---
title: "Sabtain Ahmad — Speaker at Human x AI 2026 | Human x AI"
description: "Sabtain Ahmad — CTO & Co-Founder of ManaMind, building autonomous AI agents that test video games — Speaker at Human x AI Conference 2026."
url: "https://humanxai.events/sabtain-ahmad"
---

1. [Human x AI 2026](https://humanxai.events/2026/)
2. [Speakers](https://humanxai.events/2026/speakers)
3. Sabtain Ahmad

The people behind the ideas / 2026 speaker

# Sabtain Ahmad

CTO & Co-Founder, ManaMind

- [ManaMind](https://www.manamind.ai/)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/sabtainahmad)

![Sabtain Ahmad](https://humanxai.events/assets/images/speakers/Sabtain-Ahmad.avif)

Human x AI / Vienna / 2026

A perspective worth sharing

> “Public vision-language models were unreliable for interpreting games. So we built our own — a model that actually plays the game to find the bugs.”
>
> Sabtain Ahmad

Sabtain Ahmad spoke at Human x AI 2026 on 19 May 2026 in Vienna. Speakers for Human x AI 2027 have not been announced yet.

Session at Human x AI 2026 · Use Case

## What European Founders Need to Stay and Scale

Date

19 May 2026

Time

14:55 – 15:20

Place

Main Stage, Vienna

[Explore Human x AI 2026](https://humanxai.events/2026/)

## About

Sabtain Ahmad is CTO and Co-Founder of ManaMind, a London/Vienna-based AI startup building autonomous agents that test video games. The company's proprietary vision-language models play games to detect bugs, aiming to cut studio testing costs by up to 80%.

ManaMind secured USD 1.1 million in pre-seed funding to launch its AI game testing platform — addressing one of the most labour-intensive and costly stages of game production: quality assurance.

## AI & Research

Ahmad conducted doctoral research in Artificial Intelligence at TU Wien, focusing on scalable and privacy-preserving distributed machine learning. His doctoral work focused on optimising edge intelligence for smart environmental monitoring — a framework for energy and communication efficiency that earned him the Critical Infrastructure Award from the Austrian Academy of Sciences.

Before founding ManaMind, he spent over three years building AI systems for industrial automation, and completed a research collaboration with Umeå University in Sweden on distributed machine learning.

## From Academia to Startup

Ahmad's path from TU Wien to a venture-backed AI startup reflects a pattern increasingly visible in Europe's AI ecosystem: deep technical research finding commercial application in domains the US startup scene has overlooked. Game QA is a multi-billion-dollar problem that still relies heavily on manual human testing — precisely the kind of structured, repetitive, high-stakes environment where autonomous agents can deliver transformative value.

## Areas of Expertise

- AI Game Testing & Autonomous Agents
- Vision-Language Models
- Distributed Machine Learning
- Edge AI & Privacy-Preserving ML
- Industrial AI Automation

## From the Content Hub

- [The QA Tester Plays to Win: Sabtain Ahmad on AI Agents That Break Games](https://humanxai.events/the-qa-tester-plays-to-win-sabtain-ahmad-on-ai-agents-that-break-games)

Human x AI 2026

## More 2026 speakers

[All 2026 speakers](https://humanxai.events/2026/speakers)

- ### [Victor Tchervenobrejki](https://humanxai.events/victor-tchervenobrejki)

  Head of AI and ML Solutions, Cloud Office