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Best of LinkedIn: Tech Show Madrid 2025 · Best of LinkedIn: Digital Transformation & Tech

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: This episode is provided by Thomas Allgaier and Frenos, based on the most relevant LinkedIn post about TechShow Madrid, twenty twenty five.
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  Speaker 1: Frenos supports ICT enterprises with market and competitive intelligence, decoding emerging technologies, customer insights, regulatory shifts and competitor strategies.
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  Speaker 1: So product teams and strategy leaders don't just react, but shape the future.
• 0:24
  Speaker 1: Welcome back to The Deep Dive.
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  Speaker 1: Today we are really immersing ourselves in the insights from Texas of Madrid, twenty twenty five.
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  Speaker 1: It felt like more than just a conference this year.
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  Speaker 0: Oh, absolutely.
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  Speaker 0: It was a real snapshot of where Spain's digital ecosystem is putting its energy, wouldn't you say?
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  Speaker 1: Definitely.
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  Speaker 1: And our source material pulled from some key LinkedIn posts by leaders who are there.
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  Speaker 1: It paints a clear picture.
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  Speaker 0: It really does.
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  Speaker 0: The conversation seems to have firmly moved past the what if stage.
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  Speaker 1: Straight into.
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  Speaker 1: how do we do this now?
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  Speaker 0: Exactly.
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  Speaker 0: We're going to distill the concrete strategies, the.
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  Speaker 0: the critical points that kept coming up, what attendees were calling the decisive success factors for actually turning these digital pilots into real measurable business value.
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  Speaker 1: Across AI, cloud, cybersecurity, data, the whole stack.
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  Speaker 0: Precisely.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, so let's kick off with the big one.
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  Speaker 1: AI.
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  Speaker 1: The dominant feeling wasn't if AI is important anymore.
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  Speaker 1: That's settled.
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  Speaker 0: Right, the huge challenge now is implementation.
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  Speaker 0: It's that journey from a cool proof of concept to making it work systemically across the whole business.
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  Speaker 1: Getting it out of the lab and into the wild.
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  Speaker 0: Yeah, that scaling anxiety was almost... palpable in the discussions.
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  Speaker 0: Nelson Rodriguez, Mavares, and others really zoned in on avoiding this thing.
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  Speaker 0: they called the syndrome of the eternal pilot.
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  Speaker 0: Ah,
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  Speaker 1: the eternal pilot.
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  Speaker 1: I like that.
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  Speaker 1: Seen a few of those.
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  Speaker 1: Haven't
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  Speaker 0: we all?
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  Speaker 0: Companies prove AI can do something neat, but then it just stalls.
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  Speaker 0: It doesn't get integrated properly.
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  Speaker 1: So what's the fix?
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  Speaker 0: The core lesson hammered home was enforce purpose.
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  Speaker 0: You absolutely have to define the business problem you're solving and how big you intend this to be before you even think about the tech stack.
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  Speaker 1: Makes sense.
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  Speaker 1: If you don't know the why, the how is just tech for tech's sake.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly.
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  Speaker 0: Don't start the how.
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  Speaker 0: if the why isn't crystal clear and measurable.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, but here's what really jumped out at me from the sources.
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  Speaker 1: The biggest blocker to scaling isn't the tech itself.
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  Speaker 1: It's not compute power.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: It's people.
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  Speaker 1: It's culture.
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  Speaker 1: Leaders like John Trociaula, Cruz Slegee, and Stephanie Light were really quite forceful on this.
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  Speaker 1: They said, cultural readiness and team enablement Those are the make or break factors.
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  Speaker 0: That rings true.
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  Speaker 0: Cultural readiness isn't just, you know, having engineers who know Python.
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  Speaker 0: It's much deeper.
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  Speaker 0: Like what?
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  Speaker 0: It's about the organization actually being willing to trust these autonomous systems to genuinely change how work gets done and critically to upskill their teams fast enough.
