The Tech × Art Summit
All forms of art —
made by hand,made with AI
Cairo ICT 2026 · 30th edition · “AI in Action” · presents
Edition 01 · Concept presentation
07 to 10
November 2026
Egypt International Exhibition Center · New Cairo
Preface
To everyone
who makes art
We are living through the biggest change creative work has seen since the camera. Tools that turn imagination directly into image and sound. A film used to cost millions — now it costs an idea. Some of us built our craft over decades; some of us are sixteen with a phone. Khayal is where we meet this moment together — not to replace the artist, but to discover what the artist becomes next.
FilmmakersDesignersMusiciansArt directorsCreative directorsVFX artistsProduction designersAnimatorsWritersGame makersPhotographersCreators & influencersSocial media specialistsMotion & 3D artistsImmersive artistsLighting designersEvents professionalsUI/UX designersDigital artists — AI & classic
~60%
of Egyptians under 30
$42.7bn
projected AI contribution to Egypt’s GDP by 2030
The platform
Built inside the region’s
biggest tech event
Khayal is the media flagship of Cairo ICT’s 30th edition — ministers on the floor, government patronage, and one badge that opens every hall.
Cairo ICT 2025 edition figures · cairoict.com
161,280
visitors
62,000
students at Connecta
580+
exhibitors
550+
speakers
80+
countries
55,000m²
exhibition space
What Khayal is
The region’s first summit of
technology × art
4 days
Four days of showcase
AI-made content beside hand-made content — films, games, music and campaigns from both schools on the same screens, plus live demos where AI filmmaking meets the newest cinematography hardware. That mix is the show, and it brings both audiences.
48 hours
Hands-on, not hand-waving
Hands-on with both sides of the craft: prompt battles and a 48-hour Create-athon on the AI side, real cameras, lighting and lenses to shoot with on the other — a student walks in with a phone, out with a portfolio.
SWOT
Industry in the room
Keynotes, a published SWOT of every AI video platform, a creator market with speed interviews — talent meets money and tools.
Positioning: tech and art under one roof — AI content and classic content given equal billing, so the industry that built Arab cinema and the generation rebuilding it both buy a ticket to the same four days.
AI × classic · every form belongs
All forms of art.
One summit.
Filmmaking
From 35mm to text-to-video — both premiere on the same wall
Design
Hand sketch to generative identity — art directors meet the models
Music
Orchestra and oud beside voice models and prompt-to-track
VFX & Animation
Frame-by-frame craft beside diffusion pipelines
Photography
The lens and the latent image, hung side by side
Writing & Story
The pen, the writers’ room, and the co-writing model
Games
Hand-built worlds, AI-born characters — playable in the Arcade
Digital Art
Pop art, pixels, projection, prompts — the gallery runs on glass
And every form gets the argument it deserves: For & Against debates on the Main Stage, one honest Pros & Cons panel per track, and Workflow Face-offs — the same brief, classic pipeline vs AI pipeline, judged live. Every panel seats both sides.
Who will be there · on stage and in the room
The stars, the masters
& the next generation
Celebrities & Actors
On stage, not just on posters — facing the technology coming for their craft
Directors & Producers
The names who built Arab cinema — debating, judging, mentoring
TV Anchors & Presenters
The faces of Arab broadcast — hosting, and meeting their AI doubles
Composers & Musicians
The hitmakers of Arabic music, judging what the models can do
Media Professionals
Broadcasters, journalists, showrunners and agency leads
Marketing Directors
Hunting the latest in advertising, film and events for their brands
Event Planners
Scouting staging, screens and formats for their next productions
The Next Generation
The AI-native creators everyone above is here to meet
Signature panels
& talks
Speaker lineup in confirmation — names announced progressively
Avatar vs Actora star meets their AI avatar live… and we find out if it can actually act
Directing the Machineone scene, real actors vs AI, same director
Can AI Write a Hit?composers judge the models, blind
The Newsroom vs the Deepfakeanchors against the fakes, live
The big shout · Khayal Film Festival
E£1,000,000
The region’s biggest AI short-film prize — open to every filmmaker with an idea and a phone.
| Award | Prize | Partner opportunity |
|---|---|---|
| Grand Prix — Best Short Film | E£500,000 | Title naming available |
| Vertical Short (made for phones) | E£200,000 | Platform-partner natural fit |
| Student Film | E£150,000 | Education-partner naming |
| VFX Achievement | E£100,000 | Tool-partner naming |
| Audience Choice | E£50,000 | Telco / voting-sponsor fit |
The media core
One summit,
seven tracks of media
Track 01 · Film & Video
Film & Video track · presented by
Partner logo
Each track is nameable — one partner per vertical, category exclusivity included. Every track runs both ways: classic craft beside the AI pipeline. And the whole venue is an immersive layer — AR moments, projection mapping and interactive installations between the stages.
