Web Summit 2024: The Global Events Industry in the AI Era

From November 11 to 14, 2024, Web Summit took place in Lisbon, Portugal, drawing over 70,000 attendees — a new post-pandemic record. The theme was no surprise: AI occupied everything from the main stage to the startup booths, with LLM applications, AI agents and AI governance the densest topics.

For the language services industry, Web Summit is a window on the events economy: international exhibitions fully surpassed pre-pandemic levels in 2024, and interpreting and localization demand for large events rose with the tide. Notable is the summit's own multilingual service model — AI live captions for main-stage talks, professional SI for key sessions, and a multilingual agenda in the mobile app: the layered "human + AI" service is now standard for mega-events.

The language technology presence at the summit is also growing: from translation platforms to AI dubbing tools, language tech companies now exhibit on the main floor of tech mega-events — language services are no longer "supporting vendors" to the events industry but part of the AI application ecosystem.

The events industry's boom is globalization's most visible barometer. When seventy thousand people fly halfway around the world to meet face to face, the value of "connection" — and of language services — speaks for itself.