At Estudio Nómade, we traveled to Rio de Janeiro to attend Web Summit Río 2026, an event that brought together more than 42,000 founders, CEOs, investors, and creators from around the world over the course of three days.
Widely regarded as one of the world’s largest technology and business gatherings, the event offers a valuable opportunity to gain a clearer perspective on where brands, industries, and innovation are heading—beyond what we encounter in our day-to-day work.
Join us as we explore the ideas, conversations, and insights that inspired us most throughout the event.
The consumer no longer types: they converse.
The first signal came from the most technical stage. In a talk titled How brands get found when no one clicks anymore, Bernardo Brandão (CMO of Argentine firm Tiendanube) put numbers to something we’d been sensing: the way people search for and discover brands has transformed forever.
For twenty years, brands fought hard to achieve the coveted—and necessary—”SEO positioning”: a brand battled to appear first on Google through keywords and backlinks, and the prize was the click. This is the model that’s fading. Today, more and more people don’t type a search: they ask an AI assistant a question and receive a synthesized answer, with no link list and no click. This new model is called “GEO”: Generative Engine Optimization.
Positioning brands to be recommended by AI assistants follows different logic than SEO positioning: while backlinks and keywords once mattered, now brand mentions, entity authority, semantic depth, and originality carry the weight.
This new model also changes how success is measured: the indicator shifted from traffic and CTR to how often AI mentions you when someone asks about your category, already measured as “AI Visibility Score” and “Share of Voice.”
The data Brandão shared illustrates the speed at which brands are moving toward this new digital positioning strategy:
- Traffic migrated. Reddit grew 178% year-over-year; YouTube, 95% and Wikipedia appears in 53% of ChatGPT’s responses;
- Tiendanube sellers multiplied AI-driven traffic by 35 in just 18 months;
- ChatGPT concentrates 76.8% of conversational AI use; everything else combined doesn’t reach 5%;
Conversations about brands are already happening inside AI. Alert, marketing teams orchestrate decisions to make those conversations favorable for their brands’ business. The question shifted from “How do I appear first?” to “What does AI say about me when someone asks?”
The Sentient Consumer: when feeling is the new luxury
The second signal came from the opposite angle: emotion. In a WGSN keynote, the renowned British global trend-forecasting and consumer-analysis firm addressed the “Sentient Consumer.”
Their counterpoint to introduce this archetype was concrete: as AI makes everything faster, more automatic, and more efficient, what becomes scarce is exactly the opposite: what we feel.
In an era defined by hyper-automation and artificial intelligence, the ability to feel takes on particularly profound value for the consumer.
The keynote’s core was anchored in a quote by U.S. technology ethics specialist Tristan Harris: “The most human technologies aren’t those that remove effort, but those that make it worthwhile.”
With this mindset, the sentient consumer is drawn to memory, calm, and meaning more than efficiency. When AI can generate a thousand options in a second, calm, feeling, and the ability to connect stop being details and become luxuries. Projects like Oloris by Gentle Systems emerged as signals of an emerging category: brands designed for the nervous system, not the algorithm.
Now, efficiency is taken for granted—commoditized AI guarantees it. What sets brands apart is feeling: the sensation a brand leaves, what the customer remembers when they close the screen.
One conclusion
The GEO model is the technical face of this phenomenon; the sentient consumer, the emotional face. For those of us working in branding, a clear emerges in the middle that no AI can yet automate: judgment. The decision of what to say, how to sound, what to make people feel. Judgment is what rises in price when everything else becomes cheaper.
The Web Summit content we chose to bring to the table—one technical, one behavioral—reaches a concrete conclusion: for businesses, the commoditization of efficiency means effort now focuses on avoiding the loss of the human factor.
Our approach at Estudio Nómade
Our experience at Web Summit Rio ’26 validated how we work with brands today and the type of services our clients need. Our work accompanying entrepreneurs is grounded in a branding understanding that combines the ability to identify, declare, and favor companies’ positioning while embracing their capacity to establish human connection.
With this mindset, the technical and creative aspects of our work are balanced, because we choose to give them equal importance when building brands that seek to compete and connect while following the rules the market sets.
We work across verticals where this bimodal approach between technical and creative is required: Real Estate, Hospitality, Food & Drinks, Health & Beauty, Education, Travel, and Sustainability represent categories where the purchase decision is largely emotional, and where a brand with judgment and strategy behind it beats a brand that understands and operates only from the surface.
Far from designing for the algorithm or today’s trends, at Estudio Nómade we design so a brand means something and acquires the credentials needed to become meaningful in today’s markets.
We returned from Rio confirming that for today’s businesses, the advantage isn’t in doing things faster or falling into imitation: it’s in doing things that matter to the people who matter to us.
Interested in bringing your project to life with our team? Let’s connect.
