Technology, education and the future, led by UPT
Technology, education and the future, led by UPT
Why one of CNN’s most powerful voices chose to bet on Tech Talks — and on UPT
There is a particular kind of traveler who does not arrive at a city the way most people do. He does not come looking for landmarks or local cuisine or the comfort of the familiar. He comes looking for something harder to name — a pulse. A current beneath the surface. The quiet, unmistakable signal that something is beginning.
Richard Quest is that kind of traveler.
When he came to Timișoara in 2025 for Tech Talks, he arrived as he always does — as a journalist, as a moderator, as a man who has spent decades reading rooms at Davos and boardrooms around the world. He left with something he rarely does: a three-year commitment. He would return. He would moderate Tech Talks by UPT in 2026, in 2027, and in 2028.
That decision deserves a closer look. Not because it is a headline, but because it reveals something about how the world’s most attentive listeners decide where to pay attention.
Quest has a habit — or perhaps it is a discipline — of seeing cities the way a writer sees a sentence. Not all at once, but in layers. His CNN series, Quest’s World of Wonder, has taken him to Panama City, Helsinki, Tokyo, Dubai, Nairobi, Budapest. The premise is deceptively simple: go somewhere, watch carefully, and find out why it matters. Not through museums or monuments, but through people. Through energy. Through the quiet arithmetic of ambition.
Timișoara fit this logic in a way that surprised him. The city did not announce itself. It did not need to. What it offered was something rarer than spectacle — it offered depth. A cosmopolitan past layered over a present that was quietly, methodically reshaping itself around technology and education. And beneath all of that, a future that was not merely imagined but being actively built.
But it was the people who sealed it. The students who asked sharp questions. The entrepreneurs who were not performing ambition but living it. The professors who understood that a university’s greatest output is not degrees but dialogue. Quest recognized something in that room that he has spent a career looking for: the rare alignment between what a place has and what it intends to become.
Quest has moderated enough conferences to know the difference between an event that impresses and an event that moves. The first kind fills a room. The second kind changes one.
Tech Talks 2025, in his assessment, did the latter.
What UPT has built is not simply a conference. It is a framework — a living architecture of conversation between industry, academia, public policy, and the technology sector.
Timișoara is not merely reaching for the status of a tech hub; it is beginning to behave like one. And for someone like Quest, who watches these trajectories for a living, that distinction is everything. Aspiration is common. Execution is rare.
When Richard Quest commits to something, it sends a signal. His presence alone carries weight — not because of his fame, though that is real, but because of what his attention implies. He does not return to places out of obligation. He returns because he believes the story is still being written.
His commitment to Tech Talks through 2028 communicates three things to the ecosystem watching. First, it is a form of external validation — credible, earned, not manufactured. Quest is associated with events where conversation has real consequences, and by returning, he places Tech Talks in that company. Second, it is an act of continuity. Real transformation does not reveal itself in a single year. It unfolds in cycles, in chapters, and Quest understands that better than most. Third, it is, quietly, a form of ambassadorship. When Quest speaks about a city — on CNN, at global forums,
in passing conversations with editors and executives — that city enters a conversation it could not have entered on its own.
For Tech Talks, continuity is not a luxury. It is the point. Each edition becomes not an isolated event but a chapter in an evolving narrative — and narratives, unlike photographs, have the power to carry meaning forward.
The next edition will be defined by a conversation that, on paper, sounds almost too significant to happen in one room: Richard Quest and Mario Draghi.
Draghi is not a name that needs introduction in economic circles. He shaped the architecture of modern Europe — its monetary union, its crisis response, its painful reckonings with competitiveness. Quest is not a name that needs introduction in media. He reads economies the way a doctor reads a heartbeat: in real time, with patience, and with an instinct for what the numbers are actually saying.
Quest’s style in moderation is direct, connective, and unforgiving in the best sense. He does not moderate for politeness. He moderates for clarity. And Draghi, whose natural territory is the largest questions European civilization is currently asking — about strategic autonomy, industrial relevance, and the future of competitiveness — deserves an interlocutor of precisely that caliber.
Together, they will do something that few regional events can claim: they will place Timișoara, and Tech Talks, into a European conversation that is already underway — and that will only grow more urgent.
At the center of everything — the event, the commitment, the broader ambition — stands UPT. But it would be a mistake to think of Tech Talks as something that happens “at” a university. It is something the university has become. UPT has turned itself into a bridge: between education and industry, between local ambition and European relevance, between a city and the wider world watching to see what it becomes.
Quest understood this instinctively. And his instincts, as those who follow his work know, tend to prove themselves.
Some decisions are made in boardrooms. Others are made on a quiet afternoon walk through the center of an old city, when someone stops — and listens — and says, almost to himself: “Something is happening here."
Richard Quest made that decision in Timișoara. And the fact that he is offering three years of his professional life to Tech Talks is not, in the end, a business move or a diplomatic gesture. It is an investment — the most serious kind a person can make — in something he believes will matter.
From 2026 to 2028, we will see what that belief produces — for the city, for the university, and for the ecosystem that is quietly, patiently, learning to believe in itself.
———
Tech Talks by UPT 2026 Irreplaceable — We Need Humans 15 May 2026 · Timișoara, România Moderator: Richard Quest
Special Guest: Mario Draghi
