What could four days change?

If you haven’t already, subscribe and join our community in receiving weekly tech insights, updates, and interviews with industry experts straight to your inbox.

Grow your business and expand your perspective – with insights and interviews from the global LEAP community, here in your inbox. 

This week we’re quoting…

Sohaib Chohan (Managing Director at Telo AI)

What Chohan said: 

“For other vendors, my biggest advice would be: don’t leave LEAP with leads, leave with next steps already agreed.”

Four days can change a tech business 

More than just your event strategy, that line speaks to the difference between collecting attention and building continuity.

By the final afternoon of LEAP, the atmosphere changes a little bit. The conversations become more reflective, and founders who arrived carrying polished decks and ambitious targets start comparing notes over coffee before they catch their flights home.

People start wondering what happens after this – but the people who were prepared for that question right from the start are excited. Because for them, the event has become a turning point. 

On the blog this week, we’ve been writing about two very different stories from LEAP 2025. One centred on AI infrastructure operating at enormous scale, and the other began with a simple interaction between a passer-by and a QR code printed on a t-shirt.

Groq and Telo AI approached LEAP with the same understanding: opportunity moves faster when preparation is already in place.

From an MoU to AI infrastructure at scale

Groq’s story illustrates this at infrastructure scale. The company specialises in AI inference (the stage where trained AI models generate responses in real time). As AI systems move from experimentation into everyday enterprise use, inference has become increasingly important because it determines how quickly, reliably, and affordably those systems can operate.

Groq’s LEAP journey: 

• First appeared on the LEAP stage in 2024, where the company signed a memorandum of understanding in Saudi Arabia.
• One year later at LEAP 2025, Groq announced a $1.5 billion Saudi commitment to expand its AI inference infrastructure footprint.
• Also in 2025, demonstrated live AI inference from its Dammam data centre, including ALLaM, the Arabic-first large language model developed by the Saudi Data and AI Authority.

The thing that stands out to us in that sequence is how visible the progression became. A public announcement evolved into operational infrastructure, demonstrated live in front of investors, enterprises, and policymakers gathered in Riyadh.

A QR code, a conversation, a pilot

On a completely different scale, Telo AI followed a similar principle. The company came to LEAP with its enterprise AI call agents. But instead of relying on long explanations about what the technology could eventually become, the team created an immediate experience – with QR codes printed on staff t-shirts, which connected attendees directly to a live AI call interaction.

Chohan said: 

“The QR campaign was one of the most valuable experiments we ran. What we learned is that buyers don’t want to be told about AI, they want to experience it instantly.”

That design choice changed how people interacted with the company. Conversations started with a real experience of the product. And Telo AI carried the same approach into its follow-up process after the event – quickly launching pilots and tailored use cases. 

“We treated every conversation at LEAP as the start of a sales process, not the end of one.” 

So what could four days at LEAP change for you? 

If you come with a clear sense of what you want LEAP to do for you, you can compress months of relationship-building into a few focused days. 

• A single conversation can become a pilot project. 
• A product demonstration can lead to investor interest. 
• An introduction in Riyadh can open the door to an entirely new market.

Because LEAP brings together the people startups spend most of the year trying to reach separately: enterprise buyers, government stakeholders, investors, infrastructure partners, media, and founders building at the edge of fast-moving industries.

And when those groups are all together in the same place, it’s a real opportunity to fast-track your goals. 

The companies that gain the most from LEAP tend to understand this before they arrive. They come with meetings already booked, target accounts already identified, and demonstrations ready to run in real time. They think carefully about what happens after the first interaction, because they know the event itself is only the beginning of the process.

Groq used LEAP to make infrastructure progress visible to the market at exactly the right moment in the AI cycle. Telo AI used it to turn curiosity into active enterprise discussions within days. Both companies treated LEAP as part of a much larger trajectory for growth.

So if you’re planning for LEAP 2026, arrive with ambition – but also with structure. 

Because the future direction of a business can change surprisingly fast when the right people meet at the right time.

Register now to join us at LEAP. 31 August – 3 September 2026. Start the conversations that will drive your next phase of growth.

Have an idea for a topic you'd like us to cover? We're eager to hear it. Drop us a message and share your thoughts.

Catch you next week,

The LEAP Team