02 December 2026 16:15 - 16:45
Dancing with Goliath: Navigating product strategy against frontier labs
Every product team building with AI is one platform update away from a frontier lab quietly shipping their feature for free. This keynote takes Semgrep as the case study: a focused, specialist product going up against OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google, who could fold a version of what it does into their own platforms at any time.
Rather than a head-on fight, the talk frames this as choosing where and how to dance: which parts of the product to defend fiercely, which to concede, and how staying narrower and faster than a frontier lab can be the advantage rather than the weakness. It doubles as a US-versus-UK/Europe positioning story, contrasting how challenger product teams build AI-native strategy differently when they don't have a frontier lab's compute, data, or distribution to fall back on.
Attendee takeaways:
- A framework for deciding what to defend versus concede when a frontier lab could out-build you
- How specialism and speed become a genuine moat against much larger competitors
- What US-versus-UK/Europe positioning looks like in practice for an AI-native product strategy