Web Summit returns to Lisbon from Monday, November 9 to Thursday, November 12, at the MEO Arena and the FIL exhibition halls in Parque das Nações, as listed by the organizers and by the European Commission's HaDEA agency, which is taking part. Retail to See will be there for all four days. This is the note we file before we walk in: what the organizers are promising, why a retail paper is going to a technology conference, and what we will be checking on the floor.

Why we are going

Web Summit is not a retail show, and it has never claimed to be one. It is where the technology that retail ends up buying is shown to the people who fund it, usually a year or two before it reaches a buyer's desk. We traced that pattern across the ten Lisbon editions since the move from Dublin and across the circuit in Rio, Doha and Vancouver. Last year's Lisbon edition counted 71,386 attendees and a record 1,857 investors, as reported by Portugal Global and by Web Summit. A crowd that size, with that much capital in it, is where the next checkout, the next fulfillment robot and the next retail media platform will be pitched first.

A program with a clear accent

The most striking thing about the 2026 program so far is where it comes from. Of the speakers featured on Web Summit's own homepage, most come from Chinese AI and robotics companies, or from companies that started there: Tao Zhang, co-founder of Manus AI; Li Chen, co-founder of Unitree; Dahai Li of ModelBest; Fei Xu, chief marketing officer of Xiaomi Group; Leo Haojun Wang of Pony.ai; Alan Shen of MiniMax; and Ling Ge of Tencent. Replit's Michele Catasta is the exception. And two of the featured "speakers" are not people at all: AgiBot's A3 humanoid and Galbot's G1, listed with job titles of "Humanoid Robot" and "Embodied Large-Model Robot".

That is a deliberate editorial choice, and it follows the one moment of the 2025 edition that everyone remembered: Chinese humanoid robots dancing on the floor, which People's Daily and Euronews both covered as the scene-stealer of the week. Putting two machines on the speaker list is a statement of intent, and the risk is obvious. A robot that dances is a demonstration, not a product, and the distance between a stage and a stockroom is exactly where retail technology tends to fail. We will be asking the robotics companies one question that a keynote rarely answers: who is paying for a unit today, and to do what.

The Western names are fewer so far but closer to commerce. Third-party listings name Cloudflare's Matthew Prince, Reddit's Jen Wong, Pinterest's Claudine Cheever and Amazon's Danielle Perszyk, along with the European Commission's Henna Virkkunen, as reported by Dealroom and Seedtable. We treat those names as provisional until they appear on the official schedule.

What we will be looking for

Four things, in order of how close they sit to a shelf.

Whether the robotics companies talk about stores at all. Humanoids have been sold to the industry as a warehouse story first. If anyone on the floor has a store deployment with numbers attached, that is the news of the week for our readers.

What the commerce sessions say about agents. Last year the commerce program still talked about retention and acquisition, as social.plus did with its "Why Retention Beats Acquisition" session. This year the question is whether an AI agent buying on a customer's behalf is presented as a channel retailers must serve or a threat they must manage. Both answers have consequences for retail media, which depends on a human seeing the ad.

What European regulation sounds like in the room. A European commissioner on the same program as a wall of Chinese AI and robotics companies is a conversation about market access, whatever the session title says, and that touches every retailer selling cross-border into the EU.

And where the investors go. The record investor count last year was the most important number of the edition. We will be watching which startups draw them, and how many of those sell to retailers.

We will report from Lisbon from Monday to Thursday.

Sources: Web Summit, homepage and "Meet our 2026 speakers", consulted October 30, 2026; Web Summit, "We'll return to Lisbon for Web Summit 2026"; European Health and Digital Executive Agency, "Web Summit 2026"; Portugal Global, Web Summit 2025 record attendance, November 2025; Web Summit, "Record investors at Web Summit 2025, bucking industry trends"; People's Daily, "Chinese robotics steals spotlight at Web Summit in Lisbon", November 14, 2025; Euronews, "Dancing robots take centre stage at Lisbon's Web Summit", November 12, 2025; Dealroom, "Web Summit 2026"; Seedtable, "Web Summit Lisbon 2026, speakers and companies"; social.plus, "Francesca Gargaglia took the Commerce Stage at Web Summit 2025".