Tech Show London 2026: Inside Europe’s Largest Infrastructure Hive

by Oleksii Tkachuk | March 16, 2026 11:02 am

Tech Show London brought together thousands of technology professionals at ExCeL London on March 4-5. Our team was there to explore the current state of enterprise infrastructure, connect with product and engineering teams, and collect insights for our operations. From packed exhibition halls to post-session speaker conversations, here’s what we brought back.

Our Team at Tech Show

Two QATestLab delegates were on the ground connecting with visitors about their quality challenges:

• Kristina Smereka[1] – Product Growth Advisor
• Illia Shymanskyi[2] – Marketing Manager

How Tech Show Met Us

Tech Show London 2026 combined five co-located shows under one roof: Cloud & AI Infrastructure, DevOps Live, Cloud & Cyber Security Expo, Big Data & AI World, and Data Centre World. One badge, two days, and a very wide cross-section of the market.

The first thing our team noticed was the atmosphere. This was far from a stereotypical SaaS conference. The crowd was formal, technical, and business-focused. Suits, firm handshakes, badge scanning. Kristina even joked that it was the first event where she felt a tad too casual in her dark jeans.

Day one set a dynamic pace. The venue was packed, and conversations naturally leaned shorter and more introductory – a quick pitch, a LinkedIn connect, a promise to follow up. This high tempo allowed our team to feel the exhibition layout, identify priority stands, and start opening conversations that would continue into day two.

Day two shifted gears. With fewer people around, there was more space to revisit stands, dig a bit deeper, and talk through specifics. Most of our more detailed, technical conversations happened on the second day, building on the connections made the day before.

What We Saw on the Floor

Even though AI was present in most sessions and conversations, it wasn’t the defining theme of the event. The real focus was on infrastructure, data management, cloud platforms, and hardware. AI came up frequently, but always as a layer on top of something more foundational.

What stood out across conversations was how many companies are dealing with growing infrastructure complexity. Whether it’s hybrid cloud environments, live systems with zero tolerance for downtime, or platforms juggling multiple third-party integrations, the underlying challenge is the same: making sure reliability scales with the product. This makes QA a core part of infrastructure planning.

On AI, one area where it felt most relevant was in regulated environments: setting boundaries for what AI agents can access, handling sensitive data with open-source models, and building governance around compliance-critical automation. As we integrate AI into our own QA workflows, these conversations gave us practical reference points.

Many of the companies we spoke with had mature engineering practices and established internal processes. That made conversations more focused and productive – instead of explaining why testing matters, we could go straight into discussing specific approaches, optimization strategies, and areas where an external perspective adds the most value.

A View from Our CTO

We also had a secret weapon at Tech Show: Max Vornovskykh, our CTO, who attended the event independently to focus on AI sessions and strategic conversations. Max came looking for real implementation cases rather than promotional demos, and he found both ends of the spectrum.

After two days on the floor, Max summed it up like this:

The industry is moving in the right direction … Not everything impressed equally, but that sobriety itself signals a maturing market. Tech Show London is worth attending if you calibrate expectations right: it’s more of an environment for networking and strategic market scanning than a source of ready-made answers.

One session that stood out was a talk by Isabell Gruebner from AstraZeneca. She walked through their AI adoption journey from first pilots to enterprise scale. Max noted that AstraZeneca’s path closely mirrored what QATestLab went through with analyzing meeting recordings – same stages, same walls, similar solutions. You can find out more about our approach in his article for How We AI[3].

The event format with no closed doors also made speakers remarkably accessible. You could walk up to anyone right after their session, and that’s how Max ended up in a conversation with Krish Ramineni, Co-Founder and CEO of Fireflies.ai, a tool QATestLab uses daily. When you get to ask questions directly to the person behind a product, it’s a different level of understanding.

Cookies, Sumo Wrestlers, and Conference FOMO

Not every connection starts with an elevator pitch. One of Illia’s most memorable conversations began at the coffee queue, when he grabbed an extra cup and a cookie for someone walking off a nearby stand. That turned into a walk to the stand together, a fun game catching falling tubes (6 out of 10, not bad), and eventually an agreement to connect with the company’s technical team.

As for merch, the event matched its serious tone – no one was handing out mountains of freebies. But a few items did catch our delegates’ eyes. Illia grabbed a sumo wrestler figurine that now lives on his desk, easily the best conference souvenir he’s picked up. Kristina, meanwhile, had her heart set on a sleek transparent shopper bag, but by the time she went to get one, they were all gone. Conference FOMO is real.

Summing Up

Tech Show London was a dense, focused two days. The event confirmed what we’ve been seeing in our own practice: infrastructure complexity is growing, and the conversation around quality is shifting towards testing smarter at scale. That’s the kind of room we want to be in.

Our team is already working through the conversations and the insights we collected. If we crossed paths at the event and haven’t connected yet, feel free to reach out. And follow us on LinkedIn[4] to catch our next destination.

[5]

Related Posts:

• How We Incorporate AI in Our QA Processes[6]
• Testing the Brains of Tomorrow’s Tech – AI and ML[7]
• New job title: The Ethical Hacker on Artificial Intelligence[8]

Source URL: https://blog.qatestlab.com/2026/03/16/tech-show-london-inside-europes-largest-infrastructure-hive/

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