Picture of Mimi Billing, Europe editor of Sifted

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Opinion

April 22, 2026

Can Europe ever compete with California?

Spending a week in San Francisco, I found one question that kept resurfacing: can Europe still compete in tech?

Mimi Billing

5 min read

At Salesforce TDX, the major CRM company’s developer conference, I found myself surrounded by close to 50k developers who use their tools on a daily basis. The focus on AI was almost unimaginable. The entire conference centred on how to transform customers into so-called “agentic companies” using Salesforce’s AI tools — such as Slackbot agents, agentic AI, and agentic scripting — built within its ecosystem, with support from companies like Anthropic and OpenAI.

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South Park in SF
Accel office at South Park in San Francisco.
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Mimi Billing

Mimi Billing is Sifted's Europe editor, based in Stockholm. She covers the Nordics and can be found on X and LinkedIn

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