December is when I take stock. Not just of the numbers, but of the things that matter more: what I started, what worked, what didn’t, and what I would do differently. This year, the top item on the list is a project that a year ago was just an idea on a sheet of paper: AI Expo Europe.
I founded it in January, together with a team that worked incredibly hard, and on 6 and 7 October we held the first edition in Bucharest, at the Radisson Blu. Two months have passed since then, enough for the dust to settle and for me to look at things with a clear head. So here is my year-one review as a founder, written honestly, not as a press release.
Why we started it
At the start of the year I explained at length why I founded AI Expo Europe, so I won’t repeat all of it. In short: in 2023 AI suddenly became the topic at every dinner table, but the serious conversations, with people who actually build and deploy it, were mostly happening in other capitals. I felt Central and Eastern Europe deserved its own meeting place for business and AI, and that Bucharest could be that place.
If you want the full context, I wrote about the year everyone started using AI from my own point of view. In a way, AI Expo Europe was my practical answer to that year.
What the first edition showed us
We announced more than 100 speakers, among them representatives of large tech companies such as NVIDIA, Google, Microsoft and IBM. But what I took home had less to do with big names and more to do with a few things I suspected and which turned out to be true:
- Big tech and the local ecosystem can share a room. That is not a trivial point. A Romanian founder building an AI product rarely gets the chance to hear, in the same hallway, someone working at global scale. It shifts the perspective on both sides.
- Government wants a seat at the table. The presence of Romania’s Minister of Research, Innovation and Digitalisation signalled that this is no longer a niche technical topic. For a business event, direct dialogue between the people who write the rules and the people who build the products matters.
- Business people want practical AI, not philosophy. Most of the questions I heard were not “will AI replace us?” but “what can I automate on Monday?” and “how much does it cost to try?”. That is a healthy question, and I’m glad people are asking it.
- Live demos make AI tangible. Attendees could interact with a humanoid robot, a robot dog and a digital avatar. You can give ten talks about the future of technology, but the moment someone sees a robot respond in front of them is the one that sticks.
What was hard
It would be dishonest to write only about the good parts. Some things were hard, a few harder than I expected.
First: we built an event from scratch in less than a year. No previous editions, no photos from last year, no brand anyone recognised. When you call someone and say “come to the first edition of something that doesn’t exist yet”, you are asking a lot. Over the summer I wrote about how to organise a conference with 100+ speakers, but theory on paper is one thing; watching your to-do list grow faster than you can tick it off is another.
Second: convincing international speakers to come to Bucharest. Many of them have calendars full of well-established events. Bringing them to a city some had never visited, for an event with no track record, takes patience, solid arguments and a lot of follow-up. The team did an excellent job here.
Third, and perhaps the most subtle: balancing hype and substance. AI grabs attention easily right now. It is tempting to build an event full of big promises and slogans. We tried to keep the focus on things people can actually apply, but I admit the line is thin, and I don’t think we got it exactly right everywhere.
Fourth: logistics. Rooms, overlapping schedules, demos that need space, power and people to look after them, hundreds of small details where, if one slips, everyone notices. I learned similar lessons when I worked on Crypto Expo Europe (a crypto business event in Bucharest), and back then I wrote about what I learned organising a crypto event. Much of it applied again. Some of it I had to relearn.
What we would do differently
No first edition comes out perfect, and that’s fine: otherwise there would be nothing to improve. A few directions we are already thinking about:
- More hands-on workshops. If people arrive asking “what can I do on Monday?”, the best answer is a session where they actually do something, hands on the keyboard.
- More time for networking. The most valuable conversations at any event happen between sessions. The schedule needs to leave more breathing room for them.
- More case studies from the region. It is inspiring to hear what a global company is doing, but it is more useful to see how a company from Romania, Poland or Bulgaria implemented AI, with budgets and constraints similar to yours.
What comes next
We have announced that AI Expo Europe will take place every year, and work on the 2025 edition has already begun. I’m not sharing details yet, because I would rather announce things that are certain than promise and backtrack. What I can say is that we will start from the lessons above and from the feedback we received, including the critical kind, which is by far the most useful.
I still believe our region has something to say in AI: very good engineers, hungry entrepreneurs and companies that still have a lot to gain from automation and personalisation. An event doesn’t solve anything on its own, but it can put the right people in the same room. And from there, things start to move.
Thank you
An event isn’t made by its founders; it’s made by people. Thank you to the speakers who trusted a first edition, to the partners who bet on us with no track record to check, to the attendees who came with good questions and curiosity, to the team who carried the weight day after day, and to the volunteers without whom many things simply wouldn’t have happened. I won’t name names, because the list would be long and I would certainly forget someone. You know who you are.
Were you at the first edition, or are you thinking of coming to the next one? What would you like to see at an AI event to make the day there truly worth it?