News and updates from AImpacto Rotaract Madrid.
First day at South Summit Madrid 2026, AImpacto members Ela Alpagut, Anna Shatalova , Fernando Rangel, and Oleksandra Udovenko had the opportunity to engage with entrepreneurs, policymakers, investors, and innovators tackling this very question.
At the Hackathon Soluciones WhatsApp en Smart Cities, organized under the #INCIBEemprende program in collaboration with WOZTELL and Ciudadano Conversacional, AImpacto Madrid Rotaract not only contributed through regulatory and AI governance discussions, but also competed as part of Equipo Lila with the project BeLocal. We are very proud of the team: Miguel Ornelas Silva, Olivia Vidal de Salazar, Yonatan Cuervo, Anna Shatalova and Stanislav Vynnytskyi! Together they developed a civic-oriented conversational solution designed to address a structural urban challenge: the invisible erosion of local commerce. As highlighted in the presentation, Madrid has experienced a -14% decline in neighborhood retail between 2020 and 2024, with 43,800 active retailers and 78,900 commercial businesses operating under increasing pressure.
The recent Startup Grind session on transitioning from corporate leadership to founding in the AI era was refreshingly unfiltered. Two accomplished women leaders — both former corporate executives turned founders — offered a rigorous and grounded perspective on entrepreneurship in a time of technological acceleration. There was no romantic narrative about “taking the leap.” Instead, they dissected the psychological shift required when moving from structured hierarchies to ambiguity. In large organizations, risk is distributed. In startups, risk centralizes. Accountability sharpens. In the AI context, that pressure intensifies: rapid iteration cycles, regulatory uncertainty, and constant technological evolution demand clarity of thought. One message stood out powerfully: AI is not a strategy. It is a tool. Enduring founders are those who define their problem space precisely and align technological capacity with real market friction.
At Area 31, a clear insight emerged: growth today is driven by belonging, not just acquisition. During the Community Hacking session, founders and operators explored how ecosystems—not audiences—create sustainable scale. Borja Vega reframed Startup Grind as an identity space rather than an events platform. Eleanor Manley highlighted curated conversations as strategic assets. Liam Coyle positioned community as activation, not visibility. Daniela Roiz emphasized belonging as a business model. The takeaway: community is infrastructure. Trust compounds, rituals reinforce loyalty, and storytelling builds defensibility. For AImpacto Madrid Rotaract, impact scales when people feel ownership—community is not soft power, it is competitive advantage.
At the Hackathon Soluciones con WhatsApp para Smart Cities Madrid, AImpacto Rotaract Madrid led a workshop titled “De Idea a Prototipo: ¿Puede tu app incorporar IA, cumplir la normativa europea y escalar desde el primer prototipo?”, delivered by Anna Shatalova (Founder of AImpacto and Compliance Specialist) and Fernando Rangel (AI Specialist and Founder of Kuentia). The session focused on a central challenge often overlooked in early-stage innovation: building AI-enabled solutions that are not only technically functional but also compliant and scalable within the European regulatory framework. Using the case of municipal cultural centers in Madrid (21 in total), we examined how procedural complexity can create unequal access and administrative burden, and how conversational AI, implemented responsibly, can streamline processes without compromising rights.
The presentation of La Era de la Revancha, organized by AImpacto at Librería Ocho y Medio in Madrid, was deliberately framed not as a conventional book launch but as an academic and critical-thinking forum. Rather than focusing on literary promotion, the session examined the structural transformations shaping the current geopolitical order. Drawing on Andrea Rizzi’s analysis, the discussion addressed the erosion of liberal-democratic reference points, the resurgence of nationalist revisionism, and the reconfiguration of global power balances. The conversation engaged directly with themes such as the weakening of multilateral institutions, the tension between strategic autonomy and dependency in Europe, the rise of populist movements fueled by economic and cultural dislocation, and the accelerating rivalry between major powers — particularly the systemic competition between the United States and China.
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