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  Speaker 1: Because if the people on the ground don't buy in or don't know how to use the tool.
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  Speaker 0: then the pilot dies.
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  Speaker 0: Doesn't matter how technically brilliant it was.
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  Speaker 1: Which I guess leads straight into the ethics and governance piece, right?
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  Speaker 1: Because you can't have that cultural buy-in without trust.
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  Speaker 1: Precisely.
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  Speaker 0: Angelus, Sebastianelli, and Gabriel and Antonio Valverde Castilla made that point very clearly.
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  Speaker 0: AI governance is absolutely critical.
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  Speaker 1: And it's not just code deep.
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  Speaker 0: No, the ethics aren't just magically baked into the algorithm.
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  Speaker 0: They're in the choices made by the humans deploying and managing that system every single day.
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  Speaker 1: That's a key distinction.
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  Speaker 1: Frank Jane Navarro really drove that point home too, didn't he?
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  Speaker 1: Arguing AI needs to be demonstrably fair.
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  Speaker 0: Yes, fair.
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  Speaker 0: Not just blindingly efficient, because the risk is huge.
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  Speaker 0: You could just end up scaling hidden biases, making them worse, all under this, this veneer of technical neutrality.
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  Speaker 1: Scary thought, but... On a more practical note, we did see some solid use cases emerging.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Michelle River mentioned generative AI being used pretty effectively for optimizing complex back office stuff.
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  Speaker 0: Ah, the back office, that makes sense.
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  Speaker 0: The scale there means you can often see the ROI quite quickly.
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  Speaker 0: Less glamour maybe, but real value.
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  Speaker 1: So looking ahead, where does all this point?
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  Speaker 1: There were hints of some pretty massive ambition beyond just making processes more efficient.
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  Speaker 0: You're thinking of Juan Coro's concept.
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  Speaker 1: Exactly.
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  Speaker 1: Moving from a smart city to an agentic city.
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  Speaker 1: What on earth does that mean in practice?
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  Speaker 0: Well, it's kind of the ultimate expression of autonomy, isn't it?
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  Speaker 0: An agentic city wouldn't just use AI for insights, it would rely on AI agents.
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  Speaker 1: Economist entities.
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  Speaker 0: Yes, programmed to manage city infrastructure dynamically, proactively.
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  Speaker 0: Imagine traffic control that doesn't just react to jams but predicts them.
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  Speaker 0: Rerouting energy, water, waste, autonomously.
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  Speaker 0: Just to keep the whole system balanced.
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  Speaker 0: Wow,
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  Speaker 1: that's a leap.
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  Speaker 0: It's a fundamental shift.
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  Speaker 0: From human in the loop optimization to AI just... running things, which obviously needs incredible levels of trust and crucially super low latency.
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  Speaker 0: Okay,
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  Speaker 1: low latency, high trust.
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  Speaker 1: That brings us neatly to the infrastructure side of things.
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  Speaker 1: Cloud and data centers.
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  Speaker 0: Yep, you can't have these advanced AI solutions, especially not at scale without the right foundation.
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  Speaker 0: Michelle Ribber was quite blunt about it.
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  Speaker 0: If you want resilience, if you want to scale, a multi-cloud strategy isn't just nice to have anymore.
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  Speaker 1: She called it the only viable foundation.
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  Speaker 0: Pretty much.
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  Speaker 0: And it's not just about flexibility.
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  Speaker 0: It's about the total cost.
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  Speaker 0: People are finally looking beyond the upfront price tag.
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  Speaker 1: Factoring in security, maintenance, compliance across different regions.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 0: And when you add all that up, the holistic cloud approach often ends up being more economical and more secure than trying to do everything on premise.
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  Speaker 1: But this need for speed, especially for things like that agentic city idea, that puts the spotlight back on physical infrastructure, doesn't it?
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  Speaker 1: Edge data centers.
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  Speaker 0: Absolutely.
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  Speaker 0: Jose Luis Gomez Pardo made a really strong case for this.
