How to Web 2026: Updated Agenda and 3 Themes to Watch

How to Web Conference 2026 takes place in Bucharest from October 6 to 8, at Face Convention Center (Piața Presei Libere). The organizers expect more than 3,000 participants from >40 countries, and the speaker list includes professionals from OpenAI, Meta AI, Google, Stripe, Make, HubSpot, and numerous European investment funds.

October 6 is day 0, with side events and programs dedicated to investment, including the Investors Summit. The conference itself runs on October 7-8, across three parallel stages, with presentations, workshops, roundtables, and live demos.

This year's theme is “What will you build when you can build anything?”.

After going through the agenda, the question can also be phrased differently: when development gets faster, what gets harder? We picked three answers for this round-up.

1. Building Something Useful Is Not Easy

The agenda has some very direct titles:

“The Discipline of Not Building” - Sander Nagtegaal, Co-founder & CEO - Unless AI
“Stop Shipping What Nobody Asked For” - Marcin Klimaszewski, Founder - Product Build Day
“What If Emotional Connection Is What Saves Your Product? - Nesrine Changuel - author and former product lead at Google and Spotify

In fact, among the conference's six meta-themes, the organizers named the rise of “product slop”: features launched only because they were cheap to build, not because they solve something worth solving. As implementation gets simpler, the challenge shifts to choosing the right problem and to distribution.

On September 4, the organizers grouped the agenda into six meta-themes:

1. Productivity: moving beyond the “typing speed” fallacy

2. Future of work or the rise of the high-leverage micro-teams

3. Future of product and strategy – can we, in fact, escape the “product slop” trap?

4. Tech (Agentic): moving from assistants to autonomous systems – but what’s next?

5. Startup and market dynamics

6. Building Europe – time to scale to the global category kings from our ecosystem

Read the How to Web meta-themes on the conference blog

2. ROI Means More Than “Hours Saved”

One of the sessions to watch is “Building for ROI: Guide to Measuring the Impact of AI Initiatives”, presented by Sara Maldon, Head of Business Automation & AI at Make.

Maldon says she refused to use “time saved” as the main metric for Make's AI transformation. She recommends using the metrics the company was already measuring: for example pipeline velocity, win rate, or another operational outcome. She also gives an example: the team built an AI toolkit for generating marketing content, but after seven months adoption was close to zero. In short, “it works” and “it delivers value” are two different tests.

For companies building their AI budgets for 2027 right now, non-technical factors are becoming more important than model capability.

Spotlight: 20 Startups to Watch for Trends

Separate from the talks agenda, How To Web Spotlight will offer a benchmark of early-stage startups that get in front of investors. 20 startups from Eastern Europe are selected for mentoring, 1:1 meetings with investors, and exposure in the Demo Area. The semifinal and final will take place on October 7.

Follow the Spotlight page for the 20 startups

3. Delegating an Entire Workflow to AI Still Takes Work

Teodora Mușatoiu from OpenAI will demonstrate live how Codex can take over a software development task from planning through testing and deployment. The session is presented as a shift from autocomplete mode to end-to-end agent delegation.

Teodora Mușatoiu made a few technical observations in an interview published on September 23 (Source).

High latency in an AI application is not always a model problem. It can be an architecture problem (using a model that is too large for a simple operation, or running tasks sequentially that could have run in parallel)
Evaluating an agent in production is not just about whether it gave the right answer. The cost per successful operation, task completion efficiency, and how the system behaves when something fails also matter. And some situations should be escalated to a human operator, not resolved automatically.

That makes the session interesting for technical leaders and software teams that have moved on to the next step: can they control the entire execution flow of AI agents?

AI Costs in 2026. Not Just LLMs!

At OPTI, we published an analysis of AI costs for the first half of the year in August 2026. The cost per token can fall while investment grows: what matters for business is the cost of the working application, including data, retrieval, infrastructure, routing, and retries. In the Gartner estimate cited, the “AI Models” category represents approx. 1.3% of the broader AI market in 2026.

Read the AI cost analysis

Bonus: Who Buys Technology in CEE?

How to Web is also still an event about startups and investment. On October 6, the Investors Summit brings together more than 250 investors, LPs, executives, and founders, and funds such as Atomico, Creandum, Eurazeo, Notion Capital, Credo Ventures, Cherry Ventures, and Dawn Capital have been announced for the conference.

Ionuț Stanimir, Marketing and Communication Director at BCR, is officially quoted on the local technology market: “Over the past decade, our region has witnessed a heavy focus on paper valuations and funding headlines, yet far less attention on how everyday CEE businesses are actually changing the way they operate through technology built right in their backyard. Securing the next venture round is only part of the equation, but real momentum happens when local enterprises, SMEs and public institutions start buying directly from local startups. That’s the exact dialogue we’re sparking at How to Web Conference this year between founders, investors and prospective buyers.” This is definitely a theme worth following.