Twenty Years On, Webrazzi Goes All-In on AI — And Istanbul Is Where It Happens

When Arda Kutsal launched Webrazzi in 2006, Turkey’s tech ecosystem was a fraction of what it is today. Two decades on, the platform that has chronicled every major moment in Turkish digital business is marking its anniversary with its most ambitious event yet: Webrazzi AI 2026, an Istanbul conference dedicated entirely to artificial intelligence and its real-world impact on business. We preview what to expect — and why this event matters far beyond its home city.

There is a particular kind of authority that only longevity can confer. When Webrazzi publishes a piece of Turkish tech news, it carries two decades of institutional weight behind it. When Webrazzi organises a conference, Turkey’s technology and startup community shows up — because Webrazzi has been in the room, reliably and independently, for every significant moment in the country’s digital transformation since 2006. Founded that year by Arda Kutsal, the platform has grown from a technology blog into the country’s pre-eminent digital media and events organisation for the intersection of business, startup culture, and emerging technology.

For its 20th anniversary, Webrazzi has made a choice that reflects both the moment and the institution: the flagship event of 2026 will be Webrazzi AI 2026, a conference dedicated entirely to the impact of artificial intelligence on business. The date is 8 April 2026. The venue is Wyndham Grand İstanbul Levent Hotel & Conference Center — one of Istanbul’s most established corporate event spaces, in the heart of the city’s business district. The ambition, as Webrazzi’s own description puts it, is to stage ‘the first AI agenda crafted at this scale’ in Turkey — bringing together the decision-makers, technologists, and entrepreneurs who are translating AI from a phenomenon into a set of real, working business outcomes.

Why AI, Why Now, Why Istanbul

The timing of Webrazzi AI 2026 is not accidental. The conference is being staged in a week — and a month, and a year — when artificial intelligence is generating more noise, more controversy, and more genuine commercial impact than at any previous point in its history. The same week that OpenAI signed a Pentagon deal that cost it 2.5 million boycotting users, Anthropic shot to number one on the App Store, Iran deployed AI-generated propaganda across its domestic platforms, and every major tech company announced quarterly results in which AI investment was the dominant narrative — for better and for worse.

Against that backdrop, Webrazzi’s decision to make AI the entire subject of its 20th anniversary conference is a statement of intent. Not a panel at a broader summit, not a sidebar discussion: a full-day, purpose-built event in which every speaker, every session, every networking conversation is oriented around a single question. As the event’s own framing puts it: ‘AI adaptation speed is becoming one of the most critical factors determining a company’s competitiveness.’ That is not a prediction. It is a description of what is already happening across Turkish business — in banking, retail, healthcare, insurance, manufacturing, energy, logistics, education, and professional services, all of which feature explicitly in Webrazzi AI 2026’s agenda.

“AI is no longer just a technology. It is a new engine of growth, transforming business models, efficiency, cost structures and value creation. AI adaptation speed is now one of the most critical factors in a company’s competitiveness.”

The Speakers: Banking, Consulting, Cloud and the Cutting Edge

The speaker lineup announced for Webrazzi AI 2026 reflects the event’s deliberate positioning at the intersection of enterprise adoption and frontier innovation. This is not a conference of futurists predicting what AI might eventually do. It is a conference of practitioners — CIOs, managing directors, unit heads, founders — who are already doing it, and who have specific, accountable stories to tell about what has worked, what has not, and what comes next.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Berrin Özselçuk  General Manager  ·  Amazon Web Services (AWS) Turkey
• Sezgin Lüle  Deputy CEO  ·  Türkiye İş Bankası
• Çağlar Gülşeni  Unit Manager, AI Competence Centre  ·  Türkiye İş Bankası
• Cem Aracı  CIO  ·  PwC Türkiye
• Simin Toker  Director  ·  PwC Türkiye
• Gökhan Mataracı  Innovation & Technology Advisory Leader, Partner  ·  KPMG Türkiye
• Prof. Derya Unutmaz  Professor  ·  Jackson Laboratory, USA
• Hakan Kul  Country Manager Turkey  ·  Dassault Systèmes
• Dr. Serhan Yılmaz  Executive Vice President  ·  Doğuş Technology
• Bahar Serçin Halefoğlu  Founder & CEO  ·  ALSE Data
• Berkay Özuygur  Co-Founder & CEO  ·  Parny
• Burcu Ağma  Co-Founder  ·  Connectmind AI
• Rudi Dökmecioğlu  Founder  ·  Tmob AI Studio
• Selim Yörük  Founder  ·  Next Big App
• Umut Özbağcı  CEO  ·  Datassist
• Ussal Şahbaz  Managing Partner  ·  Ussal Danışmanlık
• Yüce Zerey  AI, Marketing & Growth Specialist

The diversity of the lineup is worth pausing on. The presence of AWS Turkey’s General Manager signals the event’s ambition to connect Turkish enterprise AI adoption with the global cloud infrastructure on which that adoption depends. İş Bankası’s Deputy CEO and AI Competence Centre head together signal the depth of commitment that Turkey’s banking sector — historically one of the most technologically sophisticated in the region — is making to AI at the operational level. PwC and KPMG’s participation from the consulting world reflects the growing demand from corporate clients for structured AI advisory services. Professor Derya Unutmaz of Jackson Laboratory brings a scientific rigour and a global research perspective that grounds the commercial discussion in the biological and computational realities of what AI can and cannot currently do. Dassault Systèmes and Doğuş Technology anchor the industrial and automotive dimensions. And the founder-led participants — ALSE Data, Parny, Connectmind AI, Tmob AI Studio, Next Big App — represent the startup and scale-up layer that gives any technology conference its energy and its sense of possibility.