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  Speaker 0: He argued that real AI adoption, the kind that needs that low latency, happens where you have strategically placed edge data centers.
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  Speaker 1: Close to the action.
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  Speaker 0: Plus to the action, providing single-digit latency.
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  Speaker 0: He actually boiled the success formula down to three things.
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  Speaker 0: Power, peering, and place.
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  Speaker 1: Power, peering, place.
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  Speaker 1: Okay,
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  Speaker 0: yeah.
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  Speaker 0: The sheer size of the data center isn't the be all and end all.
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  Speaker 0: What matters more is reliable power, neutral interconnection.
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  Speaker 0: that's the peering and being in the right physical location, the place to cut down data travel time.
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  Speaker 0: That's vital for things like AI inference at the edge.
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  Speaker 1: And this whole infrastructure conversation, you couldn't escape the green IT angle, could you?
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  Speaker 0: Not at all.
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  Speaker 0: It's intrinsically linked, no.
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  Speaker 0: People like Marco Mayor Martinez, the team from Huawei Digital Power Spain, they were intensely focused on energy efficiency and sustainability within these, let's face it, power hungry environments.
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  Speaker 1: It has to be part of the equation.
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  Speaker 0: It's become a mandate.
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  Speaker 0: Juan Jose Navarro Morales summed it up nicely.
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  Speaker 0: Phenops is meeting green ops.
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  Speaker 1: So managing cloud costs and cutting your carbon footprint.
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  Speaker 0: They're two sides of the same coin now.
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  Speaker 0: You can't claim to be optimizing your budget if you're ignoring your energy consumption.
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  Speaker 0: It's insufferable.
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  Speaker 1: Were there concrete solutions being shown?
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  Speaker 0: Yeah, Data Center World had exhibits focused on this.
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  Speaker 0: Too Sewed was showing strategies for compliant, sustainable deployments.
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  Speaker 0: And John Cockrell had tech for advanced cooling and, interestingly, heat recovery systems, finding ways to reuse that waste heat.
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  Speaker 1: Smart.
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  Speaker 1: OK, so we have efficient, sustainable infrastructure.
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  Speaker 1: But it needs to be secure.
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  Speaker 1: that brings us to cybersecurity
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  Speaker 0: a massive priority.
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  Speaker 0: clearly and the conversation is definitely broad and beyond.
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  Speaker 0: just you know Firewalls and tech.
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  Speaker 1: it felt much more about culture and compliance.
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  Speaker 1: this time Daniel Romano Ascaras Highlighted a really interesting shift in perspective.
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  Speaker 0: What was that
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  Speaker 1: that compliance frameworks think ISO?
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  Speaker 1: Zero one or the big one now NIS to cross the EU.
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  Speaker 1: they're starting to be seen not as burdens, but as accelerators.
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  Speaker 1: accelerators
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  Speaker 0: that is a shift
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  Speaker 1: right instead of an obstacle course.
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  Speaker 1: They're being treated like a structured roadmap for implementing good security.
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  Speaker 1: Following the framework actually simplifies the process.
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  Speaker 0: that makes a lot of sense when you put it that way.
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  Speaker 0: And the vendors, of course, are stepping
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  Speaker 1: up.
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  Speaker 1: Cutting-edge stuff.
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  Speaker 1: Definitely.
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  Speaker 0: We saw Palo Alto Networks, Tarium II, Selinda Kursabyek was involved there, showcasing tech really focused on that real-time endpoint visibility and control, which is crucial when your systems are spread across multiple clouds.
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  Speaker 0: You need to see everything.
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  Speaker 1: But beyond the tech, the word that kept echoing everywhere was...
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  Speaker 0: Trust.
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  Speaker 0: Digital Frost, yes.
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  Speaker 0: Luis Villanueva from SGS Digital Trust, he didn't mince words.
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  Speaker 0: He called it the essential enabler of transformation, not just important, essential.
