Cerebras, PwC and Adobe executives join the DeepFest speaker roster

DeepFest 2026's confirmed speaker list puts Andrew Feldman, chief executive and co-founder of Cerebras Systems, alongside Joe Atkinson, global chief artificial intelligence officer at PwC; Luc Dammann, president of EMEA at Adobe; and Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City College of New York. Four names, four different arguments about artificial intelligence, which is roughly how a conference of this kind is assembled. Feldman represents the hardware position. Cerebras builds wafer-scale processors — a single enormous chip cut from a whole silicon wafer rather than dozens of separate dies — on the argument that the bottleneck in training and serving large models is moving data between chips rather than raw arithmetic. It is a minority bet against the industry's dominant architecture, and it makes Feldman one of the few chief executives in the field with a genuinely contrarian technical case to put. Atkinson's brief is the opposite end. A global chief AI officer at a professional services firm spends his time on the question enterprises actually struggle with: not which model, but how an organisation of hundreds of thousands of people changes the way it works, and what happens to the assurance and audit obligations when it does. PwC is also, as a firm, one of the largest single deployers of these tools internally, which makes its position more than advisory. Dammann brings the creative-software view, and Adobe has an unusually direct relationship with the Saudi market: the company granted free access to a package of its AI tools across the kingdom's population , a commitment it valued at $4 billion. An Adobe executive speaking in Riyadh is speaking to a country where the company has made a large distribution bet. Kaku is the outlier and the crowd draw. He is a physicist and populariser rather than an AI practitioner, and his function on a programme like this is to widen the frame beyond the next product cycle. He also appears on LEAP's own main stage, which carries chief executives from AMD, Cisco and HUMAIN . DeepFest runs its own stages inside the same Riyadh venue as LEAP, with more than 180 speakers and 120 exhibiting AI brands . Cerebras also appears on the exhibitor and sponsor roster, which is the usual arrangement: a keynote slot and a stand are bought together. What has not been published is what any of them said. Speaker confirmations are made in advance of a programme; the content of the sessions is not, and none of these four has been reported making a specific announcement from a DeepFest stage. Anyone using this roster as a guide to the week should read it as a statement of what the organisers wanted the agenda to cover, which is hardware economics, enterprise adoption, creative tooling and the long view. TechScoop is reporting from LEAP 2026 in Riyadh.