LTW 2025: Interview with Inrupt Co-Founder & CEO John Bruce

Drawing more than 45,000 participants across three action-packed days, London Tech Week was abuzz with fresh government commitments, groundbreaking innovations and a flurry of announcements.

Billed as the country’s biggest tech event, London Tech Week took place from 9 to 11 June 2025 at London Olympia.

The event launched with a keynote speech by Sir Keir Starmer, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, who was soon joined on stage by Nvidia Co-Founder and CEO Jensen Huang.

John Bruce, CEO and Co-Founder of Inrupt, joined Technology Magazine at London Tech Week.

John co-founded Inrupt alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, to change the internet. 

The pair sat on a panel at London Tech Week called Agentic Wallets: The Key to Reclaiming a Web that Works for Everyone, where they detailed the current drawbacks of the internet and why it is critical for trust and innovation that web users are put back in control of their own data.

“When I met Tim, I realised, ‘boy, this is a fabulous opportunity to change the web’,” he told Technology Magazine. 

“With his brilliance and my modest business skills, we set off to change the world.”

Here, John speaks to Technology Magazine at London Tech Week.

What were the key themes from your keynote?

We exist in an interesting time.

Look at the conference here, it’s busy as all heck — and the world over is the same. 

The principal theme is LLMs. I think we're at a critical point in time where, if we don't watch it, our data becomes consumed by LLMs. 

As a consequence, we’ll become — and it might sound dramatic — their servants. They’ll make decisions for us too easily.

What’s really important is we keep control over that experience. To do that, we need control over our data. And to do that, we need a digital wallet that contains the data and that’s what we do.

What excites you about AI and agentic technology in this space? 

The whole world of agentic commerce and the agentic experience on the web is hugely different from the one we've got — but if we don’t watch it, it’ll become hugely different in bad ways as well as good. 

Tim always says how the web’s evolved for all its goodness — just think of the implications of the web. However, there are some attributes of it that he wishes didn’t exist. 

We’re about to double down on the bad stuff, but unfortunately, that will constrain our opportunity to do the right stuff. 

We come to conferences like this to make sure that everybody appreciates that there’s another way of doing it.

Giving them our digital wallets, letting them operate our AI called Charlie, as a consequence, they’ll get the principal benefit of all of the LLM experiences, but in a way that keeps them in control. That’s so important.

How do you see the World Wide Web changing from your perspective, especially working alongside Sir Tim?

Tim sees the opportunity for what it could be as clear as day. He tells me that when he originally invented it, the most difficult job he had was explaining to people what he meant. 

Now, the most difficult job he has is explaining to people why it was so difficult back then. Everybody says it’s so obvious, but it certainly wasn’t back then. 

We feel that way now about what we advocate with Inrupt. People sort of get it and sort of kind of don’t, but we believe that in due course they'll go ‘why?’

If we had this conversation in 20 years time, how do you think people would react to the conversations that we’re having now?

I hope it’s not 20 years from now. 

When we said we’d build Charlie, Tim wrote about it six, seven years ago, and we back then laughed and said, oh, in 20 years we’ll get round to that. 

Then, it was all about Siri and Alexa and that was pretty much it. We called it Charlie and we said, in 20 years, let’s do it. Here we are, seven years later, and we built the AI platform because that’s what the technology can do these days.

How important are platforms like this in accelerating the work that you do?

It’s hugely important. We were backstage with Peter Kyle, a really very talented individual and it shows that some of the work we’ve done here in the UK for the government shows promise. It’s the same in other countries around the world. 

Some of the work we do here in the UK with people — like NatWest and the BBC — shows great promise and all around the world we’re experiencing the same. 

The work that we do here with all the attendees — and the work that Technology Magazine does too, delivering our message appropriately — helps people know how to react to it. That's hugely important.

What else are you looking forward to?

I hope that we’ve been able to convey our message appropriately.

On our website, you'll see plenty of videos about what we’re doing as well as use cases of where we’re doing it and who we’re doing it to. 

People sort of get it and sort of kind of don’t, but give yourself the opportunity, give yourself the chance to get it. Go on the Web, as invented by Tim, and experience it a bit more. 

If you sit at a point in time in a position where you can help, we’re here to help too.

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