The World Water-Tech Innovation Summit is celebrating its 15th year and provides a global platform for water leaders, investors, and innovators committed to building a more resilient water future, as the sector enters a new era of intelligence and transformation.
The summit returns to London on February 24-25, 2026, to bring together decision-makers across utilities, regulators, engineering firms, investors, big tech and technology providers, industrial water users, and start-ups from around the world. Together, they’ll explore innovation pipelines, forge partnerships, and unlock value in the water sector.
Director of Asset Management, Chris Steele, is a speaker on the panel for the “Future-Proofing Infrastructure: What Does Smarter Asset Management & Delivery Look Like?” session being held on 24th February at 11.25am on the main stage.
This session will explore with the sector’s shift from network expansion to asset renewal, how utilities and engineering companies can improve the accuracy of condition data and boost delivery productivity to ensure investments deliver maximum ROI.
Water utilities are rising to the challenge of delivering major capital programmes while managing delivery risk and maintaining cost realism and the UK’s AMP8 cycle is bringing unprecedented investment levels and pressure to modernise infrastructure.
The panel will discuss what the technology stack needs to include to effectively map assets, monitor performance and track key efficiency outcomes across potable and wastewater networks and how the utilities can ensure interoperability across legacy systems and new platforms to overcome data fragmentation and enable a unified view of asset performance.
The panel is hosted by Newsha Ajami, Chief Strategy & Development Officer for Research, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. The other speakers on the panel are Evelyn Cortez-Davis, Director of Water Services, Los Angeles Department of Work and Power and Thomas Grand, Chief Operating Officer, Samp.
About Chris Steele
Chris Steele is the director of asset management services at Binnies and brings 20 years of asset management experience across the regulated and non-regulated water, energy and waste sectors, with leading involvement within digital industry forums and working groups. Key to his current role has been a focus on expediting the use of digital solutions and technologies to enhance the physical asset life cycle aligned to the EU’s Sustainable Development Goals. This experience, combined with his passion for nurturing new ideas, has brought him to lead a diverse team of asset management professionals to meet the evolving challenges of asset-intensive organisations.