UK’s first Homelessness Data Lab, bringing together more than 25 organisations including Bloomberg, NatWest, and Accenture.
The thesis is that the warning signs of housing loss; rent arrears, benefit changes, family breakdown, show up in data long before someone reaches the street. The same analytics tools businesses use for supply chains could be turned to prevention.
It was a reminder that technology isn’t just about efficiency. It’s also about what you choose to apply it to.
Where Victoria Fits In
This was our second year joining the Global Victoria trade mission to London Tech Week. The connections made across the five days were genuine; conversations that started in the halls of Olympia and continued over coffee, lunch, and the occasional after-hours event.
There’s a reason Global Victoria keeps bringing Victorian companies back. London remains one of the world’s most important technology hubs, and the conversations you have here are different from the ones you have anywhere else. The investors are serious. The partners are real. The deals get done.
For us, the week reinforced something we already knew: Victorian innovation travels well. The conversations about supply chain optimisation, about decarbonisation, about helping organisations make better decisions, they land just as well in London as they do in Melbourne.
What We Took Away
London Tech Week is many things at once: a keynote stage for government ministers and billion-dollar CEOs, a demonstration floor for the latest hardware, and one of the most honest readings available of where enterprise technology actually is.
The organisations with something serious to say weren’t talking about whether to deploy AI. They were talking about what it takes to deploy it well, at scale, with governance, and with human accountability still visible in the chain.
That’s a conversation we’re happy to be part of.
