The Gap I Didn't See Coming

A week in Copenhagen, and the question I came home with.

A year ago, this week would have broken me.

Four sessions across four days. Two co-presentations with Microsoft. An expert-led session of my own. And the big one: telling the Sunrise AI story to the entire Volaris Bacchus portfolio. Combined audience just shy of a thousand people. I'd have run from it.

Last Friday, I wrote a LinkedIn post about that contradiction. About being an introvert who'd somehow ended up signed up for a week of public speaking at a scale he'd never done before. About quiet thinking being my superpower, not something I needed to fix. The post landed harder than anything I've ever written, which surprised me at the time. It surprises me less now, because I think it caught something true about where a lot of people are sitting right now: doing serious work, and quietly wondering whether they're allowed to stand up and talk about it.

So I went to Copenhagen. Here's what actually happened.

The Fear Didn't Go Anywhere

It showed up on Sunday afternoon and sat with me through the flight. Through the welcome party. Through the rehearsals on Monday morning. It was there when I walked on stage for the first session. I'd half-expected, in some optimistic corner of my brain, that the work would somehow override the dread. That domain expertise would dissolve the nerves. It didn't.

What did happen, and this is the bit I didn't see coming, is that the fear stopped being something I had to manage. It started feeding the energy instead of stealing it. By the portfolio spotlight on day three, I wasn't talking myself onto the stage. I was bursting to get on it. To tell the Sunrise story. To say out loud what seventeen production AI products and two next-gen platforms in five months actually means. To put numbers on the table that, until that moment, had only lived inside internal slide decks.

I'd call it fear-as-fuel, except that phrase has been a self-help platitude for 25 years. The cliché is that you push through the fear. What actually happens, when the work is good enough and the room is warm enough, is that the fear stops resisting you and starts moving in the same direction. The thing you were dreading becomes the thing you're using.

That's not something I can take back to a boardroom and put on a slide. But it's one heck of a useful thing I learned at Quadrants 2026 in Copenhagen.

The Talk Landed

Solvyr, the AI suite I've been building at Sunrise, had a room of portfolio leaders leaning in, not just listening. The closing question of my spotlight session was Who is your Chris? That question kicked off conversations that carried on through lunch, through the bar, through every hallway and breakfast queue for the rest of the week. It's still arriving in my LinkedIn DMs as I type this.

But the conversations told me something I didn't go to Copenhagen expecting to hear.

They weren't really about whether AI matters. That argument is over. Nobody at Quadrants needed convincing that AI is going to change software businesses. Nobody was asking me to justify the spend, or to defend the architecture, or to talk about hallucinations. The questions were quieter than that. And harder.

They were about the gap.

The Gap

The gap between knowing AI matters and actually letting your people build with it.

The gap between the strategy session and the Tuesday morning where someone with domain expertise is given permission to try something.

The gap between a slide deck about innovation and the messy, half-broken, surprisingly good first version that someone shipped on a Friday afternoon because nobody told them they couldn't.

I left Copenhagen convinced that the question for our portfolio, and probably for any portfolio of vertical software businesses right now, isn't whether to move on AI. It's how soon we let our people build.

That sentence sounds simple. It isn't.

Why "Letting People Build" Is Harder Than It Sounds

Letting people build means accepting that the first version will be ugly. It means accepting that the person who can do this might not be the person you'd expect. It might not be a developer. It might not even be on the engineering team. It might be someone with twenty years of domain expertise and a willingness to spend evenings learning how to talk to a model. The shape of a builder is changing, and a lot of organisations are still recruiting for the old shape.

It also means accepting that the work won't fit the existing approval process. Most enterprise approval processes are designed to manage risk in a world where building things is slow and expensive. AI tooling has changed both of those things. If your governance model assumes a six-month build cycle, and someone can prototype the thing in a weekend (I do this all the time), the governance model has quietly become the bottleneck, not the safety net it was meant to be.

Nobody in Copenhagen said any of that out loud. But it was the unspoken half of every conversation I had after the spotlight session. People in vertical software businesses know AI is going to reshape what they sell. They aren't all sure their organisations are set up to let that reshaping happen from the inside.

I'd argue that's the single most consequential question vertical software leadership teams are sitting with right now. And the longer it goes unanswered, the more likely the answer becomes "it'll be reshaped by someone else, on terms we didn't write."

I Didn't Get to Copenhagen Alone

Two people deserve more credit than they'll ever ask for.

Ian Reay has backed this work with a quiet confidence that's mattered more than he probably knows. He doesn't need to be loud about it. He's been the through-line in the Volaris arc of the last twelve months, the one who saw what was being built before most people had the language for it, and the one who kept making space for it without making a song and dance of having done so.

Irina Glodeanu. First at the AI Accelerator in Denver back in March. Then again this week in Copenhagen. One of those rare voices that affirms the journey without ever needing to take credit for it. Senior, busy, generous with attention, and completely without the political reflexes that usually come with that combination.

Both of them have been 'my Chris', in different ways. The closing question of my spotlight was Who is your Chris? I asked it of the portfolio, but the honest answer for me is that I've had two of them, and I wouldn't have got here without either.

Everyone needs one. Some of you have one already and might not have realised that's what they are. Some of you are someone else's Chris, and could probably stand to do that more openly than you do.

Home Now

The week was exhausting. I came back with a different relationship to public speaking than I left with, which is something I didn't know was on offer. The work continues. Solvyr keeps shipping. The Sunrise AI story keeps getting written.

And the gap I went to Copenhagen worried about, between what's possible and what we're allowed to build, feels for the first time like it might be closing. Not because of any one talk, or any one product, or any one room of senior people leaning in. Because the conversations have shifted underneath us. People are asking the right questions now.

That's worth a flight to Denmark.