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Blog · Retrospective · 18 October 2026

BIGTECH Africa 2026 Retrospective. Two days at Cité de la Culture with the startups, CTOs and SREs who stopped by.

On 13 and 14 October, Pocteo exhibited at BIGTECH AFRICA 2026 in Tunis and took the stage. Here is what we showed, what we heard and who we met.

BIGTECH AFRICA 2026Cité de la Culture, Tunis13 · 14 OctoberStartup exhibitorSpeaker session
BIGTECH Africa 2026, 13 and 14 October, City of Culture, Tunis, Tunisia. Organised by TPM Events.
01 · At the booth

We showed the PKE flavors side by side: PKE Prime for production on dedicated nodes, PKE Flex for CI and preview clusters, PKE Edge for remote sites and PKE Metal for your own servers. One managed Kubernetes for every stage of an application's lifecycle.

The pitch to startups was simple: modernise the infrastructure without hiring a platform team, boost developer productivity, and get to market faster with the stability and security production demands. Infrastructure handled means the team spends its time on the business, not the platform, and that is where a startup becomes competitive.

Ahmed Ben Daamer, Senior Software Engineer and Pocteo Ambassador, represented us on the booth and in the interviews.

Ahmed Ben Daamer, Senior Software Engineer and Pocteo Ambassador, being interviewed in front of the Pocteo Platform backdrop
Ahmed Ben Daamer, Senior Software Engineer and Pocteo Ambassador, interviewed at the booth.
The Pocteo Platform booth at BIGTECH AFRICA 2026, with the fleet management platform backdrop: secure, resilient, scalable
The Pocteo Platform booth at Cité de la Culture: fleet management at scale.
02 · In the hallways

The technical conversations were the best part. LLMs, deterministic workflows for proactive monitoring in SRE operations, and cybersecurity threat detection came up at almost every stop.

We also met the actors our products depend on: datacenters, virtualization and cloud stack providers. Great discussions with their CTOs, and real potential for collaboration. We shared our roadmap with enthusiasm and left with a list of follow-ups.

03 · On stage

As a speaker, Walid Dridi presented Zero Humans in the Loop, an overview of how we use AI inference to secure uptime: proactive monitoring and self-remediation triggered by symptoms, before the incident occurs.

One slide said it best: why not just an LLM? Because the difference is not the model, it is the structure around it: flow, context, guardrails, trust, tools and audit.

The slides: Zero Humans in the LoopOpen the PDF in a new tab

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Walid Dridi speaking at BIGTECH AFRICA 2026 in front of a slide titled: an LLM alone is a new engineer guessing
Walid Dridi on stage: AI inference for uptime, and why an LLM alone is not an SRE.
04 · See you in 2027

Thank you to everyone who stopped by the booth, sat in on the talk or challenged us on the hard questions. See you at the 2027 edition. We intend to make it even more impactful.

Missed us at the booth?

The conversation continues.

Tell us where your application is in its lifecycle. An architect will show you which PKE flavor fits, and what the first week looks like.