Five days in India’s “Silicon Valley”: How Sii experts built AI tools at the ABB Accelerator 2026

More than 2,000 participants from 37 countries, over 600 submitted use cases, and two Stevie® Awards plus an International Innovation Award to its name – that’s ABB Accelerator in numbers, the global innovation program Sii experts joined in June 2026 in Bengaluru. In a few days we designed working AI solutions for real, everyday problems at ABB. 

A key takeaway from the week is simple: when you bring together the right people, a clear goal, and a few days of focused, shared work, AI stops being a promise and becomes a working solution. That’s how work on AI projects should look – fast, with effective communication, and across organizational boundaries. 

ABB Accelerator is a global innovation platform, complemented this year by the AI Boost conference, product sessions, and countless opportunities to talk with people from industry and from India’s technical universities. Those conversations, between presentations and over coffee and kadak chai, carried the most energy. 

Our speakers from Sii Poland – Bogusław Kosęda, Paweł Mazur and Patryk Wyżgowski – brought their own topics to that exchange, close to ABB’s business: predicting safety risks in industrial environments, AI-augmented field service built on Copilot Studio and Azure AI Foundry, and parameter-correction recommendations built from machine-data streams in waste management.

“Predicting a safety hazard in industrial environment before it reaches a worker is no longer the hard part. That layer is already production-grade. The hard part is the line: AI predicts and advises, a human commits the decision, and a certified, deterministic function is the one that acts. The winning architecture isn’t the most autonomous one – it’s the one an operator trusts and an auditor can defend. The technology was never the obstacle. Trust is. ” – says Bogusław Kosęda, PhD, Senior AI Architect, Sii Poland.

Apart from taking part in the AI Boost talks, Sii experts built four hackathon solutions. 

Four solutions built in a few days 

All four solutions addressed processes that in a large, international organization can drag on for weeks – and that Sii managed to bring down to a working prototype in a few days. 

What Sii experts learned is that adoption depends on embedding a solution in the tools people already use, on keeping control and traceability of every decision, and on AI that advises rather than replaces people. The effects were measurable – the prototypes genuinely cut the time needed for these tasks and were well received by ABB business teams. 

These weren’t demo-only prototypes 

It’s easy to assume that something built in a few days of a hackathon is just a demo that will never reach daily work. Bengaluru showed otherwise and suggested solutions respond immediately to recurring, everyday challanges at ABB. These initiatives got warm reviews and some of them immediately got traction for bringing them into production. We observed that short build time does not mean a short shelf life.

“Automatization rarely stall because people are slow – they stall in handoffs, in inboxes, and when nobody knows where a document actually is. That was our biggest learning: simplicity, security, and meeting people inside the tools they already work in are what drive adoption. Automation only counts when people actually use it” – says Paweł Mazur, Senior Microsoft 365 Consultant, Sii Poland.

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Lessons from Bengaluru

Here are some insights brought by Sii Poland Team from ABB Accelerator 2026:

• Put a team with different skills and from different organizations at one table, instead of splitting the work across distant departments. 
• Give it one specific, narrow problem – not a vague “let’s do something with AI.” 
• Shorten the feedback loop: a few days of focused, shared work beats months of email back-and-forth. 
• Treat organizational boundaries – IT, Legal, Finance, different countries – as something to cross, not accept.

Thank you to ABB for inviting us on this adventure – we can’t wait for the next one.