Beyond the hype: How to align your leadership team when AI moves faster than people | By Kuma Partners

🚀 A Web Summit side-event with the people who decide where AI goes next. Investors, executives and founders.

🎯 No Web Summit ticket required, only registration here.

🚀 Evening social event here: https://luma.com/tjed8ali

📋 What’s on the agenda?

What happens when you hand 100x tools to an organisation that struggles to coordinate?

Faster software does not save an executive team that cannot agree. It simply means people show up to the boardroom with five different AI-generated plans, no consensus, and weeks lost to corridor politics. The tools made producing work instantaneous, but leaders still have to look each other in the eye and make the hard calls.

In this private 45-minute briefing, Dr Sven Mulfinger examines the real operating bottleneck inside high-growth companies: how leadership teams actually align, decide, and execute when technology moves faster than human habits.

Drawing on his research with IESE and IE Business School and advisory work with fast-growing scaleups, Sven connects two critical layers:

First, the enterprise paradox of AI speed: why layering hyper-fast tools over ambiguous decision rights creates decision drag, and what leadership teams must change in their governance to move with genuine velocity.

Second, the cognitive reality of company builders: why many founders think in non-linear ways, displaying strong traits of ADHD, giftedness, dyslexia, or autism. While these cognitive preferences provide an extraordinary edge in the AI era—unmatched pattern recognition, rapid ideation, and bold risk-taking—they often create whiplash for teams built for predictable, linear execution. Sven breaks down where communication fractures and shares concrete operating rules to keep visionary leaders and operational teams in lockstep.

The session concludes with an open, off-the-record sparring session under the Chatham House rule, addressing live leadership friction directly with the room.

The Room

Strictly capped at 30 places and reserved for:

• Venture-backed Founders and CEOs (Seed to Series C)
• C-Suite Executives and Managing Directors
• VC General Partners and Portfolio Operating Partners

Agenda (45 Minutes)

• 15 mins | The Speed Paradox & Decision Governance: Why AI accelerates organizational friction, and how executive teams must redesign decision ownership to keep pace.
• 15 mins | The Non-Linear Founder Dynamic: The cognitive edge of divergent minds, where team alignment breaks down, and how to build operating rhythms that protect execution velocity.
• 15 mins | Executive Sparring: Candid, off-the-record discussion tackling live leadership and board challenges from the room.

🎤 Speaker

Dr Sven Mulfinger is a Managing Partner at Kuma Partners and an executive advisor. In research collaboration with IESE and IE Business School, he analyses non-linear cognition and decision systems in leadership, helping scaling founders and enterprise boards eliminate leadership drag, resolve co-founder gridlock, and protect decision velocity.

Who this is for

🧭 Founders 📣 Executives 💰 Investors

Presented by:

www.kuma.partners

📍 Where

Wednesday 11 November 2026 4pm to 4:45pm Lisbon time

Sixt Research Centre Av. Dom João II 49 Arts Hotel & Business Centre, Block A, 8th floor Parque das Nações, Lisbon