ScotSoft 2025
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ScotSoft 2025

By ScotlandIS

Scotland's leading technology conference, a festival of ideas, innovation and talent

Date and time

Location

Edinburgh International Conference Centre

150 Morrison Street Edinburgh EH3 8EE United Kingdom

Agenda

8:30 AM - 9:00 AM

Registration

Tea, coffee and breakfast rolls on arrival.

9:00 AM - 9:05 AM

Welcome

Karen Meechan, CEO, ScotlandIS

9:05 AM - 9:55 AM

Ministerial Address

Kate Forbes MSP, Deputy First Minister

Richard Lochhead MSP, Minister for Business

9:55 AM - 10:55 AM

Keynote - Adventures in Scottish IT

Peter Palmer, Tech Entrepreneur

Peter Palmer (MBE, MA, MSc, DPhil, MBCS) was a founder of Spider Systems in 1983 and AXON Networks in 1992. Both were successfully sold in the mid-1990s. In the late 1980s, he was a founder of Scotl...

11:00 AM - 11:20 AM

Coffee Break

Tea, coffee and biscuits will be provided, with the chance to network and browse the exhibition hall.

11:30 AM - 12:10 PM

Attacks and Defences for LLMs

Daniel Llewellyn, Director of Technology, CreateFuture

With the incredible speed that developers have been integrating AI into their applications, the tools we have to prevent attackers from abusing AI has not kept up, and in fact unlike other vulnerabil...

11:30 AM - 12:10 PM

Designing Your Ideal Agentic Employee

Pete Gordon, Principal Consultant, Waracle

In today's AI-powered workplace, sophisticated Large Language Models (LLMs) are transforming from tools to teammates. This session reveals a proven methodology for creating "Agentic Employees" – AI s...

11:30 AM - 12:10 PM

Reverse Investor Pitch: What Investors Can Do for You

Fraser Lusty, Investment Director, Equity Gap

Joshua Walter, Partner, Osney Capital

Gillian Fleming, Co-Founder, Mint Ventures

Alex Lusty, Gatekeeper, Gabriel Investment Syndicate

In this unique session, investors take the stage to pitch to you — Scotland’s innovative start-ups and SMEs. Hear directly what support, funding, and expertise they offer, the types of businesses the...

11:30 AM - 12:10 PM

10k and Counting: Insights and Trends from Cloud Native London

Cheryl Hung, Senior Director, Arm

In 2017 Cheryl Hung started a meetup, Cloud Native London, with no speakers, no venue and no attendees. Just 7 weeks later, over 100 people turned up to the first event. Now Cloud Native London has g...

11:30 AM - 12:10 PM

There's No Such Thing as Plain Text

Dylan Beattie, Founder and Director of Ursatile

Software is complicated. Machine learning, microservice architectures, message queues… every few months there’s another revolutionary idea to consider, another framework to learn. And underneath so m...

11:30 AM - 12:10 PM

Strategic Thinking and Action - Tools and Techniques for Business Success

Tracy Pound, Managing Director, Maximity Limited

Tracy will cover the key topics of knowing your customer, solution-based selling, utilising every available marketing channel, staying different, expanding your reach, and the challenges associated w...

12:20 PM - 1:00 PM

Beyond Compliance: Leading the Industry and Transforming Developer Experience

John Ockenden, Senior Full-Stack Engineering, Accenture

Serverless applications have the benefit that cloud providers manage the underlying infrastructure, but they can be difficult for E2E testing. In this talk, John will look at patterns which can make...

12:20 PM - 1:00 PM

The Carbon Challenge of Digital Applications: Scale, Measurement, and Action

Sumit Ganju, Chief Engineering Officer, GoCodeGreen

Digitisation has made the IT systems sector a growing contributor to organisational carbon impact, with software, cloud infrastructure, AI systems, and workloads driving substantial energy demand and...

12:20 PM - 1:00 PM

£750m for a Supercomputer?!

Mark Parsons, Director of EPCC, Edinburgh University

The UK Government announced in the June Spending Review that a new £750m supercomputer will be coming to Scotland. The next national supercomputing service will be hosted and operated by EPCC, the Na...

12:20 PM - 1:00 PM

From Theory to Practice: Lessons from the AI Integration Frontier

Jamie Graves, Managing Director, L-Point Ltd

Drawing from his career building AI-powered products, this talk distills key principles that separate successful AI integrations from failures. Jamie will share practical frameworks for determining ...

12:20 PM - 1:00 PM

Cyber Threats in the Supply Chain: How Major UK Retailers Got Attacked

Robin Klusman, Manager Security Architect, Resillion

Supply chain attacks are making headlines, most recently with the attack that shut down Marks and Spencer for several weeks. Attackers are taking advantage of the additional attack surface that is th...

12:20 PM - 1:00 PM

Agentic AI: Software Steps into the Labour Market

Gary Crawford, Founder/Chief Advisor, Owendale Advisory

In 2011, Marc Andreessen famously declared, "Software is eating the world." But Andreessen wasn't entirely correct: software merely ate the tasks of storing and retrieving information—until now. Age...