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  Speaker 1: And it wasn't just consultants speak, was it?
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  Speaker 1: It felt like a genuine business imperative everyone was grappling
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  Speaker 0: with.
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  Speaker 0: Remofita echoed that really strongly.
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  Speaker 0: He basically said, look, in Spain, if you don't have Digital Trust, you simply won't have digital growth.
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  Speaker 0: Full stop.
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  Speaker 1: Which raises the million dollar question.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: If trust is the absolute key, especially with more autonomous systems coming online, how do organizations actually build and maintain it?
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  Speaker 0: It's the core challenge.
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  Speaker 1: And this is where the analysis took a really unexpected turn, I thought.
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  Speaker 0: Ah, you mean Rizzo Jimenez's point.
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  Speaker 1: Yes.
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  Speaker 1: The idea that criminology should be part of digital security design, I have to admit that initially sounded counterintuitive.
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  Speaker 0: It does sound a bit left field at first, doesn't it?
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  Speaker 0: But when you think about it...
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  Speaker 1: Go on.
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  Speaker 0: Well, what do criminologists specialize in?
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  Speaker 0: Behavior analysis, understanding motivation, risk anticipation, how systems and people can be exploited.
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  Speaker 0: They focus on the why and the how people commit fraud or breach security.
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  Speaker 0: Whereas
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  Speaker 1: the tech teams focus on the what and where the vulnerabilities.
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  Speaker 0: Exactly.
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  Speaker 0: So bringing in that behavioral expertise, that understanding of the human element, the motivations behind attacks, it could significantly boost resilience.
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  Speaker 0: especially against complex fraud.
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  Speaker 0: It's about securing the people and the processes, not just the perimeter.
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  Speaker 1: Fascinating angle.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, let's switch gears a bit to the customer-facing side.
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  Speaker 1: Retail, e-commerce.
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  Speaker 1: Right.
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  Speaker 0: AI is definitely... being positioned as a wealth driver there, but wisely, Delio Diaz Garcia offered a reminder.
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  Speaker 0: Tech is great, but the fundamentals still rule.
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  Speaker 1: Good product, good experience, clear purpose.
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  Speaker 0: Precisely.
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  Speaker 0: You can't AI your way out of a bad product or a confusing business model, and the challenges are still huge.
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  Speaker 1: Like returns.
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  Speaker 0: Oh yeah.
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  Speaker 0: Zigzag launching officially in Spain really highlighted this.
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  Speaker 0: They dropped their annual recurrence report, Spain, twenty twenty five.
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  Speaker 0: Get this, they're projecting.
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  Speaker 0: online returns will talk thirteen point three billion
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  Speaker 1: billion.
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  Speaker 1: Wow, that's a massive operational headache.
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  Speaker 0: Huge, especially dealing with what they call serial returners and slow returners.
• 10:33
  Speaker 0: That's a problem.
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  Speaker 0: crying out for better data analysis, maybe even AI to manage.
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  Speaker 1: And with that kind of cost involved, the metrics people track have got to change,
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  Speaker 0: right?
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  Speaker 0: They have to.
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  Speaker 0: Marta Segura Verdeel's panel on app marketing really hammered this.
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  Speaker 0: The message was, stop obsessing over vanity metrics like sheer download numbers.
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  Speaker 1: Focus on what actually matters.
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  Speaker 0: Yes, retention KPIs, things like churn rate, and crucially, lifetime value LTV.
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  Speaker 0: Are you keeping customers?
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  Speaker 0: Are they valuable over time?
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  Speaker 0: If not, that growth is probably just leaky bucket syndrome.
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  Speaker 1: Makes sense.
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  Speaker 1: And it's not just the metrics.
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  Speaker 1: The whole marketing strategy is having to adapt, isn't it?
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  Speaker 1: Because of AI and platform changes.
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  Speaker 0: Absolutely.
