The end of June in Tel Aviv had that dense, slightly electric conference feel, the kind where hotel lobbies and expo halls blur together and everyone seems to be half in a conversation and half already thinking about the next one. On June 30, the Microsoft AI Tour in Tel Aviv gathered developers, enterprise teams, founders, and researchers around a very focused set of themes: how AI is actually moving into production systems, not just staying in demo mode. There were long stretches of discussion around copilots, AI agents, and cloud-scale deployment, but also a quieter undercurrent about governance and trust, which, honestly, kept coming up more than expected. The tone was less hype and more “this is already here, now what do we do with it.”
Not far in time and almost overlapping in spirit, New Tech 2026, running from June 30 through July 1, expanded the lens outward. Where Microsoft’s event felt tightly anchored in one ecosystem, New Tech felt like a wider cross-section of the industry pressing in from every direction at once. AI was still the dominant thread, but it sat alongside hardware innovation, cybersecurity shifts, semiconductor momentum, and the constant churn of startup pitches that feel both ambitious and slightly chaotic in that very Tel Aviv way. There was a sense that every hallway conversation was either about scaling something globally or rebuilding something from scratch, sometimes both in the same breath.
What made the two events feel connected, even without trying to be, was how similar the underlying narrative had become. Whether it was enterprise AI deployment on stage at Microsoft’s event or startup demos at New Tech, the conversation kept circling the same transition point: moving from experimentation to systems that actually carry real workloads, real money, and real risk. You could hear it in the way speakers talked about infrastructure almost as much as models, and in how often security and data integrity showed up even in talks that were supposedly about innovation.
By the time the second day of New Tech wrapped up on July 1, the overlap between the two gatherings almost felt intentional, even if it wasn’t. Tel Aviv was doing what it often does during these weeks, acting less like a backdrop and more like a pressure cooker for ideas that are still forming but already being deployed. And walking out of those venues, there was that familiar mix of optimism and uncertainty, not polished or final, just very active, like something is clearly accelerating but nobody is entirely sure where the edges will settle.
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