1:00 PM - 1:50 PM

Lunch

2:00 PM - 2:40 PM

Coping with Constant Change: The Realities of Embedding AI

Richard Marshall, Principal, Concept Gap Ltd

Software environments have always been evolving, but the rate of change in the last couple of years has grown exponentially. This creates a massive problem for developers looking to create a stable, ...

2:00 PM - 2:40 PM

Code Meets Creds: Navigating the Identity Collision Course

Chris Owen, Managing Director, dotnext Europe

As software eats the world, identity is quietly becoming its favorite snack. In today’s DevOps-fueled, API-saturated world, the line between development and security has not just blurred—it’s bucklin...

2:00 PM - 2:40 PM

Pushing the Limits: Exploring 1-Bit Large Language Models for Efficient AI

Marcin Wawryszczuk, Principal AI/ML Architect, Andersen

1-bit LLMs aim to drastically reduce computational cost while maintaining useful performance. Quantisation has evolved from 8-bit to 4-bit, and now researchers are pushing the limits with 1-bit repre...

2:00 PM - 2:40 PM

The Race for Quantum Computing

Dr Mark Jackson, Senior Quantum Evangelist, Quantinuum

In this session, we'll unpack what quantum computing really means for business and finance – and how companies, banks and governments can prepare today for its impact. Progress in quantum computing i...

2:00 PM - 2:40 PM

The Founder’s Revenue Trap: Why Great Products Don’t Sell Themselves

Fraser Morrison, Founder and CEO, 1000Steps

Many tech founders believe, “if we build it, they will come.” The reality? They don’t. Most companies that manage to break out of the first phase grow through founder-led selling. That’s a powerful ...

2:00 PM - 2:40 PM

Discovering ES|QL, the New Query Language for Elasticsearch

Emmanuel Demey, Web Developer Freelancer

Elasticsearch has long been a powerful tool for searching, aggregating, and analyzing data at scale. With the introduction of ES|QL (Elasticsearch Query Language), a new chapter begins. ES|QL brings ...

2:50 PM - 3:30 PM

Patching the Pipeline: Aligning Python Engineers and SQL Analysts

Ceri Shaw, Fractional CTO

Technical leaders often find themselves managing teams where Python engineers and SQL analysts operate in silos with misaligned goals and workflows leading to data teams struggling to untangle the da...

2:50 PM - 3:30 PM

Gamifying the Future: Transforming Digital Engagement in Scottish Widows

Rose Ulldemolins, Engineer Lead, Lloyds Banking Group

Derek Shanks, Director: Digital Technology, Lloyds

Join Derek Shanks and Rose Ulldemolins as they explore how Scottish Widows is reimagining the digital experience through the lens of gamification and next-gen app design. Derek will share the strate...

2:50 PM - 3:30 PM

Co-Innovating in the Cloud: Lessons from Scaling AI in Partnership

Scott Henderson, SVP Platform Engineering , Craneware

This session shares technical insights from real-world co-innovation at hyperscale — drawing on experience collaborating with Microsoft to deliver AI-powered solutions in sensitive data environments....

2:50 PM - 3:30 PM

How Hackers are Using AI (and What We Can Do About It)

Chris Butler, Resilience Director, Databarracks

In this talk, Chris will explore the many different ways hackers are using AI to enhance and accelerate their attacks. From deepfakes tricking staff into sending money, to phishing emails and ransom ...

2:50 PM - 3:30 PM

AI Security Starts With Your Team: Building Cyber Resilience Through Training

Gerasimos Marketos, Chief Product Officer, Hack the Box

Edouardos Petriadis, Solutions Engineer, Hack the Box

In this session, Gerasimos and Edouardos will explore how organisations can build end-to-end resilience - from protecting AI systems, to augmenting human defenders, to preparing for the rise of auton...

3:35 PM - 3:55 PM

Coffee Break

Tea, coffee and biscuits will be provided, with the chance to network and browse the exhibition hall.

4:00 PM - 5:00 PM

Keynote - Pivot Point: Back to the Future

K D Adamson, Futurist and Ecocentrist

The age of technology optimisation is over, and the age of resilience has begun. In a future shaped by moralism, meta-mercantilism, and meatspace global business was a great start-up, but it isn’t g...

5:00 PM - 5:15 PM

Conference Close

Karen Meechan, CEO, ScotlandIS

Good to know

Highlights

  • 9 hours
  • In person

Refund Policy

No Refunds

About this event

Science & Tech • High Tech

A full-day event for technical professionals and leaders in the sector. As one of Scotland’s biggest software conferences for over 25 years, ScotSoft allows you to connect, learn, and innovate while meeting new talent at the Young Software Engineer of the Year Awards.

This year, the event offers an unparalleled opportunity to gain invaluable insights from industry leaders, collaborate with peers, and explore the latest industry trends.

Frequently asked questions

Organized by

ScotlandIS

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£150
Sep 25 · 8:30 AM GMT+1