This report is a collaborative publication by McKinsey & Company and Boardwave to identify segments of the AI market where Europe is demonstrating emerging promise.

For founders and leaders of growing technology businesses, building the right board is only part of the challenge. Once the right people are around the table, the real question is whether they are helping the business make better decisions.

AI can write a flawless CV in seconds, so every candidate now looks like a star. Here's how to find the ones who genuinely are.

Few people have reached the top of politics, technology and now finance quite like Boardwave Patron, Sir Nick Clegg, who has gone from Britain's coalition government, to the top table at Facebook, to the venture capital frontline of Europe's AI ambitions.

From a tough lumber town in British Columbia to the boards of some of the world’s leading companies, Sherry Coutu has spent four decades proving that where you start has nothing to do with where you end up.

We’ve all heard the rhetoric: Europe is good at founding companies and bad at keeping them. A Boardwave panel of a former minister, a stock-exchange insider, an early-stage investor and an economist thrashed out why, and disagreed on the cure.

Three years in the making, a genuine world first, and a really big thing, not just for Boardwave’s members of course, but more broadly for scaling founders in the ever hotter UK tech scene, which is definitely having its moment.

From a kitchen-table charity to the London Stock Exchange, Eben Upton has built Raspberry Pi into a billion-pound business that has sold tens of millions of computers - while rescuing the vanishing generation of programmers it was created for, and doing it with a small team he hires slowly and rarely loses.

Rob Elkin is the co-founder of Rational Partners and a technology leader whose career spans CTO and senior engineering roles across consumer technology, edtech, and mobile. He was CTO at Busuu, where he moved the business towards an exit that was the largest for EdTech in European history at €385M, and led technology and product for the UK business at Just Eat.

Almost every piece of advice about AI starts with the same word: faster. Two days in the Berkshire woods made the case for the opposite, and surfaced a tension almost every leader is wrestling with.

What Silicon Valley Is Really Saying About the Future of Software.

SovAI is a government investment unit that takes equity stakes in businesses on commercial terms. The taxpayer is effectively the limited partner, and the expectation is that these investments generate returns. 

The final panel of Parliament's AI inquiry examined a familiar UK pattern: strong early momentum, thin domestic backing at scale, and too many reasons for the best companies to look elsewhere as they grow.

Energy costs, grid delays and infrastructure uncertainty are emerging as serious tests of UK competitiveness. Parliament's AI inquiry heard the evidence.

On 14 April 2026, the Business and Trade Select Committee opened oral evidence for its inquiry into Artificial Intelligence, Business and the Future of the Workforce with a panel focused on frontier AI and policy. Giving evidence were Professor Neil Lawrence, DeepMind Professor of Machine Learning at the University of Cambridge, and Dame Wendy Hall, Director of the Web Science Institute at the University of Southampton.

As AI changes how work gets done, the most valuable employees will be those who can own outcomes, orchestrate systems and direct expertise. Simon Hill explores why the rise of the “Full Stack Employee” demands a rethink of how companies hire, structure roles and create value.

We’ve turned the biggest themes from the Silicon Valley Tour into an Insights Report for the wider Boardwave community, designed to be a practical guide for tech and AI leaders scaling across Europe.

There is a conversation circulating through boardrooms, investor committees and tech conferences that goes roughly like this: SaaS is dead. AI is going to eat the entire software industry. The seat-based model is finished. If you haven’t already rebuilt everything around agentic AI, you are already too late. Like many sweeping narratives, this one contains a significant kernel of truth wrapped in a layer of exaggeration. Let me offer a more measured view - from someone who has spent decades building, running and investing in enterprise software companies, and who cares deeply about the future of European technology.