Countdown to Enterprise AI Summit: sovereign AI, real deployments, and lessons from production

# What this event is about Rotterdam. The program treats digital sovereignty as a practical, solvable enterprise problem rather than only a policy debate. The focus is on how organisations can use leading AI while keeping control of data location, access, and operating conditions.

# Who to watch and why it matters Julien Blanchez leads a session on sovereign AI. His background includes more than a decade at Google working on data protection, security, and digital sovereignty for large, regulated organisations. He will explain what's driving rising sovereignty demands and concrete approaches for keeping access to AI technology on an organisation's terms.

The agenda highlights short, measurable cases rather than theory. Two concrete examples mentioned in the program:

• European Personnel Selection Office (EPSO): deployed a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) instant-answer engine inside Drupal in under eight weeks. It runs in all 24 EU official languages, produced 90% fewer repeat support questions, and showed zero hallucinations on manual review.

• American Diabetes Association: will report what happened when editorial teams used real AI tools, including the operational lessons that emerged when AI moved into everyday editorial workflows.

Those cases show timelines, multilingual scale, measurable outcomes, and the human-review controls applied after deployment.

# Governance, controls, and infrastructure Sessions around sovereignty will cover practical control points procurement and IT teams ask for: where data is stored, which models are allowed, who can access them, and how spending is controlled. Other sessions on the agenda look at infrastructure choices for organisations that must know precisely where data flows — for example, private gateways and hosted implementations that keep processing inside approved jurisdictions.

# Community and moderation questions Speakers will also tackle social and community impacts. Moritz Arendt will take on whether AI can strengthen digital communities or risk hollowing them out. Expect a focus on moderation, human oversight, and how community processes change when AI is applied to engagement or content workflows.

# Who should attend The summit targets CXOs, heads of digital, procurement and security leaders, editorial and product teams deploying AI at scale, and architects who must map AI into existing enterprise systems. The sessions aim to give pragmatic models, deployment timelines, and governance controls you can use in procurement and operational planning.

# Logistics The event is one day, held aboard the SS Rotterdam on 28 September. The full agenda and ticket details are available on the Enterprise AI Summit page.

# Practical takeaway If your organisation needs to adopt AI under regulatory, procurement, or internal governance constraints, this summit presents short, production-minded examples and a session specifically about keeping AI on your terms. Expect concrete deployment timelines, governance patterns, and discussion of infrastructure choices that preserve data residency and access controls.