• 11:16
  Speaker 0: Raquel Trigarro Del Castillo shared some really valuable insights from Lorena Romero-Abril over at PUMA.
• 11:23
  Speaker 0: The takeaway on SEO was fascinating.
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  Speaker 1: Not just keywords anymore.
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  Speaker 0: Far from it.
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  Speaker 0: Modern SEO, she argued, demands community engagement, depth context, really understanding the long-tail searches.
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  Speaker 0: It's much more nuanced.
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  Speaker 1: And the geographical part was striking, too.
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  Speaker 0: Wasn't it?
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  Speaker 0: She stressed that the geo component, local context, is now weighted incredibly heavily, like, eighty percent importance.
• 11:43
  Speaker 1: Eighty percent, so content can't just be translated anymore.
• 11:47
  Speaker 0: No, it needs to be truly localized.
• 11:49
  Speaker 0: written for that specific community, that specific place, that requires a hyper-local digital strategy, which is a big shift for many global brands.
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  Speaker 1: Okay, so let's try and pull these threads together.
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  Speaker 1: We've got AI needing purpose and trust, cloud needing to be multi-cloud and sustainable.
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  Speaker 1: security needing to build trust, maybe even with criminology, and marketing needing hyperlocalization and real retention metrics.
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  Speaker 1: What does this mean for actually measuring the ROI on all this tech investment?
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  Speaker 0: It means you need a dual focus.
• 12:22
  Speaker 0: Luis Marino Gonzalez and others talked about needing both short lights and long lights.
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  Speaker 0: Short
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  Speaker 1: lights and long lights.
• 12:27
  Speaker 1: Yeah,
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  Speaker 0: short lights are the immediate wins, the efficiency gains you can measure right now.
• 12:32
  Speaker 0: But you also need the long lights, the vision for future transformative value, even if it's harder to quantify today.
• 12:39
  Speaker 0: The key is defining measurable business outcomes first before you chase that long term sustainable scale.
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  Speaker 1: So it all comes back to purpose and measurable outcomes.
• 12:48
  Speaker 1: It
• 12:48
  Speaker 0: seems to.
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  Speaker 1: We've certainly covered a lot of critical ground today from edge data centers enabling low latency AI potentially for those agentic cities.
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  Speaker 0: Right.
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  Speaker 0: All the way to the absolute necessity of ethical purpose driven AI that's built on a foundation of organizational
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  Speaker 1: trust.
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  Speaker 1: The main message feels pretty clear, doesn't it?
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  Speaker 1: Competitive advantage isn't just about being more efficient.
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  Speaker 1: in your little silo anymore.
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  Speaker 0: No, it's about building these integrated scalable systems and they have to be fundamentally rooted in compliance and sustainability and overarching everything in digital trust.
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  Speaker 0: The innovation we saw, it felt as much cultural and human as it did technological.
• 13:27
  Speaker 1: Couldn't agree more.
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  Speaker 1: The Spanish tech scene feels vibrant, practical.
• 13:31
  Speaker 1: focused on getting things done.
• 13:32
  Speaker 1: Lots
• 13:32
  Speaker 0: of collaboration, too.
• 13:34
  Speaker 1: If you enjoyed this deep dive, just a reminder that new episodes drop every two weeks.
• 13:38
  Speaker 1: Also, check out our other editions on cloud insights, sustainability in green ICT, digital products and services, health tech, defense tech, ICT and tech insights, and artificial intelligence.
• 13:48
  Speaker 0: Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into TechShow Madrid, twenty twenty five.
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  Speaker 2: And we'll leave you with a final thought to chew on considering that shift we talked about from a smart city to potentially an agentic city.
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  Speaker 2: Take a look at your own organization.
• 14:03
  Speaker 2: Which complex but repeatable business process do you genuinely believe an AI agent could take over entirely and successfully?
• 14:10
  Speaker 2: Right now, based on the data and infrastructure you already have, something to think about, subscribe so you don't miss our next deep
• 14:17
  Speaker 1: dive.