AI & Big Data Expo Europe will bring enterprise AI architecture, agent governance, and data engineering to RAI Amsterdam on 19–20 October 2026.

The event’s six tracks are part of the TechEx Europe programme, beside the Physical AI Conference and Intelligent Automation Conference. The key sessions cover decisions facing enterprise leaders and engineering teams: how to give agents authority, what data infrastructure supports them, and how autonomous systems operate in warehouses and robot fleets.

Governing enterprise AI agents

Karen Lawson, SVP and head of data and AI trust at Syndio, will distinguish an agent’s technical permissions from its authority to make commitments involving customers or money.

A Monday architecture panel takes the related platform question. Avinash Jha of Volvo Group, Frank Kartmann of Deutsche Bank, Anna van den Breemer of EY, and Csaba Tamas of Parloa will discuss platform choices when assistants take on longer tasks with less human direction.

Kevin Redmond, VP for Data and AI Platforms at IBM, will address the data foundations required to run agentic AI across business units. Nathalia Beekman, Chief Data Officer at Shell, will speak on master data quality at scale and its role in AI use cases.

Shruti Sharma, Chief Data and AI Officer at Save the Children UK, will examine operating models and organisational structures. Charlie Doubek, Head of Global AI Delivery at NTT DATA, will argue that architecture and operating models help determine whether AI reaches production.

Hicham Yezza of the BBC and Maurits Kaptein of Kyvvu hold the Tuesday session on oversight, running from live model monitoring all the way through to audit trails.

Taking AI from development to production

The developer programme covers the work between an AI demonstration and a complete production system.

Jean-Mathieu Saponaro, Director of Engineering at Datadog, is set to examine whether coding agents can produce data pipelines to a production standard. Konstantin Grigoroff, Principal AI Engineer at Shell, will present lessons on trusted agents that use MCP to query enterprise data.

Engineers from EBRD, Ford Credit, and eBay share a Tuesday panel on generative AI inside IDEs, CI/CD, testing, and code review, with development practices and risks on the same bill. Bernat Coma Puig, AI Tech Lead at GLS, will discuss self-hosted small models in production at the parcel network. Control and data sovereignty are among that session’s subjects.

Procurement is booked as a separate comparison. Representatives from Picnic, Brenntag, Coca-Cola Europacific, TUI, KLM, and Glean will weigh buying against building on cost, delivery speed, control, and vendor dependence.

Autonomous robots and enterprise automation

As for the co-located Physical AI Conference and Intelligent Automation Conference, an automation returns panel includes speakers from ING, Citi, SIXT, and Eli Lilly & Company. The panel will examine measurement methods and KPIs.

Promise Akwaowo, Head of Intelligent Automation at Post Office, will address decision boundaries, exception handling, auditability, and human oversight in enterprise workflows.

Tuesday’s physical AI programme brings supply chain operations into focus. Alex Duca, Director of Automation and Operation Technology at A.P. Moller Maersk, will discuss robot fleet coordination, routing, monitoring, and ongoing model improvement. Jan Andreas Daske of Swisslog will cover autonomous item picking, self-organising fleets, and adaptive material flow in warehouses.

Airbus SVP Grzegorz Ombach will examine governance and operational discipline for autonomous systems. An unmissable closing panel – featuring Hugging Face, Unitree Robotics, Kier Group, and DHL – will discuss robot foundation models, vision-language-action systems, and build-versus-buy decisions.

TechEx Europe expects more than 8,000 attendees, 250 speakers, and 200 exhibitors across eight co-located events at RAI Amsterdam on 19–20 October 2026. Attendees should check the live programme for updates.

See also: Marinela Profi, SAS: On governing autonomous AI agents

Want to learn more about AI and big data from industry leaders? Check out AI & Big Data Expo taking place in Amsterdam, California, and London. The comprehensive event is part of TechEx and is co-located with other leading technology events including IoT Tech Expo and the Cyber Security & Cloud Expo. Click here for more information.

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