The past stretch of tech events didn’t feel like fireworks so much as pressure building under the surface. Across conference halls, demo stages, and side rooms with bad coffee and very good conversations, a few patterns kept repeating. AI was everywhere, obviously, but the tone has changed. Less hype theater, more operational realism. Speakers talked less about what models might do someday and more about what breaks when you actually deploy them at scale: power draw, latency, governance, cost ceilings that sneak up on you three quarters later.