How can AI research drive both innovation and real-world impact? Should one pursue academic research – or leave to build a startup? This is often framed as an either-or decision. It is a false dichotomy: many of today’s most influential AI advances come from people who chose to do both.

The evidence is strong: Researchers can maintain a high-impact academic profile while translating foundational discoveries into real-world applications. Consider a professor with 450,000+ citations who has spun out 40+ companies (including Moderna); Google has emerged from Stanford research; DeepMind was founded by Demis Hassabis after his postdoctoral research at Tommy Poggio’s lab in MIT – he later shared the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for AlphaFold; and Databricks has been created by Berkeley PhDs and people behind Apache Spark. All three Turing Award winners for deep learning have also launched successful AI startups. University-rooted teams in the U.S. have raised over $100B since 2024. What once seemed exceptional is now commonplace: research and entrepreneurship often strengthen each other.

In this panel of leading AI researchers, academics, and founders we will discuss:

• In which areas might AI create the greatest impact as we move forward?
• What advances in AI research or engineering are most critical to unlocking that impact?
• How can we close the gap between breakthrough research and real-world deployment?
• What does it take to pursue research and entrepreneurship simultaneously?
• In what ways can building a company strengthen one’s research, rather than dilute it?
• What personal lessons have emerged from the panelists’ journeys?
• Which common narratives about academia vs. startups are misleading or counterproductive?
• Why are some researchers hesitant to become entrepreneurs?
• How can European research institutions better foster AI-lab spin-offs?
• Why might combining these two roles be one of the most exciting professional opportunities today?

If you are interested in how AI can best impact the world - and whether you’re considering founding a company or simply curious about how scholarship fuels innovation - this session will offer big ideas and practical insights on how to thrive in both worlds.

Ultimately, the researcher-entrepreneur may represent one of the most intellectually rewarding and impactful careers today. It may well be one of the best games in town.

EurIPS is an experiment conducted for one year. What do we as a community think should happen in future years?

Should EurIPS continue in its present form? Should conferences experiment with a greater degree of regional distribution? Should a new independent European meeting be created or grown out of an existing one? Should we return to the conference model from previous years? Is there a need for decoupling of publication and presentation of scientific works?

This session initiates these discussions in an effort to determine what should happen next.