Bath Digital Festival returns this May with a simple but powerful prompt: What if?
From 19–21 May 2026, the city becomes a meeting point for technologists, founders, creatives, researchers and the quietly curious. Not a traditional conference, and deliberately so. Bath Digital Festival is designed as a working space for ideas rather than a stage for polished conclusions.
Across three days, breakfasts, showcases, workshops and discussions create opportunities to test thinking in real time. Some sessions explore emerging technologies and their implications. Others focus on skills, careers and the practical realities of building products, teams and businesses in a rapidly shifting landscape. The aim is not to present a finished vision of the future, but to open space for people shaping it to compare notes.
What makes the festival distinctive is the mix of voices. Early-stage founders sit alongside established industry leaders. Students and career changers join conversations with policymakers and investors. Researchers bring insight from universities while product teams share lessons from the market. The result is a programme that feels less like a broadcast and more like a collaborative workshop for the regional tech ecosystem.
For organisations, the festival offers a chance to engage with a highly active digital community across the South West. For individuals, it provides a rare opportunity to step outside day-to-day roles and look at the bigger picture: where technology is heading, what skills matter next, and how collaboration might unlock new possibilities.
The theme What if? is intentionally open. It invites participants to question assumptions, explore alternatives and think beyond incremental change. Some of those questions will be ambitious, others pragmatic, but all are grounded in the belief that better ideas emerge when people from different backgrounds meet in the same room.
Bath Digital Festival has grown steadily year on year, drawing thousands of attendees and partners from across the UK tech landscape. Yet its character remains rooted in community: approachable, curious and focused on meaningful exchange rather than spectacle.
If you work in technology, are building something new, or simply want to understand what the next few years might look like, Bath Digital Festival offers a place to start that conversation.
