European Agenda - DATA festival online 2025
Program Details
21st of October 2025, 10:00 am – 10:30 am
Keynote: Autonomous by Design: Rethinking Workflows with Agentic AI
Agentic AI marks a shift from algorithmic assistance to autonomous co-creation. This annual keynote of the DATA festival Founders explores how multi-agent systems with memory, intent, and adaptive planning can take on real business responsibilities, synthesizing data, coordinating tasks, and driving outcomes across functions. They’ll dive into emerging patterns of AI participation in workflows, human-AI interfaces, and the path toward productive machine agency.
21st of October 2025, 10:30 am – 11:00 am
From Concept to Factory Floor: Designing Robust AI Architectures for Industrial Applications
Dr. Nikita Golovka, Software Architect Industrial AI (IoT/Edge) | Siemens
Dr. Nikita Golovko is a seasoned Solution Architect with over 16 years of experience designing scalable, secure, and cost-effective software architectures for industrial and mission-critical systems. With a solid academic foundation and research background in machine learning, he excels at bridging the gap between cutting-edge AI technologies and real-world shop floor applications. Nikita is recognized for translating complex business requirements into robust technical architectures and aligning cross-functional teams toward shared goals.
Passionate about innovation, sustainability, and the long-term impact of engineering decisions, he focuses on leveraging AI, IoT, and edge computing to drive continuous improvement in industrial environments. He is also deeply engaged in the topic of technical debt and is currently writing a book exploring how engineering culture and decision-making frameworks can be used to effectively manage and reduce technical debt over time.
21st of October 2025, 11:00 am – 11:30 am
Generative AI @ Scale for Enterprises
At Merck, we have successfully rolled out and scaled GenAI to 25K+ employees, including business consumers and citizen developers. Our strategy, approach, technological insights, and key learnings will be presented. Audiences can benefit from how a similar approach can be applied to adopt and scale (Gen)AI for enterprises of similar nature and scale.
Dr. Harsha Gurulingappa, Global Head of AI & Machine Learning Practice | Merck Group
With a career spanning over 15 years, I am a seasoned professional with extensive experience in research and industry related to applying Natural Language Processing (NLP) and the constituents of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the Healthcare and Life Science domains. As the current Head of AI & Machine Learning Practice at Merck, my responsibilities encompass leading the strategy, implementation, and evolution of technological capabilities, empowering business functions to drive impact by harnessing technologies and best practices around AI/ML/NLP. My experience and groundedness in this field positions me to drive transformative innovation and spearhead data-driven decision-making initiatives.
21st of October 2025, 11:30 am – 12:00 pm
From Legacy to Sovereignty: Driving the Future of Insurance through Platform Engineering
Join me on a 4-year journey inside the world’s largest insurance company, where we tackled the challenges of legacy systems, vendor lock-in and the imperative for rapid innovation. Discover how strategic platform engineering, adaptive DevOps topologies, and bold technology choices enabled us to achieve true innovation sovereignty, driving significant business impact. This is a story of transformation, resilience, and the power of building your own future.
Sergiu Petean, Director of Cloud Engineering & Operations former Head of Generative AI | Allianz Direct
21st of October 2025, 12:00 pm – 1:00 pm
Panel Discussion
Scaling AI requires more than models. It demands robust data architecture, CI/CD for ML, observability, and governance. This panel dives into best practices in MLOps, data lineage, and feature management. How can teams ensure reproducibility, model trust, and alignment with real-world dynamics, while keeping humans in the loop as critical decision-makers?
Any questions? Contact us!