The Sponsors: Who Is Putting Money Behind Turkey’s AI Conversation

The sponsorship structure of Webrazzi AI 2026 is itself a data point about where Turkish corporate AI investment is concentrated. Türkiye İş Bankası, as Diamond Sponsor, is both a financial backer and a protagonist: with its Deputy CEO and AI Competence Centre head both on stage, İş Bankası is not sponsoring a conversation about AI from the outside — it is positioning itself as a leading participant in it. For one of Turkey’s most systemically important financial institutions to commit at this level to an AI-first conference in its 20th anniversary year is a signal that the banking sector’s AI transformation is approaching an inflection point.

Oredata, as Gold Sponsor, brings the data infrastructure perspective: the company provides cloud-native data management, analytics, and AI platform services to Turkish enterprises, and its presence reflects the foundational role that data architecture plays in any meaningful AI deployment. Silver sponsors Commencis, Datassist, Tmob AI Studio, and Trendyol complete the picture — fintech UX expertise, HR analytics, AI application development, and the country’s largest e-commerce platform, respectively. Trendyol’s presence as a Silver Sponsor is particularly noteworthy: having already built one of the most AI-intensive logistics and recommendation systems in the region, and having recently formed part of the Uber delivery partnership that TBMag covered this week, Trendyol arrives at Webrazzi AI 2026 as a practitioner of exactly the kind of at-scale, commercially grounded AI that the event aims to discuss.

Twenty Years of Webrazzi: What the Anniversary Means

It would be a mistake to treat the 20th anniversary context as mere ceremony. Webrazzi has been an unusually faithful chronicler of Turkish tech’s transformation — through the first wave of consumer internet startups, through the mobile revolution, through the emergence of Trendyol, Getir, and the unicorn generation, and now into the AI era. The publication has been independent, consistent, and willing to report on failure as well as success — qualities that are rarer in tech media than they should be.

The decision to mark the anniversary with a conference dedicated to AI rather than a retrospective celebration is characteristic of Webrazzi’s editorial orientation: always forward-looking, always focused on what the next transformation means for Turkish business rather than what the last one produced. The event’s description — ‘we are not just observing this transformation, we are helping shape it’ — is ambitious language, but it is language that Webrazzi has, over twenty years, earned the right to use.

Why This Matters From London

For TBMag’s British and British-Turkish readership, Webrazzi AI 2026 matters for reasons that go beyond interest in the Turkish tech scene. The questions that will be debated on 8 April in Istanbul — how quickly can enterprises adopt AI at scale, what does AI mean for professional services jobs, how do you build AI products that survive regulatory scrutiny, what is the real difference between AI hype and AI deployment — are the same questions being debated in London, Manchester, and Edinburgh. The answers emerging from Istanbul’s tech community are increasingly relevant to the bilateral business relationship, as more British companies look to Turkey for technology partnerships, engineering talent, and market access in a post-Brexit reconfiguration of UK economic relationships.

There is also the broader symbolic significance of Istanbul hosting a frontier AI conference at this specific moment. We are, as TBMag has been reporting this week, living through what historians will call the first AI war — a conflict in which AI-generated disinformation, AI-enabled weapons systems, and AI-driven information warfare are simultaneously operational. Against that background, a conference of bankers, consultants, founders, and cloud computing executives gathering in Istanbul to discuss how AI can make a bank’s customer service more effective, or a logistics company’s routing more efficient, or a retail platform’s recommendations more accurate, is not trivial. It is, in its way, the most important kind of response: the insistence that AI’s primary application is not the battlefield but the business case, not manipulation but value creation.

Webrazzi AI 2026 opens on 8 April 2026. If you are in Istanbul, or have reason to be, it is worth attending. If you are in London and want to understand where Turkish tech is heading next, it is worth following.

EVENT AT A GLANCE

• Event:  Webrazzi AI 2026
• Date:  8 April 2026
• Venue:  Wyndham Grand İstanbul Levent Hotel & Conference Center
• Focus:  AI impact on business — banking, retail, healthcare, logistics, education & professional services
• Anniversary:  Webrazzi 20th year — founded 2006 by Arda Kutsal
• Diamond Sponsor:  Türkiye İş Bankası
• Gold Sponsor:  Oredata
• Silver Sponsors:  Commencis, Datassist, Tmob AI Studio, Trendyol
• Tickets & info:  webrazzi.com/en/etkinlik/2026/ai
• Note:  TBMag will cover the companion UK event separately — watch this space.