The Open Velocity team spent three days at Slush this year. If you are not familiar with it, Slush is a gigantic annual event in Helsinki where Europe’s tech community get together to talk about what they are building, what is changing and what is keeping them awake at night.
It is busy and slightly chaotic, but it is also one of the few places where you can get a real sense of what 12,000+ VCs, CEOs, operators and founders are obsessing about right now.
The core theme running underneath pretty much every talk and conversation was the expectation of acceleration. Speed matters, but the speakers were clear: moving fast only works when you are moving with purpose.
A handful of other themes kept cropping up that we think are worth paying attention to:
1. Agentic AI is moving from theory into real infrastructure
Both our conversations on the floor and the sessions with Anthropic and Google pointed to the same direction of travel. We are still in a largely reactive AI world. We instruct the systems and they respond, but the groundwork for something different is in motion.
Welcome to the world of proactive agents. The systems we saw are beginning to chain reasoning steps, monitor signals and instruct reactive agents to execute without being told what to do next. It is not mainstream yet, but it is no longer theoretical either. The industry seems to be on a two to three-year path where this will become normal. MCP was repeatedly described as the USB of AI – the enabler making this deeper integration possible at speed.
The implications for growth and marketing are significant. As these capabilities mature, we will see agents that track competitors and customers continuously, surface relevant signals faster than teams can and eventually trigger downstream GTM adjustments without manual intervention.
Our takeaway
Run small experiments now. Automate something simple and learn how these tools behave. Your team won’t be playing catch-up later.
2. Creative AI has crossed from novelty to capability
Google DeepMind’s CMO breakfast showcased image and video generation using Gemini 3 which has finally reached a professional threshold. No perceptual drift. No degradation with iteration.
But every speaker reinforced a point we agree with wholeheartedly: AI does not replace the need for creativity, taste or customer understanding. The gap between output-only roles and judgment-based roles will widen quickly. The ceiling has risen for those who know how to orchestrate these tools.
Our takeaway
Creative differentiation will depend on direction, context and taste, not on who has access to the model.
3. Customer centricity is becoming the true competitive moat
Across product, growth and brand sessions, one theme dominated: the companies that win obsess over their customers in ways that cannot be automated.
Discovery interviews remain useful, but founders repeatedly emphasised the need for first-hand experience of customer problems. One multi-time CEO defined the “shape of a serious idea” as something where “someone would be strange not to buy it” because it helps them accomplish a priority task where existing options fall short.
This framework appeared again and again in discussions on product fit, conversion issues and competitive strategy.
Our takeaway
Teams need to be much closer to the messy, lived customer problems they solve. It’s not the tech that’s important; it’s the problem you’re solving. Insight and the ability to act on it is a competitive advantage.
4. Category comprehension is now a major growth bottleneck
A panel conversation with the founder of Temporal brought this into focus. Their platform is a durable execution layer that effectively makes code unbreakable by capturing state at every step. The value is enormous, but only if customers understand what the hell the product actually is.
Their challenge is not product–market fit. It is category comprehension.
This pattern is spreading across AI, infrastructure and complex B2B. Innovation is no longer the bottleneck. Meaning is.
Buyers who do not know how to categorise the solution, which job it solves or where the budget comes from will not buy.
Our takeaway
Awareness becomes key to unlocking a sustainable GTM strategy. If the category does not yet exist in the buyer’s mind, demand will not form.
5. Brand is the best edge in an AI-driven world
Despite the overwhelming focus on AI across the entire event, the most crowded session was on brand and storytelling. That was… surprising to say the least.
With generative AI increasing sameness in products and content, several speakers argued that brand remains a primary competitive lever.
But brand is not your identity or your logo. It is the story you consistently tell through every action and touchpoint. As Musa Tariq put it, “Brand is what people say about you, not what you say about yourself.”
In an AI-enabled world where everyone can produce more, faster, the companies that stand out will be the ones who consistently express a clear, coherent story that helps customers understand who they are and why they matter.
Our takeaway
Purpose, clarity and narrative (basically applying a brand-lens) are becoming core GTM capabilities, not “nice to haves” or fluffy marketing concepts you can ignore.
6. Customer acquisition is getting harder
Slush’s own 2025 Survey showed an important shift:
- 68 per cent of founders say it is easy to identify new prospects
- But only 30 per cent say it is easy to convert them
CACs are rising. Buyers are more sceptical. Competition is sharper. And most teams are being forced to choose between building the product and building the GTM function.
As one CEO put it: “Nobody seems to know how to do GTM. It’s all trial and error.”
The old levers, more content, more ads, broader targeting, no longer have an impact.
Our takeaway
Again, a lot of this interestingly comes back, again, to investment in brand. Companies need sharper value propositions, clarity on how they resonate and reach buyers and a focus on retention and lifetime value.
An interesting thread across talks from Oura, Clay and Bolt reinforced this: engagement drives retention; experimentation matters, but so does restraint; and new roles like the “GTM engineer” point to go-to-market becoming as specialised as product development.
7. Speed is increasing while clarity is collapsing
Many founders spoke about the tension of moving fast while staying aligned. Investors noted, half-jokingly, that the average founder–VC relationship now outlasts the average marriage. The endurance required in this environment is extraordinary.
Hiring ahead of market shifts has become almost impossible. Prioritisation is now a strategic discipline, not an operational one.
Our takeaway
Hire for what the next six months require, not the next six years. Build teams that can handle ambiguity.
(Our own work reflects this reality. More clients are turning to flexible, high-context advisory models because the alternative is trying to hire ahead of a market that will simply not sit still.)
What this means for your growth in 2026 and beyond
- There is a widening commercial gap between businesses that understand customers deeply and those that do not. If you don’t deliver on REAL customer needs/solve their problems, you are irrelevant.
- Go to market (how you serve, reach, convince and acquire customers) is becoming the real moat in markets where the product/service can be replicated quickly
- Brand is only growing in strategic importance; it is no longer a veneer you layer on top.
- Speed without clarity is noise. Clarity without speed is irrelevant
- Taste, judgement and first-hand insight are becoming the differentiators; technology amplifies these, it does not replace them
- As LLMs increasingly influence what customers see, strong first-party data and direct customer relationships will matter more than ever.