Stage design · IBC / NAB grade · year one
Built like
the big shows
Year one, not a pilot. Three stages plus the Main Stage — broadcast-grade from day one, placed apart for acoustic separation, scaled smart instead of scaled down.
Stage Pods × 2 · 50 each
Curved LED backwalls and transparent OLED panels, shared by the seven media tracks — masterclass-ready with demo desks and broadcast capture.
ATMOS
object audio · mixed live
The Sound Stage · 50
An acoustically isolated listening room — Dolby Atmos mixing, music creation and festival films in Atmos, live. The third stage is for the ears.
The Main Stage · 150
Wraparound LED for keynotes, the E£1M festival premieres and the closing awards — a film premiere, not a conference.
Transparent screens are the signature element throughout. Venue-technology partnership available. Photoreal concept renders, generated with Higgsfield AI.
The floor plan · entrance from Hall 3
One hall,
many worlds
Zone
Khayal zones
Cairo ICT zones · E Sports, Cyber Zone, AI Innovation Factory, Innovation, sponsor & partner booths — not part of Khayal
Illustrative view · not to scale · final layout subject to confirmation · hover or tap a Khayal zone
Stage program · the Sound Stage
The Sound
Stage
Sessions
- Song writing
- Song composing
- SFX & sound design
- Music score
- Celebrity singers workshops
All with AI & without AI
made by :/Human/MachineDolby Atmos
ATMOS
object audio · mixed live
- Dolby Atmos songs
- Dolby Atmos for films
- & more
Artists
- Double Doksh
- 2Late Not confirmed
- Amir HedayaDisney music · Egypt
- Ehab Abd El WahedMusic · all the hits
- Celebrity sound engineers
Stage program · Main Stage / Khayal Stage
Main Stage /
Khayal Stage
On stage
- Advertising agencies CEOs
- Directors
- International AI filmmakers
- International influencers in filmmaking, design & AI
Session
A Disney animation journey
by Ahmed Teleb & Amir Hedaya
Case study
High Value Target
from pre-production to screen
The festival
AI Film Festival
E£1,000,000 for the winners
Mega events
Qatar Asian Cup opening
the mega-events mastermind
Live
Celebrity vs his avatar
Soon
The production & events industry · a key audience
The people who
build the shows
Khayal is also a trade floor for the industry behind every premiere, concert and broadcast: event producers, staging houses, technical directors and the technology companies that equip them. The venue itself is the showroom — every screen, beam and hologram on the floor is a live demo by the company that makes it.
Light & Rigging
Lighting designers and intelligent fixtures — the beams that make the stages cinematic
Screens & LED
Transparent OLED, curved LED walls, the vertical cinema wall — the signature of the venue
Holograms & Projection
Holographic displays and projection mapping — the immersive layer between the stages
Sound & Broadcast
Audio systems, capture and streaming — every stage broadcast-ready from day one
For the events industry this is IBC and NAB, closer to home — and for the technology brands, a staging-technology partnership puts their gear at the center of the region’s most photographed new event.
First of its kind in Egypt · see the format live
This works —
watch it work
Khayal brings a proven global format to Egypt for the first time. Three minutes of each of these shows you exactly what partners are buying into:
The experiences · all sponsorable
Come to watch.
Stay to make.
The Studio Floor
Open workstations loaded with partner tools — four days of product-in-hand demos
Creator Market
Portfolio reviews, speed interviews, commissions — talent scouting at scale
Khayal Film Festival
Open call across Egypt, Africa and the Arab world — nightly premieres on the wall
Who is in the room
The audience brands
can’t reach anywhere else
Young creators
Teenagers and twenty-somethings making films, music and games with AI — caught at the exact moment they choose their tools, platforms and heroes.
Students at scale
Connecta brought 62,000 students last edition — feeding directly into Khayal’s workshops, jams and the Creator Market.
Industry & government
The directors, composers and studios of classic Egyptian cinema beside broadcasters, agencies, telcos and ministers — the people who commission, hire and legislate.
Not a logo on a wall — a role in the show. Partners meet this audience through their products, their stages and their prizes.
The credibility track
Every AI video model,
on the operating table
A dedicated workflows-and-pipelines track with a live, published SWOT analysis of every major AI video platform — strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats. No sponsored verdicts. Written dossiers go to every pass holder after the summit.
Pick a model — the dossier opens on the table
On the tableSora
SStrengths
WWeaknesses
OOpportunities
TThreats
Why partners care: being on this stage is how a platform earns the regional market’s trust — and skipping it is conspicuous.
Why partner
The youngest, most creative audience in the region —
at the moment they choose
their tools, platforms and heroes
The platforms they adopt this year are the ones they build careers on for a decade. Khayal is where that choice happens — in public, on camera, with your product in their hands.
