By Victor Englesson, Partner & Head of Early Stage Technology, Global Head of TMT, and William Evensen, Vice President, EQT Growth

Recently, we brought together more than 75 technology and AI leaders from across EQT’s global tech portfolio - including founders, CTOs, CPOs, and industry experts defining what comes next in Artificial Intelligence.

At EQT, our ambition is to build the most AI-literate investment organization in the world, where we help accelerate every part of EQT with data and AI. We’re weaving intelligence into how we operate - from how we source and evaluate investments to how we future-proof and help grow the companies we back. That’s why our annual AI Summit is an effort to share knowledge across our portfolio and reflect on the trends we’re seeing in AI.

A recurring theme throughout the Summit was clear: AI amplifies what you already are. One of the hardest challenges we see today in tech organizations is often culture change. Leadership remains human; hence flexible and forward-leaning change management is where the next generation of AI-native organizations will distinguish themselves.

We believe we’re entering an era where business success depends less on developing new models and more on orchestrating existing ones. As one speaker put it, you don’t need to train models anymore - you need to orchestrate them. Connected to efficient model orchestration is the treatment of Agents as doers - autonomous systems that act, not just reason. Increasingly we believe in treating Agents like “employees” - they are doers that need to be onboarded, trained, and performance evaluated, just like employees.

We also heard one message repeatedly from both speakers and portfolio leaders: discipline enables speed. From our perspective, the companies winning in AI aren’t just experimenting - they’re embedding decision-making safety, reliability, and clear governance into their DNA. In many ways, discipline and guidelines for safety are the fastest route to intelligence.

Top Takeaways

• AI-native companies win through adaptation, not scale - success comes from continuously learning organizations

• Time for bold bets - the pace of innovation in AI requires companies to actively invest behind strategic AI bets - it is better to invest in your AI capabilities and cry, than to not invest and cry

• Reliability and trust as a competitive advantage - safety, evals, and interpretability are the new moats

• Culture > tools - leadership and best-in-class change management drive AI success

• Strategic governance enables speed - clarity on security and data use accelerates adoption

• Humans + AI define the next decade - collaboration, not replacement, drives value

• A developing race: incumbents vs. AI-natives - incumbents are adopting AI to deliver business value vs. AI-natives racing to get distribution, data and proprietary feedback loops

We left the Summit energized by one clear insight: the future belongs to teams that combine trust, speed, and purpose. Winning in AI isn’t about scale - it’s about building learning organizations that adapt faster than the world around them.

Victor Englesson, Partner & Head of Early Stage Technology, Global Head of TMT

William Evensen, Vice President, EQT Growth