What 30 Leaders Looked Like in One Room — V8 Nexus Launch Night

The Tube was on strike.

If you have ever planned a London event, you know that sentence is the start of a different story than the one we ended up telling. We were checking transport apps right up to the door. People were rerouting through DLR, calling cabs, walking from stations they would not normally use. And still, on the evening of 23 April 2026, the room at iFAST Global Bank in Canary Wharf filled up.

Around thirty leaders made it through. Some came from across London, some from outside it. Some had said yes weeks before. A few said yes on the morning of the event itself. By 5:30 PM, when I stood at the front of the room to welcome everyone, I was looking at a circle of people who had genuinely chosen to be there — and had worked to make it happen.

That, more than anything else from the night, is what stays with me.

What we set out to do

V8 Nexus is London’s first AI Executive Circle — a curated community for senior business leaders, founders, and professionals who want to bring AI and Martech intelligence into how they actually run their work. Not as theory. As practice.

We built it because the networking landscape in London, for everyone I have spoken to over the past year, has the same problem: rooms full of people, conversations full of pleasantries, and very little that translates into anything useful by Monday morning. The premise behind Nexus is that curation changes the maths. When the room is selected for quality and relevance, every conversation has a higher chance of mattering.

Launching that idea live, in front of thirty real people, was the test of whether the premise holds.

It does.

The keynote — Candy Liu on AI for enterprises and SMEs

Candy Liu, Senior Strategic Global Account Director at Microsoft and Chairlady of Rise London Tech Ladies, opened the evening with a keynote on how AI is reshaping the operating logic of businesses across both ends of the market — from enterprises with the budget to deploy at scale, to SMEs who are now able to access capabilities that would have been unthinkable five years ago.

What I valued most in Candy’s talk was that she did not flatten the picture. AI is not the same conversation for a 5,000-person enterprise as it is for a ten-person consultancy. Both have real opportunities. Both have real risks. Both are running out of time to engage with it seriously. Candy walked the room through the difference, and gave specific patterns for both ends of the market.

For a room mixed across company sizes — which is exactly the cross-section Nexus is built to convene — that was the right keynote.

The sponsor — Steve, on why iFAST is hosting this

Steve, on behalf of iFAST Global Bank, spoke briefly about why iFAST chose to host the launch — and what the bank’s broader posture toward the executive community in London looks like.

Hosting a launch like this one is not a small ask of a venue partner. iFAST opened the 14th floor of the South Quay Building to thirty senior people on a strike night, with full hospitality, on a partnership we had built over a series of conversations across the previous months. The trust they extended to a brand-new community made the night possible. I will not forget that.

The closing — Alan Law on practical AI for sales and marketing

Alan Law, my co-founder at V8 Global, closed the speaker programme with a session on practical AI for sales and marketing — specifically, the patterns that working professionals can implement immediately, without a technical team behind them.

If Candy’s keynote framed where the market is going, Alan’s closing was about what to do tomorrow. He walked the room through specific examples — the kind of context-grounded outreach AI can support, the way content production can be systematised without losing voice, where the line sits between AI as an assistant and AI as part of the operating layer of a business. The kind of session that produces follow-up emails the next day asking “can you tell me more about that thing you mentioned?” — and we have had several of those since.

What happened in the room when the speakers stopped

The most underrated part of any well-curated event is the unstructured time between the formal segments. The wine, the conversation around tables, the quiet corners where two people who would never have met each other find an unexpected common interest.

I will not name names — the privacy of those conversations is part of why Nexus works — but I can say that several of those conversations are continuing. A few introductions made on the night have already produced concrete next steps. That is the test. Not how many people came. Not how many cards were exchanged. Whether the room produced the kind of conversation that travels home with people and turns into something else.

This room did.

A thank-you that is not a list

There is a version of this post that lists every person who came, every partner who supported, every supplier who delivered. I have written that version internally. It runs to two pages, and every name on it earned a thank-you. But for a public-facing recap, I want to keep the list short and specific:

• Candy Liu — for the keynote, and for being the kind of senior practitioner who shows up to back a new community. That decision matters more than I can say.
• Steve and the iFAST team — for the venue, the trust, and the partnership that made the launch possible.
• Dan Clarke and Melon Photo & Video — for the photographs in this post, including the ones I am still going through.
• Hongkongers Magazine UK — for the media partnership, and for being part of the community fabric we are building toward.
• Alan Law and the V8 Global team — for the operational backbone behind every detail of the night.
• Everyone who came — including those who fought through the strike to be there. You are the community. Without you, none of the rest matters.

And to those who could not make it on the night — the strike caught several of you, and I know it. There is a next event coming. We will make sure you are in the room for it.

What comes next

The 23rd of April was the first night, not the only night.

The next V8 Nexus session is in early summer — currently being planned with a co-host, with details to follow when the host side has confirmed. The format will evolve from launch-night-introduction to working-session, with real frameworks and structured time for conversation around specific business questions members are actually working through.

Beyond the events, Nexus is also where the practical AI infrastructure V8 Global builds — through Axia and Scaffold — is taught and applied. The forward-looking thread that I have hinted at in conversations with several of you is real: we are working on the systems that will let members surface relevant business opportunities at the moment they need them, drawn from the active context of the community itself. That is a longer build, and it will be made through Axia. When it is ready to talk about properly, we will.

Where to start

If you are reading this and were not in the room, and you think the room was for you — express interest in joining V8 Nexus. Curation means we read every application. It also means we get back to you personally, not through a sequence.

The 23rd of April was the night the premise stopped being a premise. Around thirty London leaders, in a room high above Canary Wharf, on a strike night, showed us that the room we had been describing for over a year actually holds together when you put real people in it.

We are just getting started.

— Gina

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Gina Cheng is Founder & President of V8 Nexus, London’s executive AI community. Community Intelligence posts share what membership looks like in practice — the events, the conversations, the patterns the community surfaces. The next session is in early summer 2026.

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