This agenda is preliminary and may still be updated or modified.
9:00
Opening Remarks
9:10
Europe’s AI Moment: Why CEE matters now
As the global race for AI leadership accelerates, Europe must convert ambition into economic power. This opening session explores why CEE – with its engineering talent, industrial base, and strategic location – can become one of Europe’s greatest AI hubs
9:30
Making the CEE the hub of AI innovation
9:50
Building the Foundations: Infrastructure for
the AI Era
AI innovation depends on access to powerful, secure, and affordable computing. As demand for computing capacity surges, the question for the CEE region is whether to build its own sovereign AI infrastructure – including data centres and initiatives like the AI Gigafactory – or to rely on infrastructure hosted elsewhere. How can the CEE ensure that startups, researchers, and public institutions have affordable and secure access to the computing power they need, while balancing cost, sovereignty, and scalability?
10:50
CEE Success story
10:50
From Factories to Pharma: Industrial AI at Scale
CEE’s greatest AI opportunity lies in transforming the real economy. From automotive production lines to healthcare systems and logistics networks, this session explores how AI is reshaping industry and where the region can lead Europe in deployment at scale.
11:40
Founder spotlight:
AI in health diagnostics
12:00
Lunch & Networking
13:00
AI Under Fire – How Ukraine built Europe’s most resilient Digital State
Fireside Chat: From Digital State to Agentic State: Why Ukraine May Leapfrog Estonia
13:15
Breaking the speed limit: Can governments move at startups speed?
14:00
CEE Success story
14:10
From Brain Drain
to Brain Gain: Building Europe’s next AI engineering hub
CEE has the engineering talent, research institutions, and technical foundations to become Europe’s AI engineering powerhouse. The challenge is turning the region from one that exports talent to one that attracts it. This discussion explores how universities, governments, and industry can work together to build globally competitive AI ecosystems – from rethinking tech curricula and strengthening research capacity to creating incentives that attract investment, retain top talent, and convince both global technology leaders and homegrown champions to plant their engineering and R&D hubs in the region
14:50
Founder Spotlight
15:00
Smarter Rules or More Rules? Europe’s AI Regulatory Test
As the EU advances its regulatory simplification agenda through initiatives such as the Digital Omnibus and the Digital Fitness Check, a key question arises: will these efforts genuinely cut red tape, or amount only to cosmetic change? For the CEE region – home to dynamic SMEs and rapidly growing digital sectors – meaningful deregulation could unlock competitiveness, accelerate innovation, and attract investment. The challenge now is to ensure that simplification delivers tangible results rather than symbolic gestures. CEE countries can play a leading role by promoting evidence-based deregulation and shaping EU policymaking toward practical, innovation-friendly rules that truly work for businesses on the ground.
15:45
Founder Spotlight
15:55
From Lab to Market: Scaling CEE’s AI innovation
CEE does not lack breakthrough technology. It lacks the ecosystem to scale it. Across the region, researchers and founders are building globally competitive technology – and then hitting walls on capital, procurement and regulatory friction. The result is predictable: too often, promising startups sell early, talent disperses, and innovations born here get scaled elsewhere, or not at all.
The pattern is consistent and the breaks are knowable – venture funding dries up at growth stage, public procurement favours incumbents, and there is no regional reflex that turns strategic need into commercial demand for local innovators.This panel asks what it takes to fix that: closing the scale-up gap, building the funding pipelines, and keeping CEE’s best founders building here all the way to unicorns and beyond.
16:40
Founder Spotlight
17:50
CEE 2030:
Can CEE Lead Europe’s
AI Future?
A closing strategic conversation between CEE ministers defining what the region should achieve by 2030, and the partnerships required to get there.