A package built for the home of short video
The vertical
takeover
Own the Vertical Short prize
The E£200,000 festival category made for phones carries your name — the region’s first award for the format you invented
Name the TV & Social track
Creator workshops, monetization masterclasses and the creator-economy panels — programmed with your team
The content flywheel
Vertical creation booths on the floor — thousands of attendees shooting and posting from the venue, four days of organic platform content
The simultaneous premiere
Festival winners premiere on the transparent wall and on-platform at the same moment — a first for the region
First look at AI-native creators
Festival entrants and jam winners — the next generation of creators, met before any other platform
The exact audience
Egypt’s under-30 creator generation plus 62,000 students — your growth demographic, in person, choosing platforms
Why it fits: Egypt is one of the format’s biggest content markets — and this is the one event where the platform that owns vertical can own the stage, the prize and the premiere, all at once.
A package built for the engine of AI
Every pixel here
runs on you
Power the Studio Floor
Every AI demo, render and battle at the summit runs on your silicon — four days of live benchmark in front of the region’s creators
The sovereign-AI story
Ministers on the floor, Egypt’s national AI strategy, local model builders on stage — the “AI nation” narrative with your logo on the engine room
Developer pipeline
GPU workshops, university labs and Egypt’s own model teams — thousands of developers entering your ecosystem in one week
AI characters, live
An AI NPC speaking Egyptian Arabic on the Games & Immersive track — your character tech in the most shareable demo of the show
Creator hardware corner
Studio-grade laptops and workstations in the hands of filmmakers, VFX artists and game makers — product trial at industrial scale
Category exclusivity
One compute partner at the region’s first tech × art summit — a founding claim no competitor can ever repeat
Why it fits: this audience is choosing its compute stack right now — and the summit makes that choice visible, filmable and public.
A package built for the network of Egypt
Connect the
creator generation
The youth play
Free-pass registration pushed through your channels, student bundles at the gate — youth acquisition at the exact moment of brand choice
Connected by you
The venue runs on your 5G — vertical premieres streamed live, creation booths uploading in real time. Network strength, proven in public
The nation votes
The E£50,000 Audience Choice award, voted through your app — engagement, data and a feel-good headline in one property
The creators’ brief
Your brand as the live brief in the advertising battles — hundreds of young creators producing a year’s worth of campaign ideas on stage
The national story
Enabling zero-budget creators beside MCIT and the ministers — digital inclusion as a headline, not a CSR footnote
The business floor
Studios, agencies and startups on the floor meet your enterprise arm — cloud, connectivity and fintech for the creative economy
Why it fits: every teenager in this hall is choosing a network this year — and the operator whose name is on the connection owns the story they tell about it.
A package built for event-technology providers
The venue is
your showreel
Every surface, yours
The stage pods, the Main Stage, the walls and the holograms — supplied by you, credited everywhere, photographed for four days straight
Demo to your actual buyers
Event planners, marketing directors, broadcasters and developers walk this floor scouting their next productions — your demo and your pipeline in one room
Own the signature visual
The transparent vertical cinema wall and the glass arcade are the summit’s icons — built on your flagship line, in every press photo
A launch pad
Unveil a new screen, fixture or holographic product at the region’s first tech × art summit — with regional press already in the room
Content worth keeping
Cinematic broadcast capture of your technology doing its best work — a year of case-study and sales material from one week
Year-round pipeline
Two editions a year — November beside Cairo ICT, April standalone — plus every launch and festival the summit inspires becomes your recurring contract
Why it fits: an event-tech company’s hardest problem is showing its gear live, at scale, to real buyers. Khayal is that showroom — with the region watching.
A package built for AI platforms & cloud
The agentic
studio
The Agents & MCP track
How creative pipelines become agentic — tools chained from script to color grade over open protocols, taught to the people who will actually use them
The built-with proof
This summit’s own deck, websites and planning were built with an AI assistant — the case study walks on stage and presents itself
Build-an-MCP live
Developer workshops: wire a creative tool into an agent, live — plus an agentic-pipeline category inside the 48-hour Create-athon
Assistants for creators
Hands-on on the Studio Floor: AI copilots in the writers’ room, in production planning, in post — adoption at the moment of habit-forming
The cloud backbone
Four days of generation, rendering and streaming run on your cloud — a public workload story in a growth market
Education & ecosystem
Student programs with 62,000 Connecta students, startup credits through Launch Alley, digital-skills alignment with MCIT
Why it fits: the next platform war is for the creative workflow — and the region’s creative workflow is being formed in this hall, tool by tool, habit by habit.
14 fields · 4 formats · one system
Our social media campaign
Let’simaginetogether
Let’s imagine together
Thank
you
Partnership deck · Edition 01
made by :/Human/Machine
07 to 10November 2026 · Egypt International Exhibition Center EIEC
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